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5:30 am, Anchorage Alaska. In a one floor bungalow on the end of Vine Avenue that overlooked sunset park, a young Finnish hockey player wakes up to start his day of work. He checks his phone for any relevant emails before slipping on his trainers and heading out. Ever since Santtu Rasanen had started playing hockey, he had gotten into the habit of waking up early and doing lengthy runs to his practice arena, something he picked up from his first coach.
“When I was first getting into hockey, he got into doing a lot running.” Santtu explained as he sat down with us. “Hockey players need endurance and one of the best ways is to go running. As my coach put it, you can do it anyway, it doesn’t cost anything and you get surprising results.”

There is another benefit that Santtu talked about with running. That you could see the town for which you play for and the people that live there. From Santtu’s rented place on Vine Avenue to the Sullivan Center where the Anchorage Armada play and train is about 2.5 miles (or 4 kilometers) away. For an early morning run like that, for Santtu is takes about 25 minutes. In that time though, he sees a lot of his new hometown. His route takes him past the large amount of railroad tracks and across the bridge over the Knik Arm River, which has allowed to appreciate some of the beauty of Alaska.

“To me, there is no city more beautiful than Turku.” He told us, fondly reminiscing about his birth place. “Anchorage, however, it is also very pretty in its own way. The river, the parks, the architecture, it is a nice city.”

To Santtu, the state of Alaska did feel a lot like his home of Finland. The temperatures and the scenary of the wilderness were very familiar to him and it felt comforting despite the fact he was over 6000 miles away from his beloved home. He did tell us that for the first couple of weeks, there was a serious culture shock which in retrospect the familiarities to Finland may have made worse. The scenary was similar and the temperature felt the same but everyone spoke a different language and the food was almost completely different. Thankfully the locker-room had stepped in to help Santtu during those early times, showing him where the shops were and how to get to the training facilities and helping him out with speaking English.

“Without the guys in the locker room, I would be a lot worse off.” Santtu fully admitted, “I didn’t realize need to speak English before coming here and so I was completely out of my depth, as it were. Chris (de Siren) and Braden (Lowrie) really helped me out a lot.”

The fondly called “Rookie line” of Rasanen, de Siren and Lowrie became friends rather quickly. They all shared a similar goal of making it to the SHL and eventually (hopefully) winning the grandest prize of all, the challenge cup.
As Santtu runs through the downtown area, he could see various banners and pictures of previous armada teams, including the players that had just won the Four Star cup just last season. It was clear to anyone who visited Anchorage that the city loved the Armada team and that finally being able to taste championship glory meant the world to them. Santtu respected people that stood by teams through thick and thin and thus the people of Anchorage immediately earned his respect, especially as they sold out the Sullivan Center every night.

“The Sullivan Center is rather small but that doesn’t matter. The fans always turn up to see us and they are amazing people. Fiercely patriotic people who are really friendly and love my accent… reason, I don’t know…”
The interviewer couldn’t help but chuckle at that last comment much to Santtu’s confusion.

As Santtu reaches the Sullivan Center, the ending point of his run, he couldn’t help but smile as he looked around the city of Anchorage. Here he was, a complete stranger to these parts, on a nearly completely different schedule than what he was on in Finland and yet he was enjoying himself. As we finished up our interview with Santtu, he left us with one sentence.

“I think I’m gonna like living in Anchorage.”