The Marathon: I Believe in a better way!

In 490 BC, the bastard [FN1] Athenian Pfeidippides allegedly ran about 40 km non-stop from the battlefield of Marathon all the way to Athens to give word that the Greeks had defeated Persia in the first Persian invasion of Greece, the Battle of Marathon. After making the infamous announcement of victory, Pfeidippides then promptly dropped dead, presumably due to exhaustion. Now, this fable [FN2] is cited as the origin story, if you will [FN3], of the modern marathon: a 42.2 km running race that has become so popular in the last twenty years or so that in 2013, nearly 600,000 people finished one. All of which is a little bit crazy because it seems to me that the key point of the whole story is that Pfeidippides -- who was a professional running courier, by the way -- drops dead from running such a long, and let's face it, kind of insane, distance. So, somebody somewhere was like "hey, apparently there was this guy who was a professional runner and when he ran 40km to deliver a message it was so exhausting that when he got there and delivered the message he immediately fell down and died! let's add a couple of kilometers and turn that into a race that people do for fun!". Then, for some even stranger reason, this masochistic pursuit became so popular that essentially every major city in the Western world (plus China) [FN4] hosts a marathon, the vast majority of which sell out, and selling out consists of having something on the order of 10,000+ people (or even up to 50,000+ people in the NYC and Chicago marathons). Insanity.

Pfeidippides is a bastard because if it weren't for him, I wouldn't have found myself lined up with approximately 12,000 others on the Lungarno G. Pecori Giraldi in Florence at 8:30 AM last Sunday, waiting for a 9:00 or 9:15 (they weren't able to make up their minds in the race literature or website and both times were cited in numerous different places) start, which ultimately ended up being an interesting (but I suppose not so out there by Italian standards) 9:23 AM start-time for the 31st Florence Marathon [FN5]. Ultimately, 8,686 people, including the regular protagonists of this Blog, Sandi and myself, would complete the race at times ranging between 2h09m55s for the winner, and 6h18m02s for the last guy to officially cross the finish line [FN6].

For me, running a marathon is not a pleasurable experience. Nor has it ever been, despite the fact that this was my sixth rodeo [FN7,8]. So, why do I keep doing them? you might be wondering. And that would be an excellent question/wonder. In fact, it's one that I don't exactly have an answer for. In Revolutionary Spain in the summer of 1936, anarchists took over Barcelona. They were finally free from government and rules and they had temporarily achieved exactly what they had allegedly dreamed of and worked for for so long. But within days of the rising, compromise and centralization began. The cinema workers -- the cinemas!! -- elected 18 heads from amongst themselves to lead an organization committee to help keep films playing. Maybe as soon as I finish the marathon and I vow to myself that I will never do that again I realize that if I don't have anything to fight against (the pain, the insanity of voluntarily subjecting myself to the pain, etc.) then I will no longer really be living. Well I doubt that's it, but as I said I have no idea why I keep doing these things: I'm just throwing some ideas out there [FN9].

In addition to not exactly loving the whole marathon running thing, I'm not terribly good at them either. It might be a necessary condition for a professional marathon runner to really enjoy running to even be able to keep doing it as his or her job, but perhaps not; if you're really good at it, then that in and of itself might just be enough to keep you at it. I have no allusions of ever winning, or of ever even coming anywhere close to finishing within a half-hour of the winner. By the time I cross the finish line, the top probably 100 guys have showered, had a hot meal, and might even have boarded a plane home to their respective countries [FN10].

But the realistic hope of winning isn't what keeps 600,000 people running marathons every year. If it were, we'd be living amongst a frighteningly large shit-load of clinically delusional certifiably crazy amateur athletes [FN11]. It's often said that the vast majority of runners are competing "against themselves". First-timers have probably grabbed some random time that seems, for one reason or another, to be attainable for them. Multiple-timers want to beat their previously best time. If you finished in 4 hours and 5 minutes last time, a nice goal might be to beat 4 hours. You get the picture.

My goal was to beat 3 hours and 30 minutes. For the uninitiated, that is not fast. That comes out to a pace of 4m59s per km, or a speed of exactly 12.06 km/h. The winners run nearly twice as fast, at around 3 minutes per km, and to be considered a respectable runner, you should probably be finishing the marathon somewhere under 3h10m, for a pace of 4m30s per. So, my goal -- which, to spare you the suspense, was not achieved -- was already not all that ambitious or impressive. My previous marathon time, from the spring of 2013, was 3h36m which, for me, was not really all that bad: 918th out of 2456 runners. Fair enough. The issue, though, was that, as is normally the case, I couldn't sleep the night before. Really. I wasn't unconscious for any epsilons of time during the entire night before the race. I was friggin' exhausted. And so I had a great excuse, really: I did OK, but I would clearly have done WAY better if only I had been able to sleep the night before. But since I can never sleep the night before, it didn't matter, because if it's an unchangeable factor, then it's like saying that I would have ran faster if only my legs were a little longer. That may be true, but it's not going to be changing any time soon. Same thing for sleeping the night before, or so all the previous data had told me. Until Florence...

Things weren't looking great on the sleeping front to begin with. Our hotel was conveniently located only about a 5 minute jog from the starting line, but it was on a very loud street. We arrived in Florence on Friday night, and all night long from our room we could hear very loud cars, trucks, ambulances, police cars, and especially motorbikes. I resigned myself to another sleep-deprived marathon, and moved on in life. But then something strange happened. While I didn't sleep eight hours or anything crazy like that, I got up on Sunday morning having slept at least half the night! I would estimate at least four hours, maybe five. I felt fine, not very tired at all. Confident, even. We had our breakfast in the B&B kitchen while chatting to a friendly young man who had made his way to Florence from Slovakia for the race [FN12], and set off down the street to the starting line.

We did some light jogging to warm-up, and we stood in the starting area waiting for the race to begin. Things were still fine. The race finally started, and it wasn't exactly a great start. There were just too many people everywhere and it was impossible to go the speed you wanted. I tried to get to the outside, and after the first kilometre I was already a full minute behind my goal (upper-bound) pace of 4:59. No matter, however. I kept to the side and upped the effort level just a little bit to start making up time. I saw the blue balloons of the 3h30 pace group just ahead in the distance, and I congratulated myself on the discipline that I was about to display by not getting nervous and speeding up too much to try to catch them right away. I was going to go just a little faster, slowly gaining on them km by km, until perhaps around the half-way point I would catch them and could then slow down a touch into an easier pace. This strategy started off rather well. My second km took 4:54. My third was 4:46. A touch too fast. The fourth was 4:57, and then 4:56. Then I rattled off a 4:49, 4:57, 4:57, 4:51, 4:54, 5:02, 4:55, 4:54, 4:57, 5:03, 4:53, and 4:54. For those keeping score at home, that means that after 17 km I had been running for 1h24m33s, which means I was 27s ahead of my goal time. I had made up for all the disastrousness of the first crowded km, and I was cruising. Or at least the statistics might have suggested as much...

You see, for the previous several km's leading up to 17, I was experiencing some grave discomfort. Not so much in the heels, calves, glutes, or shins, but in the umm... digestive area? I really needed a bathroom and I needed one fast. I don't think that we require any more details than that I did eventually come upon one between km's 17 and 18, and immediately felt a lot better. My next km came in at 6:02 which actually isn't that bad. An entire bathroom break only took a minute away from that km. Fine. I was then 35 seconds behind schedule which is way less than the minute I found myself behind after only the first km. My next two kilometers were right back on track at 4:56 and 4:51. I then reached the half-way mark: the 1/2 marathon point in the race.

Reaching the half-way point normally does one of two things to you: either (1) you gain some confidence because you've made it to the half-way point; or (2) you lose all confidence that you previously had because you've only made it to the half-way point which means that everything that you've just done you have to do all over again. This time, for me, it was fully the latter. And let me be clear here that the slow start and the short call from nature are not excuses. These are natural, even common, things that pop up on race day and you deal with. What happened was, as with everyone and with every race, I started to feel a lot of pain. The problem was, I was in no mood to be dealing with it.

The more pain I felt, the more I slowed down. As I slowed down, the pain continued, and I got even more wimpy and even less determined. There were water stations every 5km along the course, and starting at 25km, I began to walk during the water stations. That is never a good sign. Now, in theory I could have kept running through the water stations. But I was tired and I was in pain and I just wasn't very tough that day. A big wimpy wimp. And so, I drank my water and my sport drink ("Sali" they call it), and I walked. And then I jogged another 5 km, and did the same thing. I even walked for about a minute at the 40km water station with only 2 more k to go and according to the race statistics let 300 people in my age group pass me (up until that point my age-group position had been steadily increasing with each water station [FN13]). I just didn't care. My legs hurt and I was tired and I wasn't tough. When I finally lumbered across the finish line in shame, the time on my watch read 3 hours, 42 minutes. Or, a full 12 minutes slower than my upper-bound goal. 

So why did I do it? Why? Post-race analysis. It's all about looking back and analyzing and seeing what could have been and what happened where, etc. That's what races are all about!

Oh, and how did Sandi do? Incredibly. She finished in a time of 3h26m. The 85th female of 1,458. She was not a wimp. But I was.

[FN1] My editorializing, see infra text.
[FN2] The whole thing probably never really happened but I guess you never know.
[FN3] Sort of like Batman Begins or Man of Steel.^a
a Terrible movie, by the way.
[FN4] Imagine trying to run the Beijing marathon... Yikes.
[FN5] Or, as they call it, the Firenze Marathon. Even though the Italian word for Marathon is Maratona. So, they translate the city name but not the race type name. Even more interestingly, many people had made their own shirts (!) for the race and these shirts proclaimed the full Italian translation: Firenze Maratona (even though I think the proper grammar would be Maratona di Firenze).
[FN6] Or as Nike would put it, the 8,685th loser.
[FN7] Not literal "rodeo" but like the saying "this ain't my first rodeo".
[FN8] It was actually my fifth "open" marathon (as the Triathletes call it), but my sixth if you include marathons that are only small components of bigger races like the Ironman.
[FN9] But I suppose it is plausible.
[FN10] Or country. It's usually Kenya.
[FN11] Which isn't to say that we're definitely not, by the way.
[FN12] And who, for some reason, didn't believe me that Germany still has a terrible hockey team.
[FN13] Around each water station they have a timing mat that records your position. This allows you to get detailed timing information for different points throughout the course, and helps to prevent people from cheating.

Christmas is coming

This year, in a few days from now, Germany will be the home to one hundred and twelve thousand six-hundred and ninety-seven Weihnachtsmärkte and Christkindlmärkte (Christmas Markets), of which approximately seven thousand are in the final stages of preparation here in Munich [FN1]. Christmas Markets in theory are actually kind of nice. They look like they have a wondrous, magical-like atmosphere where people are having fun while strolling about with friends, shopping for hand-made wooden ornaments, and keeping warm with Glühwein and fried/roasted/boiled German fare. Most of the markets open up on the Friday before the first Sunday of Advent, meaning that the charming (looking) pop-up towns will open their doors to us in just a week's time.

Munich's first Christmas Market dates all the way back to 1310, while the Vienna December Market -- a forerunner to today's Christmas Markets -- is even more ancient with a launch-date of 1294 [FN2]. The CM tradition is billed as an avenue for family and friend get-togethering, relaxation, and living an embodiment of the Christmas Spirit which, not being all that religious and therefore not having all the details, I understand reflects a celebration of the miracle of the birth of a child whose Mother was so good at sticking to her story that not only did her husband believe her, but unwittingly (one presumes) launched a worldwide religion that now counts over two billion partisans. The truth is, however, that the only miraculous thing happening here is the fact that these markets are still going strong seven centuries after their initial creation, and that some people actually seem to genuinely enjoy attending them.

Christmas Markets are crowded. Like really, really, really crowded. I think I've mentioned here, meaning on this Blog, that Bavarians make an impressive brew. Glühwein, on the other hand, is just absolutely and terribly disgusting. You can maybe stomach one on the first weekend for novelty's sake. After that, however, you would have to be one thirsty mo-fo to be ordering seconds. The stench of the abomination of mulled wine floats in the air above the markets, and since there are so many of these markets (see introduction, supra), it makes its way like a Beijing smog cloud throughout the city on an anthropomorphic mission to really just piss me off. The smell is like a very special kind of vomit whose burning acidic composition enters the sinuses and, as my pal Dave Pirner [FN3] once said, nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd, and the same can be directly applied to emesis as anyone who has had the unfortunate luck of being on a plane when one soldier (metaphorically speaking) goes down (commences to spew chunks), you're going to get some kind of snowball-chain-reaction thing going on, and basically that's what the whole Glühwein season makes me feel like.

Christmas Markets are also invariably cold and wet, and being wet -- rather than, say, snowy -- they feel even colder than they would be if it were in actual fact colder and therefore cold enough so that the rain could become snow and things wouldn't be as wet and therefore not feel nearly as cold (even though it would be colder). Now, this is of course not the Christmas Markets' fault in any way, but since December in Germany doesn't regularly get cold enough to snow (but does get cold enough to be miserable), an activity that encourages/requires you to come stand around outside during a time of year that, on average, experiences these temperatures can, in fact, be faulted for those same meteorological conditions, even though the CM itself has no direct control over same.

The next problem I have with the Christmas Markets is another one related to nausea, and this time it's not with what you drink, but with what you eat. All Christmas Markets have perfected the art of food preparation where the food looks and smells just fine, but after a few bites, all basically goes to hell. You see, these unfailingly-deep-fried delicacies that include oil-drenched Käse Spätzle with Sauerkraut, fried dough covered in apple sauce, and of course -- remember this is Germany -- all manner of Wurst, start off tasting just fine. Then, before you're any the wiser, a chain reaction seems to set off within the depths of the intestine that causes a number of things to occur, including: (1) you not wanting to have anything to do with even the mere thought of taking another bite; (2) headaches, indigestion, irritable bowel syndrome, &c.; (3) swearing to never order food at another Christmas Market ever again, so help me God.

Finally, there is the matter of the trinkets which is I suppose what puts the "Market" in Christmas Market, and so clearly form an important part of the whole venture. The principal problems here are really two-fold. First, you think to yourself, you know what? I'm going to go down to the local Christmas Market (remember there really are thousands and so there's always a local one) and pick up some gifts. The problem is that it's mostly junk. I use the term trinkets very deliberately as trinkets is the most apt description for most of what's being sold. Wooden dolls, cheap toques, paper lanterns, Coca Cola place mats, bead necklaces, and religious novelties of all kinds. Some things I guess are kind of neat (once) like the Christmas Pyramids and the smoking incense doll things, but then of that small subset of items, we lead to the second half of that two-fold problem I mentioned earlier: it's still all junk! The stands give off the aura of hand-made, local-made, German-craftsmanship, but turn over a wooden whirlygig candle-powered windmill machine "painted by an artisanal hand-crafting German painter" or some such thing, and you'll see the "MADE IN GERMANY" sticker just covering up the smaller "MADE IN CHINA" stamp beneath. These stands are for one thing, and for one thing only: ripping off tourists! [FN4]

Despite all this, however, there is one good thing about Christmas Markets: it means that Christmas is coming. And that, in turn, means several other things, including: (1) some de minimis amount of time off of work, or if you're really lucky, something on the order of three weeks away from it; and (2) soon, the Christmas Markets will go away for another year.

Bah humbug! [FN5].


[FN1] All cited statistics are estimations on the part of the author.
[FN2] Wikipedia.
[FN3] Who turned 50 this year, by the way [FN3.1].
[FN3.1] And on the topic of Soul Asylum in general, did you know that they released a new album about a year and a half back?; "In 2012, Soul Asylum are pretty much off everyone's radar and they're back to recording for a small indie label, so it makes a certain sense that Delayed Reaction is their best album in ages." How about that?
[FN4] So beware.
[FN5] I actually really love Christmas time including being with family, the joy of giving and receiving gifts, delicious food and drink (not from German Christmas Markets), including Booze Soup (TM), Christmas parties that are basically just a concentrated form of the previous points, and a whole bunch of other stuff. But I thought that the "Bam humbug!" fit nicely at the end of this here little rant. Frohe Weihnachten!!!

Past while recap

Dear Long Suffering Readers: first, I apologize that you have been deprived of Pemulis, gastronomic photography, and other indiscriminate musings on European Life for so long. I personally would like to blame the always-present need for pencil-pushing -- aka work -- for getting in the way of the growing of this creative outlet. It really drains your vital mind power throughout the day and then, when you get home at the end of it all (for one more day), one just doesn't exactly have the gumption to take a seat and start piecing together witty words and phrases for the consumption of the Internets-at-large. That being said, here I am to entertain you all in a 'past while recap' so that you may feel safe and secure in the knowledge that you are up to snuff, as one might put it, on the current machinations of the protagonists of this blog's lives.

Galopprennbahn München Riem

Two Saturdays ago, we attended the Pastorius horse race here in Munich -- the biggest purse (155,000 euros) in Bavaria. There were 5 races throughout the afternoon, culminating in the grand Pastorius. I used my PhD-level knowledge of statistics to devise an unbeatable system. It is in the process of running through the EC patent system and I can therefore not disclose its particulars at this time, but the general idea is to bet on a horse that has no statistical snowball's chance in hell of winning as otherwise you don't really win any money. Overall, we spent a whopping 5 euros each (1 euro per race) but were quickly up to an astonishing 30+ euros by the final race thanks to decisive picks by yours truly and our entourage. With a 1 euro bet on my favourite horse "Pennyking", we were up more than 14 euros!

By the final race, we were feeling confident. We had won money on 3 out of 4 races; we were sizzling! So naturally we bet it all on the final race on a horse that had odds of 34 to 1. If that horse won we would be heading home with over a thousand euros!!! But he didn't win... Oh well...

Deutschland Cup 2014

This past weekend we attended our second Deutschland Cup (see http://grenoblewmd.blogspot.com/2013/11/munchen.html for last year's version). This time the participating teams were Slovakia, Switzerland, Germany, and Canada! These aren't just any Canadian hockey players though. In fact, Yahoo! Sports (and apparently most of the North American media that happened to cover it) call them "Euro-Canadians" as these are players who play in the Euro leagues such as in Switzerland or Germany.

The game we went to was on Sunday afternoon and was the final game of the tournament: Germany vs. Canada. The tournament format is round-robin and the team with the best record wins. We were purposely ignorant to the meaning of the game that we attended as it might have had no meaning taking all the fun away. Luckily for us, we attended the only game that Canada actually won. Germany was holding a 2-0 lead after the first period, but Team Canada stormed back to win with a final score of 4-2. Unfortunately, however, since that was the only game that Canada won they finished last. Team Germany were the big winners this year, but it was nice to see Canada squeeze out the win!

Running

Three weeks to go until the Florence Marathon. That means we get to start running a little bit less (until the actual day of the race when we'll have to run a whole lot). This past Sunday was a 30km run that we were supposed to do in under 2h30m. It was also supposed to be fairly easy since we should be going the same exact speed in the race but for an extra 12km / 1 hour. Ouch! Man that was hard. I don't think I'm in the right shape to do a 3h30m marathon this time, but I guess we shall see.

Goodbye and thanks for reading. Until next time...

The origins of Pemulis

https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/posthumous-gratitude/

Race Report: Waldperlachlauf 20km

Two Sundays ago we participated in the fifth annual Waldperlachlauf (Perlach Forest Run) 20km edition. We signed up a few days before to get some racing experience in the legs as we continue to prepare for the upcoming Florence Marathon at the end of November. Both of us have only ever run a 20km running race once before and it was a part of the Roanne-Villerest Aquathlon Longue Distance (see this classic GrenobleWMD post for a reminder). That 20km was only the second part of the competition which in total consisted of first a 4km open water swim, followed by a quick bite of high-fructose corn syrup in the transition area, and then, finally, the 20km run. In that event, after spending around an hour and a quarter swimming the equivalent of 10 times around a quarter-mile track, I ran the 20km in a time of one hour, 30 minutes. Nothing that's going to get me on any track teams, but respectable nonetheless.

Two years later, one Ironman later, one marathon later, quite a bit of running later, and no 4km swim to tire us out beforehand, you'd think one might improve on said time. Nope. All you have to do is cruise along at a hair under 4:30's for an hour and a half and you've got it. Nope. Now, there were of course some extenuating circumstances that we can turn to: (1) the weather in Munich is generally fairly miserable but then lo and behold we woke up on that fateful Sunday morning to a forecast of 25 degrees celsius and not a cloud in the sky when we'd been used to running in 10 degree drizzle; (2) this was a small race with only a few hundred participants and the community volunteers have not quite figured out that you should probably be offering water on a 20km course, especially on the hottest day in Munich's autumnal history; (3) it was a mentally difficult course in that the 20km route actually consisted of completing a 5km loop 4 times -- ouch!; and (4) we're older now and not currently as in good shape.

The race started off well. We hit km mark 1 in just under 4 minutes, 22 seconds. Feeling good. And 8 seconds banked for later on. But the sun was just beaming. Though they called this the Perlach Forest, there was no tree cover, and somehow it seemed that no matter where you looked you were staring at the angry burning sun. Kilometer mark 2 came 4 minutes and 35 seconds later. "Oops" we joked, knowing that going slower than the planned 4:30 was simply a comical calculation error, and nothing to do with being out of shape, tired, or slow. No matter, though. We would re-assess our current speed, re-direct it upwards, and check on things in 1 kilometer time. Plus we had only lost 5 seconds, and therefore still had 3 seconds of the original 8 safely tucked away to be drawn on only if and when they might be needed. Unfortunately, like most Canadians, we would soon find ourselves with a sorely overdrawn account.

Kilometer 3 passed in the same amount of time as its previous marked distance: 4 minutes, 35 seconds. That brought us on to the side of 2 seconds overdrawn. And things didn't get much better after that. The worst would prove to be a disastrous 4:50 on kilometer 19, and we ended up with an average pace of 4:41 for a total time of 1h33m45s, a full 3 minutes, 45 seconds above our "safe" goal time. So what happened? Well, we've already discussed the excuses above, and they are each probably somewhat involved, especially the one about not being in as good shape.

In any case, it was tough, but Sandi did get on the podium as she tends to do these days. She even won a 30 euro gift card at a running store, more than paying for our entry fees. So I guess it wasn't all bad!

About to take down our next victims

Me thinking "we have to do another lap???"

"Ouch"

Even more "ouch"

Yay but it's all worth it when you get a medal, a certificate, and a gift card

The Civil Code

Pemulis was angry. Fuming mad, even. Many have sworn that they saw cartoon-like steam exhausting from his ears as if they were the dual-chimneys of a proud, classic locomotive barrelling down a twisting metal track. This wasn't the first time that he had been a victim of the civil law's extra-contractual obligation recognized as appropriation of personality, and sadly, it most probably wouldn't be the last. But it hit a nerve let me tell you, and dammit if we wasn't going to do something about it this time.

Since his fame had grown following the publication of his first short-story collection, "Rotel Doesn't Rhyme with Hotel", a handful of semi-autobiographical sketches detailing his time as a part-time student, part-time barley malter, full-time partier at the University of Edinburgh, he had all but forgotten what it was like to experience the beautiful semblance of privacy in his life. It had begun more or less during the course of the book's South American promotional tour where he would perform nightly readings in small cafés and bars over the course of about an hour while simultaneously drowning the better part of a bottle of single-malt Scotch (at this point any one of the Glens would do), a taste that he'd apparently acquired during his time as the fun-loving principal personage of the very collection of stories from which he would read during said sessions. The readings started innocuously enough, drawing a dearth of fans -- perhaps 10 or 20 on the best of nights -- all emerging from those strange corners of the seedy underbelly of the Internet where 512-bit encryption keys reign and fan faction based on the GrenobleWMD stories passes as currency. But one night a not-unknown Swedish photographer whose name happens to escape the author at the present moment stumbled into the right bar on the right night. It just so happened that coincidentally these two characters somehow knew each other from a long-forgotten Parisian past and photographer proceeded to snap some B&W's of Pemulis the author in action. These photos, for one reason or another, seized the imagination of the youth worldwide, and quickly, as they said back then, went viral, the photos that is. Every pretender, English major, screen writer, and angst-ridden artsy teenager from Buenos Aires to Constantinople to Saigon easily and firmly identified with Pemulis's Rotel stories and his whiskey bottle, and sales of the book exploded like a rear-ended Ford Pinto. It came as a bang; the publishing industry went nuts for a kid who looked, to them, like he may be their heavenly salvation in the face of video games, cell phones, and those drab filth-filled Internet blogs written by talentless hacks with too much time on their hands and too many stars in their eyes. Fame arrived over night with not so much as a duffle bag to support itself with and it wasn't going to settle for a place on the fold-out couch. It kicked Pemulis out of his bed, it trashed his kitchen, it ate his food, used his shampoo, got toothpaste all over the sink, and it didn't once even consider to take no for an answer. It arrived without warning and it laid its claim into his life, just like that.

Fame arriving fast, loose, and on fire was exhilarating though. Booze, women, drugs, nights flying by like swirling vivid colours. No responsibilities and being taken care of by hangers-on and handlers. Fast cars, expensive watches, glistening boats, private jets, private rooms, private clubs, but, alas, no private life. No way. With the Patek Philippe 1518 Perpetual Calendar pieces also came photographers, reporters, interview schedules, and worst of all, the fans. Deranged lunatics mobbing you in the street, women and young girls alike grabbing at you, every god damned kid with an iPhone taking videos, Instagrams, and whatever the hell else they did with those things. But Pemulis could handle the fans. He could handle the photographers, the reporters, and the promotional appearances. They were taxing. They were painful. But he could handle it. What shook him to his very core, though, was when one day, this day to be exact, somebody, somewhere, crossed the line. What he fully could not take or accept was the use of his personhood in the course of advertising to sell a product when he had not agreed to said appropriation of his personality, and worst of all, when he vehemently despised, in all ways, shapes, forms, and configurations, the product and/or service in question.

It was a calm Spring morning, and Pemulis was relaxingly sipping his morning whiskey-coffee in a chair by his window. While perusing his very favourite website, a blog devoted to the quintessentially Swiss industry of haute horology, he thought at first that, though it happened rarely, he may have indulged in one too many scotches during his weekly after-breakfast Thai massage. He gave his head a shake, rubbed his eyes, threw another gulp of extra-old, extra-rare down the hatch for good measure, and looked again, closely. Sure enough, however, there he was. He stared at himself staring back at himself, only in the picture on-screen he was not wearing one of his many Patek super-complications, a Rolex GMT Master II with classic Pepsi fluted bezel, or even his A. Lange and Söhne 1815 Rattrapante Perpetual Calendar (see below).

No, it was not the thing of beauty that you see floating in the space above these words. It was something that can only be described in the English language by a word like the following: hideous. Or how about this one: nightmarish. What appeared on the screen on that fateful morning was a photograph of Pemulis performing a reading from Rotel in a bar in São Paulo, a bottle of Glenfidich 18 immediately to his right, and, astonishingly, in the foreground, a floating Rolex Vintage Rainbow Daytona. Ahh!!! The agony! He flung his computer aside in a knee-jerk reaction so swift and powerful that the machine flew off his lap and crashed in two as it forcefully struck the ground in a magnificent impact. The screen lay in the middle of the room, disconnected, slowly fading to black with a ghosting image of the evil rainbow jewels gently pulsating, and Pemulis's vacant stare becoming nothing but an outline and then, before his eyes, nothing.

Living in Montreal at the time, Pemulis turned to his trusted avocat, Maitre Solange Sorel, and gave her an earful. She, in turn, quoted to him Articles 3 and 36 of the Civil Code of Quebec:

3. Every person is the holder of personality rights, such as the right to life, the right to the inviolability and integrity of his person, and the right to the respect of his name, reputation and privacy. These rights are inalienable.

[...]

36. The following acts, in particular, may be considered as invasions of the privacy of a person:

(1) entering or taking anything in his dwelling;

(2) intentionally intercepting or using his private communications;

(3) appropriating or using his image or voice while he is in private premises;

(4) keeping his private life under observation by any means;

(5) using his name, image, likeness or voice for a purpose other than the legitimate information of the public;

(6) using his correspondence, manuscripts or other personal documents.

Bam! Articles 3, 36(3) and 36(5), thank you so very kindly. And a special thank you to you, M. Bonaparte, for creating such a beautiful, ordered set of logical codes that we can run a functioning legal society on top of. Sorel just as soon had one of her articling student underlings fire off a terse infringement notice addressed to one Rolex SA of Geneva, Legal Department, and they were then swiftly off to the Plateau to celebrate their hasty action with a case of Glenlaurel and a box of Montecristos. Later that night, in a haze of Cuban cigar smoke and notes of pungent peaty moss with hints of vanilla, Pemulis swore that he would never be the victim of such a heinous civil crime again.

Justice came quickly. As he emerged from his stupor on the floor of a warehouse apartment not far from the South shore the following morning, Pemulis's phone was buzzing with a call from none other than Mr. Gian Riccardo Marini himself, the recently newly appointed CEO of the famed Rolex watch company.

"Good morning George, how are things in Montreal?"

"You tell me", Pemulis said dryly.

"The sun is shining here in Geneva and I just came out of an interesting discussion with both our legal department and the boys down in advertising."

"Interesting, you say?"

"Well," Marini began as he smiled, pushed his chair back from his desk, and gazed out the window at Mont Blanc which could be seen in the distance, "I'm going to be completely honest with you, George."

"I hope so Gian."

"Well the truth is that we screwed up. Everyone knows you like our watches and the boys just got a little carried away with things. It seemed like a great idea at the time, but when I take a step back, well... So, what I'm trying to say is, we made a mistake and we'd like to make it up to you."

"How so?" Pemulis asked.

"First things first: I've talked to Solange and we want to offer you three things. Number one, we've already pulled the ad. Number two, we'll be running print and online retraction notices for the following three weeks confirming that you never allowed your image to be used in the course of our advertising and that you never endorsed the Rainbow Daytona, and most importantly I think, number three, we would like to offer you an original 4113 Split-Seconds Chronograph straight from our vault here in Geneva."

"Sounds generous", Pemulis was able to offer while suppressing his excitement.

"Well what do you say, George? I personally believe that it's more than fair."

"You've got yourself a deal."

Pemulis hung up the phone (so to speak) and called a taxi to bring him home. He stepped inside and walked straight to his fine oak bar. He poured himself at least five fingers of one of his favourite Scotches, a rare 1967 Glenlivet Cellar Collection. He sat down in a chair by the window of his Mile End apartment, and took a long deep drink. The sun was shining, lighting up the trees on the mountain, and making the streets sparkle from last night's rain. He grabbed a notebook from his side table and a Mont Blanc pen, and he began to write.

München im Herbst

The US National Weather Service calls an Indian Summer "weather conditions that are sunny and clear with above normal temperatures, occurring late-September to mid-November". In Germany, apparently, the equivalent warm Fall days are called "womens' summer"; who knew?

Golden colours

Blue skies and beer gardens

The Isar and the Alpines Museum

Franziskaner Weißbier

Red leaves and Sandi in the Wiener Platz

Munich parliament buildings

Sandi/Joelle with the Mighty Isar

Lehel / Isar

An Isar Brücke

Sandi / Isar

The river and my swimming pool (Müller'sches Volksbad)

Selfie

Sandi

Fall trees and buildings

Fall

And though it was a few weeks ago that we did the race, here we are with our winning medals / cookies for the Oktoberfestlauf 2014

Grenoble; it is the name of the blog after all

Grenoble is a small city of approximately 150,000 in the south-east of France nestled among the Alps. It is surrounded by three mountain ranges: the Vercors, the Chartreuse, and the Belledonne, the tallest. It is therefore both a skiing and cycling paradise. Every time of year has its own special feeling. Spring's arrival is perhaps the most alluring; it is easily tracked visually as the mountains slowly turn from a wintry grey-brown to a lush full green. The river Isère speeds up and changes colour as it carries the melting snow down from the mountains and south towards the sea. The right bank's pizzerias begin to set the tables outside and the Sunday markets pop up along the Quai Perrière bringing crowds of old and young people. The cafés around les Halles Sainte-Claire fill with shoppers and coffee and wine drinkers, leisurely reading the newspaper -- the Dauphiné Libre or Le Figaro or Le Monde -- while eating croissants and pains au chocolat and discussing life. Cycling up the mountain towards Lans-en-Vercors along the Route de Grenoble, passing first through Sassenage as the climb begins, you meet amateur and professional cyclists, all marvelling at the views of the city and the Rhône valley just beyond the edge. Past Lans-en-Vercors one passes gorges, waterfalls, majestic mountain valleys, meadows of cows, sheep, and goats, and old French towns with names like Saint-Martin-en-Vercors and La-Chapelle-en-Vercors. Back in town, you can relax after your ride in the Place Victor Hugo sipping an apéritif or reading a book by the fountain as you gaze up towards La Bastille that keeps watch over the town.

Grenoble -- and all of France for the most part -- is more than what you can do and see. It is a feeling. You can be sitting in bed reading a magazine with the walls around you looking the exact same as in any other place, but knowing that you're in Grenoble gives you a feeling that you're somewhere special. I think that partly it's the mountains. They protect you in a way from everything that is outside of them. Naturally it's true: there's no wind in Grenoble because the mountains protect the city from it. But even more than that, they provide a feeling that you're in a place, and that it does not stretch off forever and ever.

All or Substantially All (ASA)

This past weekend Sandi and I finally visited the "cool" record store in Munich together and I bought this album:

I've listened to it several times now and I have to say I like it. This might lead Tom to believe that this group is destined for tragedy. I don't know, however, what he currently thinks of Belle & Sebastian, so maybe this doesn't apply in the case that he thinks that they're already bad. They feel a little twenty-something-single-Toronto-girl-with-a-dog to me, but I still dig the music, and that thought might have something to do with the band's association with Juno and Juno's 30-(at the time)-something writer. Also, I believe that Tom's axiom #1 of my life was initially meant specifically to apply to bands that I really like and though I'm glad that I purchased this LP, and I even have several of B&S's MP3s, I'm not sure that it necessarily passes the threshold into bands that I'm totally into and that therefore will inevitably start to totally suck.

If it does, though, there is still a potential saving grace for Scotland's homegrown sons and daughters in that this axiom apparently only applies to All or Substantially All (ASA) of the bands that I end up really liking. According to s. 4.1 of the Canada Revenue Agency's SR&ED Capital Expenditures Policy, ASA is "generally accepted to mean 90% or more". It's not clear to me, however, whether this applies to how long I've liked the band for, how much I like the band, how many bands fit into the "really liking" category, or something else altogether. The reason for my confusion likely stems from the fact that, as mentioned above, I as yet do not have a fully solid hold on what bands make the cut-off into the territory where the axiom applies, and more importantly, the ASA principal that governs these axioms was previously explained to me by way of a demonstration that involved the cities in which I lived and the hockey teams representing said cities. The difference being that Tom connected ASA to the fact that of my entire life I had only lived in some cities for a small amount of time, rather than another statistic that could have been used: namely, the total number of cities. That is something on the order of 10 and so if 3 of those cities didn't have great hockey teams then the accuracy falls down to 70% and we find ourselves below the ASA threshold held out by CRA's policies to be no less than 90%. And so if these bands have a weight of some kind, rather than all counting equally, then it would be very difficult to determine the ASA applicability for these edge cases.

On Sunday we ran 26km. That fell just below ASA of the amount of time that we were awake on Sunday.

Homage to Beer

I have, perhaps, on occasion, alluded to the fact that, though Munich is a very nice city indeed with numerous benefits and top marks in several categories, when you lay it all out end-to-end, if I could be doing more or less the same thing for the same salary in Grenoble or Lyon or Montpellier, I would jump on that as quickly as you can say Schmetterling!

All that being said, however, one of those top marks earned by this city mentioned above is with respect to a historical beverage known as beer. They really know how to make it here and they know how to enjoy it. This state of affairs presented itself to us quite proliferously recently when we experienced what is known in the medical literature as the Somnium Canadium, or "Canadian Dream", or, broken down into its constituent parts: free hockey and free beer.

It all started when I had the brilliant idea to attend a Red Bull EHC hockey game on a recent Friday evening. Tickets were going for the respectable price of 10 euros a pop and off we went. When we arrived a courteous young gentleman who no longer required the services of his two tickets decided to absolve himself of said magical pieces of cardboard just as we were arriving at the Olympiapark Eisstadion. First bonus of the night. But nothing could prepare us for what happened next...

For those that don't read German and can't make use of a translating helper, let me give you a hand. "Freibier" means "free beer" and !!NUR HEUTE!! means today only. And with that you get the standard Somnium Canadium. Following this most positive happening, it seemed most apt to pay homage to this beverage of the Gods, enjoyed by Monks worldwide.

Mom carrying a whole bunch of mugs of beer

At Nymphenburg getting thirsty...

In Salzburg getting thirsty

Quenching the thirst at Nymphenburg

Quenching the thirst in Salzburg

Enjoying an Austrian brew in the Austrian Alps

Enjoying several Bavarian brews in the Bavarian Alps

Teaching them young

The English Garden!

Salzburg Stiegl

A repeat on the blog, but it fit this post well

Bavarian Breakfast

Drinking cold beer in the hot sun

Bavarian / Turkish Lunch

"I say! This isn't beer at all!"

Thanks for watching!

Pemulis and the Terrible Horrible No Good Very Bad Day

[Welcome to the first official Guest Blogger post on GrenobleWMD, contributed by loyal reader Gzowski. If you have a story to share with the readers of this blog, please submit it to our editors. We regret that only those submissions selected for publication will receive a response.

GrenobleWMD assumes first-print rights and electronic rights for unsolicited submissions; the original author retains his/her copyright.]

[Page 1]

        Pemulis was worried.  Not just apprehensive.  Extremely worried.

        Why, you ask, was Pemulis so worried?  After all, he had a loving wife, a decent job, a kickass apartment (if you could ignore the 572 trains that passed by every day), and friends in many nations not currently subject to famine, disease, or armed insurrection.

        Pemulis was worried because his parents were coming to visit.  Not just visiting in the sense of passing through on their way to somewhere else, but visiting in the sense of sleeping in the Pemulian bed, requiring food several times a day, occupying the bathroom whenever Pemulis felt the call of nature, and generally clogging up the hall with shoes, suitcases, and other paraphernalia.

        “Qu’est-ce qu’il y a ?” asked Joelle, who, having secured a solid 80% in her German exam, was no longer obliged to practice her German at home.

        “Grrr!” said Pemulis. “My parents are coming.  They’ll want to visit castles and museums and churches and fortresses and all sorts of places likely to be full of American tourists.”

        “It could be worse,” said Joelle. “They might be German tourists.”

        “Horrible!” said Pemulis, employing a word that was later to figure largely in the title of the story.

        “We could take your parents out to dinner,” suggested Joelle. “That wouldn’t be very touristy, and I wouldn’t have to wash the dishes.”

        “Good idea,” said Pemulis.
        “And we could invite our friends, Torstar and Alitalia.”

        “A very good idea,” said Pemulis. 

        Here Pemulis made a joke about his parents, but the joke had to be removed from the narrative for reasons of political correctness.

        “On the other hand,” said Pemulis, “we’ll have to sleep on the train side of the apartment.”

        “At least we can sleep in a sort-of bed,” said Joelle, “rather than the air mattress that has a hole in it.”

        “There’s a hole in the air mattress?” asked Pemulis, aghast.

        “Yes,” said Joelle. “The air leaks out slowly until you find yourself on the hard floor at 3 o’clock in the morning.”

        “How do you know?” asked Pemulis.

        “I read ahead in the story,” said Joelle.

        “That’s not fair,” said Pemulis. “But what happens on Friday?”

        “We go to Neuschwanstein and your dad makes up a silly song about it.”

        “Amazing,” said Pemulis.

        “It’s not that great a song.”

        “No, I meant that you can read the future.”

        “Not only that,” said Joelle, “but I got 80% on my German exam.”

        “Well, that is laudable,” said Pemulis, “but not quite as amazing as seeing into the future.”

        “I didn’t see,” said Joelle. “I just read ahead in the story.  If it’s not in the story, then I don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of knowing what’s going to happen.”

[Page 2]

        “Did you just make that up?” asked Pemulis. “The snowball part?”

        “No,” said Joelle. “It’s also in the story.  On page 5.”

        Here a relative of Pemulis objected that it was not possible for characters in a story to know what was going to happen to them by reading ahead in the story that they were in. However, another relative of Pemulis, an as yet unmarried one, was totally down with it, thus proving that marriage often dulls one’s capacity to suspend disbelief.  This is why Neil Young is getting divorced after 36 years of marriage.  Or it could be the fact that he doesn’t smoke pot anymore and suddenly realized that his wife is, in fact, no longer 19 and nubile but is instead 61 and sagging.

        Later on, the Pemulian parents arrived and everyone had a great time.

THE END

        Commentary on the story was not long in arriving:

JSTOR460:  What kind of a story is this?  You can’t just end the story without any sort of denouement.  What happened in the rest of the week?

LEAFSRULE:  Yeah.  What he said.  Leafs rule.

JSTOR460:  This blog is about Pemulis and his family.  It’s not about a stupid hockey team.

LEAFSRULE:  *****

[This comment has been removed as it contravenes accepted norms of communication between civilized adults.]

RUSTY13:  Hey hey my my.  Neil Young can never die.  More to the divorce than meets the eye.  Hey hey my my.

JSTOR460:  Hey hey rust for brains!  Didn’t you notice that this blog is not about Neil Young?  It’s about Pemulis and Joelle, two Canadian kids just doing the best they can.

RHYMINSIMON:  “Can” doesn’t rhyme with “Joelle.”

RUSTY13:  Yeah, JSTOR460.  What do you say to that?

LEONARDO:  I found this latest blog to be of great personal interest as I too have often attended the Mozart Festival in Salzburg, and when Herbert von Karajan was guest conductor, we would often take the funicular up to the fortress and enjoy a tasty Stiegl brew while discussing what was wrong with the last performance.

RUSTY13:  Who mentioned Salzburg?

JSTOR460:  What blog are you reading, LEONARDO?

LEAFSRULE:  Habs suck.

RHYMINSIMON:  OK, here are some rhymes for Joelle:
        So fell
        Toe bell

        Low smell

        Oh hell

        Pretzel

[Page 3]

JSTOR460:  “Pretzel” doesn’t rhyme with “Joelle.”  The last part of it does, but it still doesn’t scan because the stress is on the first syllable in “Pretzel” and the stress in “Joelle” is on the second syllable, or it would be “Joel,” which is a man’s name.

RUSTY13:  Also, “Neil” doesn’t rhyme with “Joelle.”

PEMULIS81:  You are all crazy.  I don’t want you reading and commenting on my blog, even if it is actually a guest blog and full of ridiculous stuff that I didn’t say or do. When I write my own blog, it’s full of dreamy stuff suggesting that beneath my edgy tech-savvy exterior beats the heart of a romantic philosopher, a Kerouac for our time.

LEAFSRULE:  Who’s Kerouac?

TSNINSIDER:  Kerouac was drafted 13th overall by the Islanders in ’87, but he never got further than the AHL and retired in ’93.  He now runs a bed-and-breakfast in St. Thomas, Ontario.

PEMULIS81:  Not that Kerouac.  A different Kerouac.

LEAFSRULE:  Quack, quack.

JOELLE:  Pemully-Pooh!  Your parents are here.

PEMULIS81:  Haven’t I asked you not to call me that?

JOELLE:  Yes, but it’s funny.

PEMPARENTS:  Where should we put our shoes?

PEMULIS81:  Grrrr . . . . . 

        At this point in our story, a train went by and the conversation was lost in a cacophony of trainlike sounds.

        The story continues on page 4.

[Page 4]

        “Hey, hey!  Rise and shine

        It’s time to visit Neuschwanstein . . .”

        “Christ!” said Pemulis under his breath.  “What now?”

        Pemulis Père had intruded into the room where Pemulis and Joelle were pretending to be asleep.  This intrusion was less well received than it might have been by the junior Pemuli.

        The last two lines of the song were lost as Pemulis Père was giggling to himself, an action of which he was all too often guilty.  Pemulis Mère was pretending not to have heard.

        Neuschwanstein, in case you are ignorant of the history of the place and too proud to quickly consult Wikipedia, which is what the rest of us do, was at that moment resting comfortably on a mountain in southern Germany, awaiting the arrival of the Pemulis clan—father, mother, Number 2 son, and daughter-in-law.

        Now Pemulis Pater was singing his song in the shower.  Pemulis was grinding his teeth, in the certainty that some of his remaining hairs had fallen out in the night and found their way into the mattress of their pull-out couch, which they were soon to offer to a Pemulian friend, the vivacious Sophie, on whom Joelle intended to keep a watchful eye.

        In deference to our digital age, a cookie has instructed the story at this point to give way to advertising, in this case for Oktoberfest wear.

        The story resumes.

        A Pemulian relative:  I’m not related to anyone in this story.  

        Another Pemulian relative:  I’m marrying an Anglican, so I’ll believe almost anything.

        The ghost of DFW:  It’s not my fault.  I keep telling everyone here, “It’s not my fault.”

        A Pemulian friend:  If I had read this first, I would never have bought a car from Pemulis because of his weird relatives.

        “How much further?” asked the parents of Pemulis as they climbed the road that would take them above the  tallest spire of Neuschwanstein, bent on securing a vantage 

[Page 5]

point from which they could, if not battered to exhaustion by Chinese tourists, take a photograph of the castle, built by the mad King Ludwig, who died in mysterious circumstances—a fate considered appropriate by all the servants in the castle, who had long harboured thoughts of hurling the king from the top of any one of the towers of Neuschwanstein, so long as his descent was swift and fatal.  As we know, it is difficult to get loyal servants and keep them, and this was true even in King Ludwig’s day, when the old and faithful might be replaced at any moment by the younger and prettier, as Neil Young is hoping to do as soon as the divorce is finalized.

        [Here followed an extended account of Neuschwanstein’s role in the Second World War, a story that regretfully did not make the final cut, but you can look it up in Wikipedia, which has been previously recommended.]

        Later that night, Pemulis and Joelle awoke to find themselves less well insulated from the hardness of their floor than they had anticipated when they retired, their air mattress having exhaled steadily during the night until it ran out of breath entirely, while the vivacious Sophie slept on, blissfully unaware of the painful drama enacted only centimetres from where she lay.

        “Can we fix it?” asked Joelle.

        “I don’t think there’s a snowball’s chance in hell,” replied Pemulis.

        The story comes full circle.

                                            THE END

        “Is it really the end?”

        “It’s The End.”

        “But what about the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day?”

        “That’s today.”

        “Today?”

        “It’s the day you read this story.”

        “Oh.”