Half Marathon

This weekend was a climax of a story dating way back through the winter months.  Back before Christmas Karen persuaded me to sign up for a half marathon in Munich.  It seemed so far away at the time that I wanted to do a full marathon instead.  I ended up with the half and I’m glad I did.  After many weeks of running through the snow, I ended up with many weeks injured and not getting to train as much as I had hoped.  Icing my heels at work meant wearing flip flops in February.  My colleagues gave me a hard time about that.  I got healthy, trained a few weeks, and ran a 10km, and then re-injured myself playing soccer.  With 4 weeks left to go I recovered again worked my runs up from 3km to 16km as carefully as I could.  The last few days I rested up well, loaded up with carbs, (caught a cough), and prepared to run fast.

We spent Saturday in Munich hanging out with a few Canadian engineers (very similar to American ones) walking through parks mostly.  There were a lot of discussions I hadn’t had in a long time (Mac vs PC debate, Formula Car, Fluid Mechanics, etc.). We stayed the night at a hostel (with lots of loud late night people).  After loading up with lots of breakfast and more than lots of water we headed towards Olympia park.  Really cool place (see photos).

Olympia Park - Munich

The stadium at the park with grass colored seats.

Come time for the start at 10:00 it was raining, and there were puddles everywhere.  The guy on the microphone was trying to think of things to say enthusiastically so he ended up yelling things like, “do we want 32 degrees (88F) and sunny?! or do we want today’s weather!? yeahhh!  (it was maybe 8C or 45F and rainy).”  Karen and I worked our way as close to the start as possible.  The gun went off and we sprinted through a big puddle and off to the races.  For the next 5km or so an endless stream of people flowed past me.  They kept making me want to go faster, but I did NOT want to crash before the race was over. I was aiming for 1:45:00 total time over the 21.1km race (13.1 miles).  So each 5km needed to be 25 minutes.  I finished the first one way too fast at 23:00 because of the fast start, so I hit the breaks and did the next 5km in 24:00.  9km in I got lapped by the leaders, meaning they were already at 14km, both African and super skinny.  The third 5km I tried to slow down more, but only managed to slow to 24:08.  For the last 5km I decided I was close enough to the finish to not worry about crashing and took off, finishing it in about 22:00.  The last 1.1km sprint to the finish was even faster.  After getting passed so much early on, it felt good to not have a single person pass me on the last 6.1km of the race.  Instead I passed back 60 people finishing in 1:37:41, more than 7 minutes faster than my goal time.  Karen also did really well coming in at 1:44:23 beating her goal of 1:50:00

Ready to Run Fast!

PUMA tatoo on race morning.

Official Race Photo - coming in for the finish.

As to overall standings:

Ryan:

185 of 1034 total runners

173 of 734 male runners

53 of 193 male runners younger than 30

Karen:

349 of 1034 total runners

31 of 300 female runners

11 of 132 female runners younger than 30

Off to a great start to our long distance racing careers.  I’ll keep running all this summer and would like to do a full marathon some time in the near future.  Maybe next spring in Rochester would be nice.

We finished off by going out to eat at the best restaurant in Munich (in my humble opinion), “der Pschorr” with some friends.  All 4 of us ordered apple fritters to finish off our meals.  Those fritters were actually the highlight of Munich for a few of my friends who visited in March.

I like running.  Running fast is even better.

Munich Cont'd

We visited Weihenstephan Brewery, the oldest in the world.  The guide was a doctorate student at the Technical University of Munich doing some beer related studies.  He was very Bavarian, and earned 5 liters of beer a day for his studies.  There is some crazy partnership between the university and the brewery.

 I don't know what these buildings are but I'd like to spend more time with them.

Munich as a Tourist

Here is a preview of Munich.  More pictures coming over the next few days I would imagine.

Maximilian Straße - "This ghetto is so poor that the people

can't afford roofs for their cars" - French tour guide.

A gorgeous passage

A shrine to Michael Jackson on the statue of Franco-Flemish Renaissance 

composer Orlande de Lassus in front of the hotel where MJ was fond of staying

In front of Neuschwanstein - the castle that the 

Disney castle was based off of.

On the wall of the castle with a few classmates.

This is the town of Augsburg.  The bright building is from 

the textile makers gild.

A rather different building than above belonged to the butchers gild...

The Stone Ages

This past week the honors program from my Uni sent it's engineers to Munich to visit companies.  As the only one currently living in Germany, I was the only one with a German cell phone.  That means the rest of the group had no way of contacting anyone else, except face to face. 


Chaos.


Now I realize of course that people lived like this for millennia, but most of us have been dependent on cell phones for the last few years and it has shaped our social planning.  Everything is impromptu.  If you are running late, it's easy to call ahead and explain.  In short, we've become bad at making and sticking to plans.


I'd say by the end of the week we mastered it though.  More posts coming!

München - 1st attempt

I spent this weekend in Munich for a conference.  One of the afternoons we got to check out the city.  It looks like a sweet place and I'm looking forward to going back in the spring with the honors program for a week!

 Below is from a market.  In the bottom right are 6 barrels of beer with names of the 6 breweries in Munich that are allowed to sell beer at October fest.  They are all within the city limits.

 Notice something peculiar about the clock?  It runs backwards and the "IV" is written "IIII"

As a regular at one of the most famous pubs in Munich you get your mug stored there behind bars. 

 I think this dragon has something to do with the plague.