Biking Far! (to Nürnberg)

So Nürnberg has always been just out of reach.  It's a 30 minute commute by train, but it's about $10 for a round trip, so not something I want to do so often.  It's about 14 miles away, and now that the weather is delightful, it is bikeable.  I did it the past two weekends.  This picture is from the first.  It's nice being in Nürnberg with a bike because then you are not stuck in the city center, but instead can go out a little further and find nice places like this.

Saturday, I biked to "Summer in the City" to hang out with some friends at the artificial beach there.  Quite pleasant.

Yesterday I just ran 14 miles.  Maybe by the end of the summer I'll run to Nürnberg and back?  We'll see. let's not get too far ahead of ourselves.

(side note - I finally got 10,000 views to this blog  =)

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.

BE COMPETITIVE!!!

So a friend asked me a question that I thought was worth a blog entry.

“As a PUMA employee, are you nudged to compete/be active?”

Short answer is no.  Perhaps at some companies it would be more, but at PUMA we (well I should say ‘they’) are proud to be a lifestyle brand too.  That attracts many employees who have null interest in sports and the company is okay with that, and even encourages that.  At the same time though, there is still a good crowd of people who like sports a lot, and if you hang out with those people, that becomes a bigger focus in life.  People always warn that if you hang out with the wrong crowd you’ll end up on drugs and an alcoholic, but it runs other ways too.  If you hang out with the athletes, you’re a lot more likely to find yourself competing.  In my particular case, in addition to the people I hang out with, my research on running shoes has triggered a fascination with running and running shoes.  Running isn’t just breathing hard now, but rather a study of efficiency, strength, and durability.  That keeps it much more interesting, as do my running buddies of course.

Closing Time with Parents

For my parent's last real day in Germany we traveled back to Nuremberg, and got them checked into a hotel right across from the airport.  Their flight was 6:30 Monday morning, so minimal travel was best.  We decided to take the subway and then pop out in a part of town where I had never been before.  It took a few minutes to get oriented but it was beautiful and there was a good panini shop nearby.  Eating there was a relief after all the heavy German food we’d been having.  Karen joined and we all went outside the city to Docu Zentrum where Hitler gave many speeches and marched his army in a parade before audiences of 200,000 people.  There had been a big schwastika built into the wall but they blew it up after the war.  Now the whole area is a big sports complex.  They were playing American football when we were there.

We headed back into the city for a nice Italian dinner.  We also got some white asparagus.  It is in season in Germany this time of year, and everyone is really into it.  I had some and it tastes fine, but just very plain.  I don’t know what all the fuss is about.

Anyways, it was such a blessing having my parents get to come visit me here.  We had a lot of good quality time together, lots of catching up, and of course the fun that you’ve seen through my last few entries.

Garmish-Partenkirchen (cool mountains)

So it got to be Saturday morning so we took the train to the town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen.  They had the winter olympics there back in the day.  It is know as the German gateway to the Alps.  Sounded cool to us.  It's a tiny town with the Alps as the main attraction.  We arrived and took this train below over to the foot of the mountain.  From there we transferred to the 'Cog Wheel Train.'  It has wheels with teeth so it can climb steep hills (like the alps).  Suddenly we disappear into a mountain and come out 25 minutes later at the top (almost).

 Amazing no?  It was April, and people were skiing here.  It was 30 degrees C (86F) at the bottom of the mountain but 4 (39) at the top, and windy.  From there we took a short ride in the cable car to the very top. You can see below how the train had to just pop out of the ground at the facility because there is no other access to it.  We enjoyed excellent food at the restaurant there.

From the very top we took a good look around.  Here is the Austrian side - mountains as far as you could see.  Can you imagine?! Hannibal took elephants through here!  

And here is a look at the German side.  The Eibsee (lake) is below. 

 Here is our picture with the gold star marking the highest point in Germany at 2900 odd meters.

Back at the bottom, at the Eibsee, it was hot again so we posed.