I don't think any of us imagined that it would happen, but here it is: the Munich 1/2 Marathon 2016 Race Report. Also: two blogs in one night. If you were able to get through the previous one (actually, given how "blog posts" show up in general, and since I'm doing this post like literally right after writing the other one, this one will show up "first" (i.e. ahead of the other one from tonight) and so maybe you're actually reading this one first and maybe don't even know about the other one yet), you might have (spoiler alert: maybe read the other one first if what I just described happened to you) noticed some kind of underlying theme of "you never know what might happen" and here's proof: two blogs in one night.
It turns out that everything we thought we knew about training was wrong. Nearly two months ago, on Sunday October 9th, 2016, I ran in the Munich 1/2 Marathon. Poor Sandi and I were once at the pinnacle of our sport. We had crafted a sort of aura of a reputation or personality or whatever as sports-people that were always off running or sports-doing and being in shape and all that stuff. We worked hard to develop such a persona and it felt good and it was nice to have that as a part of my identity. But life happens, man, and you not only have a kid which is already way out there but further your kid is also in some ways German or Bavarian or whatever. I mean, obviously she's Canadian and will speak English but she'll always have been born in Munich in this mansion in the English Garden and actually that's pretty cool in my personal opinion. But all that is totally beside the point and if I were one to edit my posts to try to make them succinct then the total number of words published on this site would in all likelihood be about 90% (at least) less. However, as you no doubt are well aware, I'm often more going for volume -- and really, is there anything wrong with that? Anyways, the real point was that we stopped having time to work out and we got fat.
But I did something very clever. Now, normally I'm a humble man (somewhat embarrassing but required clarification-based side note here: when you go to verify all of the claims that are made in this post, you'll inevitably end up at this URL: http://muenchen.r.mikatiming.de/2016/?content=detail&fpid=search&pid=search&idp=9999991020521D0000147AC2&lang=EN&event=MHM&search%5Bname%5D=Darling&search%5Bnation%5D=%25&search_sort=name&search_event=MHM [and so I might as well just share it with you here to save you the effort] and you'll probably notice that my participant name is "Dr. William Darling" and then you'll say to yourself [out loud] "well that's not very humble at all. In fact, he seems a bit of a smug asshole and I bet he's one of those people who when the pilot announces 'is anyone on this plane a doctor?' that he buzzes the stewardess to let them know he's here and he's ready to help" and I guess that would be fair [prima facie]. However, when you fill these things out in Germany [at least I think it's a German thing] it tells you to choose what your title is and according to my work colleague [who come to think of it might have made the whole thing up to cover up his particular arrogance] told me that you're lying if you don't choose Dr if by definition you have the god damn doctoral degree. Let's just forget the whole thing, shall we?), but in this case I think you'll have to agree that it was clever. I knew that the whole running and cycling and swimming and all that would completely and utterly just totally fall apart and crash with the arrival of our Bavarian baby. I knew it. And so to make sure that we could somehow eventually start to break out of it, I signed Sandi up for a race. You probably remember (at least I think I remember writing about it) that she did the Tegernseelauf in September and she was registered for said race because I registered her.
So, since she did the Tegernsee, it only made sense that I would do a race too. Once you're registered for something, you're kind of bound to make good on participating in said race and when it's some minimum distance long enough, then you're forced to put in a little bit of training if you want any chance of completing it (registering for a 10 K wouldn't do because anyone could do that without training, you're just apt to be slow and be in a lot of pain [cf. this year's Oktoberfestlauf]). Put all this together and you see that I registered for the Munich 1/2 (like I did in 2015 just before Hannah's arrival and as we both [we being me and Sandi] did just after arriving in Munich way back in 2013). But, though the plan worked to get us running a little bit, I still only ended up running starting a few weeks before the race, and not that much, and not that fast.
And here's where we get to the point of discovering that everything we thought we knew about running training being wrong. You see, the conventional wisdom goes that you need to run a lot and you need to run fast to properly prepare for a race (i.e. to do well in it). But here I did my least preparation ever and had the least amount of running (and cycling and swimming) in the year before the race and... I did my best ever. How about that.
Let's hope that same principle applies for Ironman because I sure don't think I'll be able to be doing any training any time soon.........
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