Letchworth is Lovely

So there is this lovely Stat Park nearby called Letchworth.  This is my 5th year as an RIT student and I've never been there.  2 friends and I decided to take the hour drive over and run through the gorgeous terrain.  We did about 8 miles in a little over 1.5 hours because we kept having to stop for pictures.  There are 3 sets of waterfalls along the way that were super cool and they are all set in a deep gorge.  We decided to do the gorge trail (most of the photos) and then tacked on the Mary Jemison Trail (video 1).  Love it!  Sorry the videos are shaky!  Enjoy.

 

Autumn's Glory

In front of my apartment after an early morning run on a glorious, brisk, Autumn day.  Favorite season of the year.

Boston

So I realize I abandoned you back in May, but it's not entirely my fault.  You see Germany doesn't really have summer, so I had to skip it  ;)   Well I suppose the bigger part of it was less and less access to internet and more and more to get done.  It did enjoy those last months in Germany.  When it came to a close I baked three cakes to split between 2 going away parties.  One party in German, with friends from Erlangen, and 1 party in English with people from work.  Soon enough I was home and my family was getting more hugs from me than they knew what to do with. 

So during the year I was working on a running shoe related project.  The running team is in Boston though, not Germany.  I had met a few people from the team but not the majority, and few of them knew what I was up to.  We arranged that after my internship finished up and I went home, that I could visit the Boston office for 2 days enjoy everything that goes with that.  I had never been to Boston before but have been wanting to visit for some time.  It's a beautiful place.

I landed Wednesday night and took the train into town and found my hotel, which was really a bed and breakfast called The College Club of Boston.  Delightful.  I believe is used to be a women's college.

After a recommendation from the gentleman at the front desk I met with Andrea, who used to study with me, at the Parish Restaurant.  I enjoyed a meal called Elephant Walking on Eggs "Sandwich from the Mountain".  Then we met Adrian and he drove us the harbor to explore.  He showed us this red line painted through the city called "the Freedom Trail" that leads you past many of the sights of Boston.  Getting pretty late though so we all headed our separate ways.  1 perk of Boston, I already know lots of people who live there.

Thursday morning I rose and enjoyed a good breakfast with no deli meats (a German peculiarity).  I then walked the 45 minutes through town to PUMA as an excuse to see more of Boston.  I got to work at 9, found out I was presenting at 10, and promptly was toured through the office to meet a million people (or meet their desks for those who weren't there) in quick succession.  The meeting started 15 minutes late because that is the PUMA way, and because designers were involved.  In the end, the seats were filled, and hardly even standing room left.  It was a great way to start off the day.  I spent the next two days meeting people, and seeing how things work in the Boston office.  I went for a run with two of the other developers at lunch just like in Germany.  One of them used to log 100 miles a week in his prime.

To conclude the trip I got to go to the preliminary round of the Red Bull 2012 Cliff Diving World Series Boston.  Pretty crazy stuff.  The Olympic high dive is 10m.  This was 27.

Then I flew home.

That's all.

oh and I got 2 new pairs of shoes in Boston  ;)

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.