Trail Running

Race Report: Tegernsee Olympic Triathlon 2015

Special bulletin: it finally happened. Thirty-five months following the momentous and earth-shattering occasion of the inaugural edition of Ironman Kalmar, Pemulis has participated in another triathlon. (Aside: we are jumping around chronologically a little here on the GWMD blog so try not to fear that the Nice/Ironman France post has not yet appeared even though this post covers an event that transpired following that one in time). Fifty-five kilometers south of Munich, this was the Tegernsee Triathlon in the picturesque Bavarian town of Gmund. And it was hot (our special correspondent on scene was on record as calling it "a scorcher"): a high of 34 degrees Celsius with the thermometer already reading 28 by the 9:00 AM race start time. Tegernsee is a small and beautiful lake surrounded by mountains of the Bavarian alps. Pemulis and Joelle have in fact gone hiking in these very mountains, and related escapades have been chronicled at various occasions on this blog (here, for example). Tegernsee is the small lake in the middle at the bottom, left (west) of the Schliersee (in the aforementioned blog post the protagonists make a hike from one lake to the other):

We decided to make a weekend vacation of the trip down south and so took the BOB (Bayerische Oberlandbahn -- Bavarian train) down to Tegernsee on Saturday morning. We stayed in an amazing renovated farmhouse 2 km from the lake. The farmhouse (found on AirBnB) was on a country road hidden from the road by big leafy trees on a big property. It had a cottage feel with smells of wood and clean air, featured views of the Alps, was very comfortable, and was just a five minute walk from the nearby town.

Sandi/Joelle (who knows anymore) brought her Brompton folding bicycle (seen above, and see here for some background on this particular brand of bicycle) to be able to easily get around while in the Tegernsee area and while spectating the race, and I of course had my racing bike for the race itself. We arrived at the Gmund train station before noon and biked the one and a half kilometers to the house and met our host before walking the five minutes into town for lunch. Besides the standard Bavarian beer gardens and beer halls, Gmund is also home to a small Italian restaurant where we ate (of course) pasta and I sampled the local brew (note there is in fact a very specific, and very good, local brew called Tegernseer Hell [Tegernsee Light] but they don't make a weißbier). We then visited the local Tengelmann grocery store to stock up on supplies for dinner and the race day breakfast.

Like the race day that would follow, Saturday was also incredibly hot. We arrived back at the cool farm house and spent the afternoon watching the Tour de France's opening stage, reading, and generally relaxing and hiding away from the record-breaking outdoor temperatures and burning mid-day sun. At 17h, we headed down to the beach to check out the water and so that I could pick up my race kit. The Tegernsee Triathlon is a "minimalist" race in that unlike a Subaru Series or Ironman event, for example, you don't get a huge bag full of free samples and advertising, you don't get a t-shirt, you don't get a race-branded swim cap, you don't get much. What you go get is a set of stickers for your helmet and your bike (which you should definitely make use of -- see here for a cautionary tale), and your ankle-bracelet containing the timing chip for the race. We sat around the lake for a bit, had some watermelon Popsicles, and checked out the transition zone and swim course to be prepared for the following day. Sandi tested the water and she gave it the OK.

When we got back to the house, we made our pre-race dinner: egg salad sandwiches (isn't all this extraneous information exciting!?), caprese and corn-carrot salads, and grapes; so healthy! We sat outside on the picnic table, exactly like at a cottage, and enjoyed the peace, quiet, and fresh mountain air.

After a goodnight's sleep, we awoke just before seven to begin the morning race preparations. I was again practicing a health-conscious diet with a menu of white bread and jam, salted peanuts, and orange-mango juice (sorry, no pictures). I baby-powdered my wetsuit (no pictures, but there is video coming!), got in my race get-up, prepped all my stuff in a backpack, and was ready to go. Sandi had her own pre-spectating breakfast, loaded up the video camera (remember: race video is forthcoming!), liberally applied SPF-5000 sunscreen, and she, too, was ready to go.

The generally acknowledged, widely held belief amongst the multi-sport community is that the worst part about triathlon is the few moments before the race begins. You feel nervous, you're waiting, you're surrounded by tons of people, and you ask yourself why in the world you would be here doing this when you could, for example, be at home in bed. I've felt this very feeling in many races before and trust me when I say that it's not exactly pleasant. The feeling quickly disappears the moment the gun goes off and you begin happily swimming along, but those moments really are terrible. Except this time. The several minutes leading up to the start of the race were surprisingly pleasant. The Tegernsee itself is a lake fed from mountain water runoff and as such is exceedingly cold. The weather, as mentioned, had been downright tropical as of late, and sitting in a neoprene floating in the cold mountain water with the sun beating down felt glorious. Instead of wishing that moment to end I felt like I would be happy to hold on to it for much longer than I could. The standard race event dance music pulsated out of the speakers surrounding the lake and I really felt quite happy. I halfheartedly warmed-up my arms by lightly spinning them to and fro, and pulled my goggles down over my eyes.

And we were off! It was a very low-key start. No gun, no nothing from what I could tell. There was some guy yammering away over the loud speaker talking about who knows what, and then out of nowhere everyone started swimming. I figured I had better do the same and so off I went. Unfortunately I did a poor job at lining myself up. I was immediately stuck behind some of the worst swimmers on this side of Germany. I'm certainly nowhere near being God's gift to swimming, but I'm not lining up for an Olympic triathlon with a plan to start swimming breast stroke! For the first almost half of the swim I used most of my energy trying to get around, over, under, and generally through this bunch of jokers. Once we hit the turn-around, however, I was cruising. It was my second wetsuit swim in three years (as mentioned in the previous blog), but it went really well. I was catching up to people quickly (who I should have been with from the start!), drafting for a bit, getting bored, and moving on to the next pair of feet. I finally found a good match to give me some motivation and we raced to the shore. My final time for the 1500m clocked in at 27m35s, including a ~250m run from the water to the transition zone timing mat. That gives a pace of 1:50/100m; since the first at least half of the swim I was basically stopping every few strokes to hit the water in frustration and try to spot a way around some breast-stroke or elementary backstroke swimmer, I conservatively estimate that my second-half pace must have been around 1:30/100m to make up for the first half :)

And then I was on to the bike. I felt strong and not too tired, having taken the swim fairly easily. It was hot, however, and the course was tough. It's a nice bike course which makes its way along decent hills through small Bavarian towns, and which is made up of two loops of twenty kilometres each. It's difficult to get into a "groove" as the terrain demands "climb climb climb", then fast descent; "climb climb climb", then fast descent; etc. Near the beginning of my second loop, I saw quite the site; something you're not seeing everyday on the Subaru Series bike course, for instance. Below us, along a footpath, were perhaps a hundred hardcore Bavarian churchgoers. Each of them in their Sunday-best Lederhosen or Dirndl, accompanied by a full marching brass band and singing, marching in the morning heat towards the small Catholic church on the hill. As I gazed in wonderment, a fellow competitor passed me on the uphill climb and said some German phrase that I imagined to be "there's something you don't see everyday" but could just as easily have been "keep your eyes on the road foreigner!". When I rolled into transition, one hour, seventeen minutes, and forty-seven seconds had passed, for an average speed of about 32 km/h. Not my best, and nothing to write home about (despite the fact that I'm essentially doing that right now), but I'll take it.

Finally, the run. I'll first reiterate again that it was hot: up to 34 celsius by this point. Second, I would like to highlight the geography of this particular run course: up. There are hundreds of metres of climbing and you go up, up, up, up, higher, higher, higher, until you reach -- around the six kilometre mark -- a golf course that overlooks the Tegernsee lake with its majestic background of mountains, and then you have a nice four kilometre downhill sprint to bring things home. A really nice feature that the run course boasted was lawn sprinklers set up like ice-cold showers. When you're that hot the vision of an ice-cold shower in the distance feels surreal at first, and as you get closer in the hazy, blinding sun, you actually somehow become less convinced of its dreamy existence. Nevertheless, when you arrive they are in fact there, in the flesh so to speak, and the dream becomes a reality. However, your body is so hot, and the water (feels) so cold that going through the shower is only pleasurable for about one one-zillionth of a second. After that sudden shock to your system, the cold water is painful, you lose your breath, you start gasping for air -- or something -- and then you keep running but now you feel just a little bit more heavy and just as hot as before. Oh well.

It was a tough run, as outlined above, but I'm glad to say that I improved my positioning on the run despite knowing that I could do a lot better with some proper training and less of an "I'm a big wimp" approach to the whole thing which included silly worrying about heat stroke and death by dehydration and other nonsensical things like that. I passed about twenty people and so I can be happy about that. Final tally for the ten K came in at a not-great for me fifty two minutes and thirty nine seconds. Whatevs.

So the final tally for my first triathlon in a few years? 1500m swim = 27:35; 40km bike = 1:17:47; 10km run = 52:39. Total Olympic time = 2:38:01. Meh. I at least didn't finish near the back of the pack as I did in the Kraillinger Duathlon quite recently: a respectable MOP (middle-of-the-pack) placing of 116 of 298. Again, I'll take it!

Following the race we spent a little relaxing at our Bavarian farmhouse, ate a little more food, and packed up for the train ride home. Coincidentally, on the ride home I happened to sit beside someone who had also done the race and who started chatting with me. It turns out that he's the head of the Computer Science department at LMU (a major Munich university). How about that?

That evening we met friends at die Goldene Bar, an outdoor summer-time bar behind Haus der Kunst, the Munich art gallery. Vive la summer!

Canada Day 2015

On July 1st, 1867, the British North America Act was enacted, bringing together three British colonies -- New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and the United Province of Canada (which was basically the southern parts of present-day Ontario and Quebec) -- into a single country called Canada. To celebrate this day, we have Canada Day. Wikipedia says that "Canada Day observances take place throughout Canada, as well as among Canadians internationally" and so to keep the integrity of Wikipedia, we felt that as Canadians living internationally, we had better take place in some kind of observance and/or celebration. And so that's what we did.

It all started on Tuesday, my first day back at work following our trip to the Côte d'Azur (which will be featured in another blog post -- I hope), and which also happened to be the final day of the fiscal year 2015. FY15 was a good year for us, and since some big goals were achieved right at the end, everyone was in a good mood including management, and they saw it fit to give us an extra free holiday some time in the week following the start of the new fiscal year. This was announced on Tuesday evening at our celebratory barbecue, and since the window for free days began on July 1st (previously explained as a day where one should perform some kind of observance and/or celebration), I took the opportunity presented to us post haste and announced that I would be somewhat of a no-show the following day, July 1st, and would instead be performing a patriotic and support of online collaboration duty by going to a cottage and drinking some brewskies if I were in Canada, but since I was not, doing something somewhat of that nature.

The thing somewhat of that nature that we ultimately settled upon was a trip to Starnberger See (apparently called Würmsee until 1962), the second-largest lake (by water volume) in Germany. Interestingly, it is also where King Ludwig II (of Schloß Neuschwanstein fame) was murdered/commit suicide/accidentally drowned on June 13 1886. We took the S-Bahn (essentially like the GO Train) south from Munich for about 30 minutes to the lake. We found a shady spot under a tree, and then, for the first time in approximately 3 years, tried on our wetsuits! As an aside, I will compete in my first triathlon in approximately 3 years this weekend: the Tegernsee Olympic Triathlon, and it would be nice to see if my wetsuit still fits, and to see if I remember how, or am able, to swim in it. As it turns out, all three seemed more or less to be the case and I in fact did fit into the wetsuit, remembered how to swim while wearing it, and was physically able to do so. Sandi also was able to squeeze into her Xterra Pro but that will be the last time until probably next Spring at the earliest!

Following a short swim, we then went for a Canada Day lunch in the local biergarten. And this is as good a time as any to reflect on what, after nearly 3 and a half years abroad, a national holiday might mean to us. I certainly don't feel German, and nor will I ever. And I'm certainly happy that I got to be born in a place that has allowed me to live the life that I have thus far. But equally, I can't exactly look to Canada and its place in the world, if you will, and clearly not to its present government, and feel any sort of pride. I can instead feel happy about the people that I know there, the beauty of the country, the fact that for the most part Canadian people are tolerant and accepting, and the fact that no matter how long we live anywhere else in the world, we will always be, and feel, Canadian. I will feel it in some explainable ways, like English will always be the easiest language for me to speak, but mostly in a non-specific, can't-put-your-finger-on-it, inexplicable way, perhaps not all that different from how Catalonian people say that they do not feel Spanish.

After a lunch of burgers and beer (Wasser mit Sprudel for Sandi), we went back to the waterfront to sit in the shade, stare at the water and the boats going by, and read. Appropriately enough for me, it was Richard Ford's 2012 novel "Canada", about a boy learning to cope with life and loneliness on his own following his parents being sent to jail for robbing a bank (note that it was appropriate simply because the title of the book is, and much of the content takes place in, Canada, and not because I am coping with a loneliness in my life or that my parents have robbed a bank to my knowledge). The sun sat high in the sky, without a cloud anywhere to be seen, and the temperature held at a hot, but comfortable in the shade, 28 degrees. It was perfect Canada Day weather, in a "Canada-like" location, with water, ducks, and sailboats dotting the horizon, sitting just in front of the hazy Alps, seen far in the distance.

In the late afternoon we walked to the ferry terminal to see if we could end the day with a boat ride. Unfortunately the last ferry had left for the day, so instead we drank frozen coffees on the waterfront and wrote postcards that we bought in France but never got around to sending while we were there. By now it was nearing 8:00 PM and though the sun could still be seen above the mountains on the far side of the lake, the Canada Day Full Moon was visible as a complete white circle in the sky. We took some last pictures, made our way back to the train station, and rode back home to Munich.