The Night Before Christmas

'Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house

Wafted the strong smell of vomit, and the panicked cries of my spouse

We ran to Helga's room to see what was the deal

And when the smell hit my nose, I fell down to a kneel

After cleaning the barf from her face and her hair, Helga was sat upright in a chair

Screaming, yelling, ranting, and fighting away

She hurt Mommy's back in a frightening way

Her wet jammies, pillow, pillow case, sleep sac, sheets, two stuffed animals, and mattress cover were hung by the dehumidifier with care

In hopes that the pungent and acrid smell of her stomach contents would not soon fill the air

We nestled Helga back, all snug in her bed

But within minutes regurgitated food particles and stomach acid surrounded her head

With her back spasming through high levels of pain

I grabbed Mommy some whiskey and told her it was probably just a sprain

After consulting the web (on my phone through an app)

I started to prepare Helga for what I hoped would be a long winter's nap

I cleaned her again and tried to console

And reminded myself for the future to be more careful with birth control

Finally I dozed for a few hours or more

When suddenly I was awoken by an almighty snore!

This was far beyond your everyday clatter

I ran downstairs to see what was the matter

I looked at the counter and saw just before me

The answer to the snoring: the remnants of a party

Joelle had finished the whole bottle of booze

And when she does that, she's sure in for a snooze

But then out the window I saw Nikolaus as he flew out of sight

I could just hear him say:

"Happy Christmas to all, buy an air freshener, and to all a good-night!"

Aber wenn man versucht manchmal...

It was a sunny and unseasonably warm Thursday morning in March and the birds were singing. After crawling out from beneath the embers of the inferno that very nearly took his life, the man spent much of the following several months in insurance and law offices trying to piece together the left-over smoking, smouldering pieces of his life. While he hadn't had the forethought to purchase any kind of flood or fire insurance, he managed to be chased down by a lawyer who had trained in the American tradition of tort law and had convinced him to sue the #$%& out of Amazon and their useless paper weight of an "intelligent" assistant. While Amazon put up quite a fight in defending the good name of their baby Alexa, it wasn't long before the man's lawyer (some writer has-been named John Grisham) convinced the powers that be at Amazon LLC GmbH Inc Corp that they had better settle this particular claim if for nothing else than to preserve Alexa's good name (you do what you gotta do for your daughter). When the cheque for fifty million EUR arrived and he settled the bill with Mr. Grisham, ESQ, he had 37 million left over to buy a brand new apartment and perhaps put a little away for his retirement. He had had his eye on a modest 3-bedroom in the Lehel district overlooking the English Garden, however, and it's not like they were just going to give it away. With the thirty-seven million Euros he now had, he only needed to take out a small mortgage of nineteen million, seven hundred and eighty thousand Euros to be able to afford the place. With the paperwork signed, his possessions deposited in the top-floor dwelling, and the first 17,000 EUR Hausgeld monthly payment taken care of, he stepped out on to the balcony and took a sip of his espresso. It tasted a little cold.

Du kannst nicht immer bekommen was du willst

Early evening on a cold Sunday in November. The streets are wet and the rain-filled humid air leaves everything with a faint dampness and a not-as-faint hint of a sad smell. The windows weep and their tears drip down to the cold dirty floor below. An impotent fan roars with thunderous noise yet the dank air remains sodden while the thick black mould that is the window sill's only friend accumulates a further layer onto its putrid self. Expanding its miserable self is its only reason for being. A tired man sinks deeply into his tired damp couch. The coils of the rusty springs have long since given way and a jagged metallic discomfort urgently converses with the man's back. His state of exhaustion prevents him from neutralizing the uncompromising pain in his back and he simply grimaces in an exaggerated look of discomfiture as his squalid feet from the sordid floor settle over the dilapidated arm of the old piece of furniture. A lunatic freezing in the streets screams incessantly, carrying his chilling horrifying voice over the smog-filled chaos of the nearby motorway. The closed window, preserving the suffocating air inside, provides less than a broken-down weak muffler to keep the nightmarish howling from one of society's forgotten at bay. Wires dangerously dangle from above where illumination was once extant. The clock suddenly strikes six and the wind bashes and bangs the cheap broken-down metal shutters. Despite the noise, the smell, the dampness, and his extreme physical discomfort, the man begins to nod off to sleep. A hypnagogic jerk jolts him up from the despicable couch and he makes his way to the broken-down kitchen. As he's making a coffee a power surge from the brewing storm disables the coffee machine mid-pour. When the electricity reengages it causes a spark that starts a roaring electrical fire on the mid-century deeply-worn stovetop. The flames spread quickly and soon he is surrounded by bright blue, yellow, and red fire. He is quickly enveloped by thick black smoke. Luckily he has recently purchased an Amazon Echo Dot, the "intelligent speaker" powered by an artificial "intelligence" called Alexa. The man says "Alexa, what do I do?". The speaker says "I'm sorry, I didn't get that." He says, again, "Alexa, what do I do?". The speaker says "Please remember to invoke the skill that you're interested in by name." The man is now on the floor gasping for air and is surrounded by what's amounting to a deadly inferno. He pleads, "Alexa, call the fire department!". The speaker replies, "I'm sorry, 'fire department' is not in your address book." The man is now flat on his back. He is breathing is short, pathetic gasps. Through his final dying breath he whispers "Alexa, why did I buy you? Goodbye, cruel world...". The speaker says, "Your Amazon order for two audio books of Elvis Costello's 'Goodbye Cruel World' is confirmed. Your preferred payment method..." before the speaker finally gives out and the entire previously wet apartment is fully engulfed in flames.

Totally random and not very useful post but I finally had time to write something so I didn't want to miss such an opportunity

1. I've got the writer's block! I've got the writer's block! The best thing to stop the block is staring at the clock. If I were at the cottage I would walk on down to sit on the dock. If such a thing were nearby and I weren't so lazy I would maybe throw a rock. Into the water to prove that I am such a jock. And of course I'm not wearin' no shoes it's the summer I've got no use for socks. But if I get too bored of this I'm sure there's someone or something that I could mock. And after all is said and done if I ain't got no money then I'll still have my stocks. My stocks! My stocks!

2. The BBQ cover is off. The BBQ cover is not on the BBQ. It's not serving its purpose. The BBQ is exposed! The BBQ both creates and at the same time withstands heat in the range of oh I don't know let's say 500 degrees. But the sun and the rain could hurt it! The BBQ cover is off! It's off! Save the BBQ!

3. We go back and forth forever. Sometimes I drive up town. But mostly, son, I drive to you, so that I can hunch over the desk! The desk is truly such a pest (these are supposed to rhyme!) and I'm really painting my cave. There are so many words that I have learned but not nearly as many that I can't remember and it's clear as rain! So many exclamation marks they make it seem like there might be a point to what I'm sayin'... But don't worry my friend we're gonna treat them like some forgotten trend. Oh ya we will! Remember I've got the writer's block, hopefully it's just a short-lived stage. I would have had a fully clear page. Like when I was so much younger and I was just a snotty messed up teen. But right now after a fortnight I'm thinking that what we have here is just a clean blank screen! You heard it here second!

Buying a Flat in Munich for Millenials

Here is a guide to buying a flat in Munich. For Millenials. Really it's a guide for anyone but let's face it, millenials need it the most. We will keep a running tally of your net worth when important updates are called for. Let's start with an anchor then. You're a hard-working young man or woman (well, by millenial standards anyways, and luckily you've been told so many times that you're special [which is apparently the root of all millenials' problems] that you've managed to somehow outwit the system [which if you think about it is actually pretty impressive because you're basically witless -- what does that say about the wit level of the system!?]) and though you're essentially 40 years old which would have been teetering towards retirement age for your parents you've only just entered the workforce because you just thought you were oh so so special and that you could really do anything you put your mind to and that made it also pretty difficult to decide what you should actually end up doing because really if you can do anything then even once you've started doing one thing why not quit before you've even started and move on to the next thing? and so you kind of wandered aimlessly for quite a few years there amassing valueless pieces of [high-grade, though] paper that basically just say you spent a lot of time partying and/or relaxing in libraries and your parents gave some school(s) a HUGE amount of money but now you're shaping up and plans are to right the ship so-to-speak before you hit the big four-oh and so in your few years of actually finally pulling in a pay cheque and putting away a small chunk of each one we've come to our first anchor.

Net worth: 50,000 EUR

Not bad, right? Amazing, actually, for a millenial. That seems like a shit-load of money to any millenial. You could literally buy more than a thousand cases of Michelob with that. But since you're reading this we assume your plan is to purchase a flat. In Munich. First things first: what can you afford? Well, a down-payment is out of the question because flats in Munich start at around 500,000 EUR (well, you could get a one-room "bachelor" maybe in Neuperlach but then is that really Munich? I hear they don't count it as München-proper if there aren't at least 1.3 BMWs per household in a neighbourhood and even worse, Neuperlach's streets are not even paved in gold! They use a non-caloric rose-gold-like polymer infused with aluminum and diamond dust. Lame.) Any way you slice it you're not going to be able to afford much with a net worth of only 50 Gs. Especially because you'll have to pay for the following 3 important things (of course there are inevitably many, many other expenses, but these are up front and non-negotiable): (1) the notary, whose job is to take a template that has been passed around amongst notaries since some time in 1973 and fill in the lines that say "price", "buyer", and "seller" (or their German equivalents) and then get paid a cool very-high percentage of the amount that was inserted in the "price" slot; (2) the real estate tax (worst element of this three-element list); and (3) the Grundbucheintrag ("land registry entry") fee. The "approximate" cost for these three wonderful money grabs is 5 to 7 % of the cost of your flat. Let's quickly divert to our first appearance of the "millenial advice" pop-up feature of this article:

Millenial Advice Feature {1}: when someone gives you a range for how much something will cost, and especially in the particular case of purchasing an apartment, house, or other immovable good under the German Civil Code, do not under any circumstances look at the small end of the spectrum and think "ok it will cost 5% of the purchase price" because it will actually cost more like 8 or 9%. Don't ask us how that works, but that's the way it is.

So, heeding MAF {1}, and being rather liberal about things we'll take the not-so-far-out estimate of 8 per cent. Performing the following mathematical equation should be no problem for us millenials because through working towards our N number of degrees we have no doubt a good degree of advanced training in high temperature physics, quantum theory, advanced machine learning techniques for deep learning, complex financial transactions in common law, and others, and somewhere in there we should probably have learned how to determine what the maximum purchase price of something might be when 8% of it must be at most 50,000 EUR. Let's see... Thinking back... Right, 0.08x = 50,000... Therefore, x = 50,000 / 0.08 = 625,000 EUR. So that's our cap.

Before we go any further, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking (and please adjust for any cultural, social, or age-related language perturbations that might be required): "Shit, dog! I can afford a god-damn mansion! ... That's nearly a million Canadian dollars!". The latter is correct. That is nearly a million Canadian dollars as of September 22nd 2017 (and that's when the Loonie has been trading somewhat uncharacteristically high). The former, however, is very, very far from the truth. No, you cannot afford a god-damn mansion. Because this is Munich, you need to first consider the "Munich Tax" (see glossary side-panel, infra)

[Glossary Side-Panel Note 1: Munich Tax]: The Munich Tax [n] is not a tax per se. Rather, it is a lump sum amount that forms part of the cost of an immovable within the confines of the metropolitan area of Munich that gives you nothing but an address that ends with München. As of September 2017 it is 400,000 EUR.

So, remember that we can afford a flat that will ultimately cost 625,000 EUR. Subtracting the Munich Tax, we are left with 225,000 EUR to pay for the actual apartment itself. Sadly, that will not get you a mansion. In fact, it will not even get you something very nice. The next step, however, is finding that not-very-nice place. What you'll do here is spend approximately 3-5 years checking the ImmobilienScout every 7-9 minutes. Some quick millenial math shows that to be on average 4*365*24*60 / 8 = 262,800 checks on immobilientscout.de. Looking at the outcome that number actually looks a little small so we'll round up a little and note that you should expect to check the ImmobilienScout around 300,000 times before you find something that you convince yourself is worth buying (important note: even though it's not worth buying).

After wasting somewhere on the order of 200 weekends of your life visiting apartments that were supremely over-priced, far from the city centre, and frankly rather ugly, the next step is to let your standards start falling. Now, since you're a millenial, you've no doubt mastered the art of displaying an ironic detachment from any situation where you could have opened yourself up to vulnerability or taking a side in any meaningful or important decision. You'll need that vital experience here more than you likely ever have before. Another thing you'll need here is a lack of pride and an ability (which I guarantee you've accumulated the requisite 10,000 hours of expert-becoming power over the years) to silence any rational doubts that you bring up when you inevitably ask yourself why in the world you would be committing yourself to working 40+ hours a week for the rest of your life to put nearly every penny you earn into a place that you don't particularly like that much and accept blindly that the bank should hold full control over you and your life decisions from here to eternity and beyond. Once you've accomplished the above, the next step is to go to your bank and tell them (remember that here you'll have to work extra hard to silence any rational voice that might be left in your brain... one technique we recommend is to periodically stab your brain with a Q-tip) that you are ready to buy a flat.

This step is pretty easy and rather painless because despite the currently low interest rates there's nothing that a bank loves more than the guarantee of huge amounts of continuous income for the foreseeable future without having to do nearly any work in return. The banker will come to your house at your convenience making it seem like he's doing you a favor and will even probably give you the pen that you used to sign your life away at the end. [Millenial Buying Advice: keep the pen and any other free gifts going forward -- even if you don't like the colour -- because you will soon not be able to afford essentially anything other than your mortgage payments and you never know when you might need a new pen.] Now, since we've somehow found an apartment that's rationally worth maybe 200,000 EUR but we've added on the Munich Tax then we're looking at a selling price of 600,000 EUR. The sellers will also cleverly not include in the total price the cost of the parking space which you have no choice in whether you purchase it or not. This is normally around 20-50 thousand Euros (with no rhyme or reason as to where in particular it lands in that spectrum) and so we're now looking at around 625,000 EUR which coincidentally was our cap that we arrived at before. Then we have that 8% of fees which as you'll probably remember comes out to 0.08*625,000 = 50,000 EUR. So, new net worth...

Net worth 2: -625,000 EUR

Ouch.

But that's the bad news. Well, there's other bad news such as the fact that you have to live in this new (worse than your previous) home and it's pretty far from everything you used to like to go to and there's nothing comparable in your new loud and dangerous neighborhood and most things are broken and you have to spend more money that you don't have on trying to fix at least some of those broken things and just when you think you're done paying those associated purchasing fees you'll no doubt be blindsided on some idle Tuesday with a friendly letter informing you that you owe another 3 or 4 thousand Euros (what's the difference at this point, right?). But then something will occur to you: who cares? In the wise and immortal words of world-renowned drug smuggler George Jung's father Fred:

"Money isn't real, George. It doesn't matter. It only seems like it does."

Danish Pastries

During our trip to Copenhagen, we were lucky enough to experience the wide, wonderful world of Danish pastries. Just 500 m or so from our place sat the GuldBageren Danish bakery. The GB baked up some of the finest breads and pastries that have ever been tasted by man. These ranged from highly sugared delicious jam-filled pastries to highly sugared delicious custard-filled pastries to even more delicious sugar and apple and icing covered pastries. I loved Copenhagen for a lot of reasons but I would consider living there even if all they had going for them was the GuldBageren bakery.

On a recent warm summer evening in the Southern Europe of Germany, while most Bavarians had long since nodded off to sleep aided in no small part by the liquefied hops and yeast they had enjoyed earlier in the evening at their local garden of beer, Pemulis lay wide-awake in bed longing for an authentic GuldBageren jam-filled, sugar-coated, icing-laden Copenhagen breakfast treat. If anyone actually understood existentialism then they might describe the experience of eating one of these pastries as being essential to the Dasein of human existence. Then again, that hardly means anything at all and the meaning of a consumable of this quality has to rise above empty meaning.

Failing to fall back asleep, and knowing that the shops had been closed for hours (and, having experienced it recently, knowing that Copenhagen was about a ten hour drive away), Pemulis crept silently down to his teeny-tiny kitchen and began the process of trying to re-create the famous GuldBageren pastry. Being limited to DSL Internet speeds as a result of living just one block outside of the Mittlerer Ring and therefore being denied the Fiber Optic connections offered by M-Net to their other more privileged customers, Pemulis could not rely on the vast troves of information that would otherwise have been available to him in cyberspace. Instead, he performed a sort of transcendental meditation that projected his mind backwards in time to the last time he bit into a GB pastry. The trillions of synapse connections in his brain worked in overdrive to distill the underlying constituent parts that made up the incomparable taste of the dessert (or snack or breakfast or lunch or...). He settled on probably: flour, yeast, salt, eggs, milk, sugar, butter, and home-made jam.

He started mixing the flour with the salt and the sugar and the yeast and mixing the eggs with the milk and the butter. He then mixed everything together into one big bowl. By this time it was nearly morning, however, and he realized that he had used the exact same ingredients that he would have for making pancakes, and so, instead of potentially wasting all those useful ingredients, he whipped up some pancakes with blueberries and the whole family enjoyed a gourmet Canadian breakfast.

THE END

Ironman Copenhagen 2017: YARR

Intro / preamble

Hello and welcome to Ironman Copenhagen 2017: Yet Another Race Report (YARR). Yes, we all know very well that the quality of this blog has degraded severely over the last eighteen months or so, and to top it all off most of the limited content as of late has been contextless boring race reports or lame training-related updates (and even those have been admittedly pretty darn sparse). In some / many cases the race reports have been involving races that the author is not even in any way tangentially connected to (cf. Giro d'Italia, blah blah blah) [which reminds me that the Vuelta a España is just about to finish its first of three weeks and our old/new Canadian friend Michael Woods finds himself within the top-10, less than a minute and a half back, which is actually kind of exciting, but don't worry I won't mention that any more]. And to top it all off, if you haven't quit reading yet, you're about to be subjected to a whole other race report and this one might even be just right-full of words because a race report's length should probably be somewhat proportional to the race's length and IM CPH was a doozy.

But here's the good news: with IMC2k17 finally out of the way, way more time on our hands, and no races to report on (though we'll hopefully keep up the tradition of the almost-here Oktoberfestlauf participation) there should theoretically be loads of time for blog post writing. Look for future posts on language, culture, food, art, literature, music, philosophy, bread making, Danish pastry testing and eating, Barolo wine tasting, and much more. With that, let's get started... with the preview to the race report!

IM Copenhagen. 3.9 km of swimming in the sea; 180 km of cycling in the howling wind; and 42.2 km of "running" (or jogging/walking/two-footed-forward-propulsion) over asphalt, cobblestone, wooden deck, and other materials through Copenhagen's beautiful city centre. Why? First, let's be specific about what "why" we're talking about here. Apart from the bigger "why", why Copenhagen, specifically? We touched upon this months ago but to refresh your memory on how it all got started, it was something like a lark: 

- "hey what do you guys think about the Cope?"
- "uh what?"
- "Ironman Copenhagen; I just signed up"
- "crazy.. ok we will too"
- "..."

But more deeply, why in the world does anyone do something like this? I can categorically and 100% unequivocally state that doing the race (this time) was NOT at all fun. During the swim I was freezing and shivering almost the whole time (and had other annoying problems that I will specify in greater detail in the actual race report way down on this page [right -- this is just the preamble]), the bike was so windy and I had to pee pretty much non-stop (even after I'd gone) for 6 or so hours, and I couldn't really run after the first ~10 km due to incorrect nutrition (presumably) / stomach problems. Unfortunately -- not to be a downer or anything -- even crossing the finish line didn't have that famous effect of at least temporarily erasing all the pain and filling you with happiness for having completed such an arduous race. I wasn't really able to even push very hard for the last little bit of the run because my stomach was so bad and would get worse once I started jogging so while I did end up jogging/running over the line, I had been mainly walking up to the last 500 m or so (maybe even less) and finally crossing the line didn't even feel like relief, actually.. It just felt.. kind of like nothing. Ugh.. super downer.

I guess one of the main reasons I felt so down about it (and have a bit since the race which was now five days ago) is that I really had the legs for the run. Despite the windy conditions on the bike, I was much fitter this time and felt like I could totally make it through a marathon (even if it wasn't super fast). Last time, though I finished with a similar overall time, my legs were just full-on DONE at the start of the run and it was a ginormous miracle that I managed to somehow get through 42.2 km of running/jogging/shuffling/walking. This time, however, I could have had a pretty acceptable IM time (and even marathon time perhaps) as my legs felt like they could totally get through a marathon at the end of the bike, but then something was off with my nutrition (or I just had a bad stomach and the nutrition was a whole separate thing) and that screwed everything up. Blah.

HOWEVER, I'm still happy that I did it! Seriously. So this brings us back to the why of doing such a race. For many people it's to prove that they can do it, to beat their previous time (side note: if I had actually beaten my previous time then I probably would have felt at least a little happier about the whole experience and obviously if I hadn't been in pain for most of the marathon then I would also have been happier), to be able to brag that they completed such a famously difficult event, to have an excuse to spend exorbitant amounts of time training, and other things. So obviously there's no ONE answer to the question "why does anyone do an IM race?". If you care (if you don't then why are you reading this tedious post?), I think it's a big mixture of many things for me. One of them is to have an excuse to "have" to train -- a lot -- for several months. That will sound strange because I feel relieved that the training is over now, and during the training I often complained about that requirement or felt sad that I couldn't do other things on the weekends. But, that's part of the point. I'm happy getting myself fit and having a good reason to go for a beautiful 6 hour bike ride. When you come back from a hard workout and spend the rest of the evening eating food that never tasted so good, you feel good about the work you did and the way your body feels after it worked so hard. And that requirement of a big race allows you to do it. For some reason the argument that you like going for a bike ride just doesn't work or feel the same when it's so much work to make sure you can somehow get in the ride (especially when you have a young daughter and both parents are training for the same race) as compared to having to do it because if you don't then you won't complete the race that you've signed up for.

Another thing is proving to myself that I can do this kind of race. I really don't think my body is made for this sort of thing and it definitely doesn't come easily to me, so making myself do it feels good -- in the high high high-level abstract plane, that is :-) ... So there's my narcissistic look on why I personally did the race. There's also the fact that I seem to have a knack for making terrible decisions (like signing up for an expensive race that requires half a year of constant training and that you don't end up enjoying doing that much or spending all of the money that you'll make for the rest of your working life on an apartment that you don't like all that much)... Oh ya, one more thing is the journey of getting there when you and friends are signed up for the same race. The camaraderie of both being in the process of preparing for something really difficult makes your conversations about how you're preparing and what you've been up to in your training somehow meaningful and that feeling of being "in it together".

Actual race report

So let's get back to that race report, shall we? Before we get started, though, a HUGE thank you to the Grandmas that made the race possible. Despite some of the negative things that you'll read in this race report with respect to not feeling super happy about how my race went, I'm super happy that we did it (as just mentioned above) and the time in Copenhagen with you was so much fun and Hannah loved it as well. But now back to the matter at hand...

Everyone reading this surely knows that I have problems sleeping before a race. In Kalmar (five years ago [!!!]) I think I might have slept a total of one hour the night before. Also, we had been staying in Thony's bachelor-style apartment in Gothenberg on a totally horribly uncomfortable inflatable mattress that creaked and sunk with every tiny movement and I hadn't been sleeping well at all for several days before the race. Not a good place to start from. This time, we were staying in an amazing AirBnB house in Copenhagen with a very comfortable bed and I had been sleeping quite well in the few days leading up to the race. On the night before I slept for about two hours, woke up for a little bit, slept for another two hours, and then around 3:45 I was up for good. That's actually pretty very good for me and I wasn't too nervous about not having slept enough. We had a couple of open-faced PB&J sandwiches and a little bit of fruit and we were out the door. Linda drove us in the famous Basketball Team Bus down to the waterfront and we were on-site (see initial image above) around ten past six. We had a few things to set up with our bikes (get the helmets and shoes from our bike bags that had to be dropped off the day before and put them on our bikes, connect the bike computers, etc.) and then we met up to stand in the porta-potty line, put on our wetsuits, and sip some more last-minute water.

While Kalmar was a mass start where everyone stood in the water together and then all started racing when a big gun went off (a pretty cool start I would say), this race had a rolling start where you first seeded yourself into a group based on your projected swim time and then 6 people set out every six seconds with the idea that the swim would be much safer and more relaxed without everyone swimming over each other at the start trying to get a position. This format must indeed be safer but I kind of like the mass swim start I have to say. Sandi and I signed up to start in the second group which had a projected swim time of 1:08 -- 1:11 which meant that our group would start being set off at 7:20. I was feeling pretty calm by this point (I had been very nervous all morning -- obviously -- but now that we were in line and ready to go I didn't have to worry about missing the start or forgetting something or anything like that anymore and so I felt much better). Finally we made it to the start and from the way we entered the corrals I ended up starting one or two groups before Sandi (so either 6 or 12 seconds -- I can't remember which).

The very start of the swim was going well. Normally the swim is actually one of my favourite parts and with a wetsuit I feel super relaxed in the water and can enjoy myself and feel happy that the race has started. This good feeling didn't last very long, unfortunately. In fact, I think I've done around a dozen triathlons and open-water swims and this one I felt the worst, by far. We had done a 4 km open water swim race in Munich in late June and it went really well (you might even have read about it here!). This time things fell apart for a few reasons but the first one that happened was my shitty, foggy goggles. They're the same ones I used in our practice swim a few days before and in the race in Munich where I had no problems. This time, perhaps because the water was so much colder (but then they were also fine the few days before which was in the same body of water so who knows) my goggles fogged right up and I couldn't see much other than vague blurry outlines. I didn't want to stop to pull them above my eyes and wipe them so I kept swimming making sure I was following other swimmers from the splashes and commotion in the water. Finally I couldn't see anything and I had to stop to "de-fog" and I realized that I was quite a bit off course. I started swimming back to the main line of swimmers and though I was a bit annoyed knowing that I would have to stop at least a few more times to de-fog and that I had wasted time going off course, I still felt fine.

Then, around the 1.5 km mark where we turned around to start heading to the other side of the lagoon, I started getting really, really cold. My whole body was shaking and I even (gasp!) started kicking to try to warm myself up. I had read a race report a few weeks ago from someone who had started IM Copenhagen in a previous year but had to be pulled out of the water due to hypothermia. I started worrying about two things: (1) that I was getting hypothermia and that my race would be done before it had even started; and (2) that if I was this cold, then Sandi must be really cold. Needless to say, I did make it to the end and got to do my race, but shivered the entire way and didn't feel warm again until maybe 20 minutes or more into the bike ride. My time five years ago in Kalmar was 1h10m and my time in the 4 km open water swim six weeks pre-IMCope was also 1h10m so I had felt confident but in the end my swim time was 1h13m. Only three minutes slower, but I thought that I would maybe even improve on my time and going through the shaking for about half the swim probably took a lot out of me. The transition to the bike went OK but it was difficult changing because I was shaking so much still.

As I headed out to the bike course still pushing my bike (i.e. before we got to the bike-mount line), I saw Peter and gave a wave to the camera, and then as I was heading out (now on my bike) I heard Linda call my name and looked back just in time to see Mom, Linda, and Hannah (being held by Linda) but didn't have time (or mental wherewithal) to yell anything back. The start of the bike was FAST. We knew it was going to be a very windy day and the wind was coming out of the South-West which pushed us North up the coast quite nicely. My first split at something like 40 km was I believe 32 km / h and I was confident that I wasn't pushing too hard. Every action has a reaction, however, and when we had to come back straight into that strong wind it just sapped the energy right out of you. I think I managed the bike and the winds fairly well as I was very concerned with feeling the way I did at the end of the bike that I did in Kalmar where I couldn't even imagine running 1 km, let alone 42.2. The bike was fairly uneventful except for having to pee like crazy and then finally around the 100 km mark I came to a toilet and relieved myself for what I swear must have been 3 minutes. One nice touch with the volunteers is that as I pulled over a volunteer ran up to me and held my bike while I visited the facilities. 

The bike course was quite scenic with a lot of coastline, many millionaires' mansions, some farmland, and every type of weather too: sun, tons of wind, torrential downpour every now and then, and then somewhat pleasant with clouds and sun as I pulled into the bike-run transition after just over 180 km in the saddle. In the end, my bike time was 6:15:46, for an average speed of 28.8 km / h. That compares to 6:14:23 in Kalmar (crazy that they were so close actually), but this ride was much, much better. First, my legs felt seven thousand times better at the end than they did in Kalmar (note: they did NOT feel "great"; they felt horrible and tired -- but that was still infinitely better than in Kalmar!). Second, Kalmar had great conditions and though it was a bit windy and we had a tiny bit of rain, Copenhagen was in a whole other league and I think that 28.8 km / h over 180 km in that wind is not too bad.

After changing into my running outfit, I walked up the ramp from the underground parking garage that housed our T2, and began jogging right away. In Kalmar my legs were so done at the start of the marathon that I had to completely walk the first km at least but this time I got right into jogging and my first few km's I held a pace of around 5:20 or so which I was quite happy with. I (stupidly) thought "wow! If I keep this up I'll get a 3:45 marathon and I should easily break 12 hours!"... Well, things were not so bad until nearly 10 km or so and that's when my stomach started to get really bad. I will obviously spare the details but I couldn't push myself at all or I would be in terrible pain and have to slow down to a very slow jog and then a walk and I had to make full use of the many portable toilets that they so generously sprinkled throughout the course. It sucked. The first time that Sandi and I saw each other on an out-and-back we both looked good and were running at not bad paces. At this point I remember even foolishly thinking that I would beat her! Ha! I remember telling her that my Garmin died (side story: my Garmin died and is still dead and I need a new one finally) and that was the extent of my problems at that golden moment in the marathon history. When she passed me a short while later she still looked great and I was feeling awful at that point and that made me feel pretty down. I continued like this for many, many kilometres and finally Thony passed me with about 2 km to go while I was visiting one of my favourite toilet stops on the course. That was really too bad because I was jogging faster than him when I could jog but just had to stop so much. He started later than us so he was actually ahead of me but it would have been nice to finish together and it was so close to happening as I finished less than two minutes after him. In the end, I did a 4:53:42 marathon which totally sucks but what can you do...

With transitions of 8:19 and 7:59 (the only discipline where I improved over Kalmar!), my total time came in at 12:38:47 which, compared to my Kalmar time of 12:30:02, is not that bad. The median finish time for my age category was just under 12 hours, though, so it's definitely not good either. It feels a lot worse though because as I mentioned seven or eight times above, I had the fitness to do a lot better. In any case, as I came across the line both Sandi and Thony were there to greet me, I got my "space blanket" to try to get warm (it had started pouring rain basically thirty seconds before I finished), and I got a medal put around my neck. Right around the corner there is a Finisherpix cameraman and we remembered to get a picture. Buying these pictures costs a small fortune and so I've never bought any of these race photos but this time -- despite it not exactly being my best race -- I might relent because at the very least this one below is pretty nice:

Takeaways

What did we learn? What can we take from this? First, if I were ever to attempt such a thing again, I have to take the nutrition planning seriously. Every training plan and coach tells you to practice exactly the nutrition strategy that you'll follow on race day numerous times during your long brick workouts (extra note: make sure to actually do long brick workouts) but we never did it once. Each time that I did a long bike ride I would invariably stop half-way for a coffee or two with a big piece of cake, and usually also near the end have a big pretzel and an Alkoholfreiesweißbier in one of the Biergartens that I pass near the end. We skipped almost all of our brick workouts too because as soon as we would get back from a bike ride, the other person would have to head out on theirs and Hannah needed some attention.

Second, I would definitely not sign up when having a very young child and also at the same time as Sandi. Training for Kalmar was a lot of fun as we did all of our long bikes and runs (in fact, essentially all the training) together. This time it was less fun because we didn't do any training together and it was always stressful setting up a plan to make sure that we could both get in at the least the de minimis amount of required training on the weekends. It would basically be: one of us wakes up early and heads out, and when they get back, we would quickly have lunch together, and the other would then head out the door. The whole time you're out biking you're a bit stressed and in the back of your mind you're thinking "oh I better hurry up and not enjoy this because either (a) the other person has to go do their workout; or (b) it's about to get dark!".

We did the majority of our bike training indoors using the smart-trainer with Trainerroad. It's a program that gives you a structured training plan based on your functional threshold power (basically the maximum average power that you can sustain for one hour). We had never done any kind of structured cycling training before and doing it this time made a huge difference. Despite the fact that we spent less total time on the bike than we did while training for Kalmar, and of course biking through the Alps around Grenoble is a little more amazing than sitting in your living room, we were both much fitter for cycling and overall much better cyclists than we were last time. I hope that I keep up the Trainerroad training but the main problem is that having the trainer set up in the living room takes up a lot of space and space is a bit of a premium for us...

Not sure what to say about swimming. My slightly worse time was kind of due to coincidence / equipment problems so the takeaway there is to make sure you've sorted out your equipment issues well before the race. I think if I had gone to our club swim workouts 2-3 times a week all year (rather than going on my own and just swimming super easy) then I could have done a little faster and probably felt a bit fresher going into the rest of the race, but in terms of realistically improving the swim time a lot, I think that would require a lot more time and work than I actually have or want to invest.

And what's next in our triathlon lives? Definitely not an Ironman. If not never, then at least ten years away. A lot of it just seemed silly to me. All the people with the tattoos and the 10,000 EUR bikes with 6,000 EUR wheels and 500 EUR aero-helmets (both my bike and Sandi's bike put together are worth less than most people's single rear carbon aero wheel in these races) and the huge time commitment -- they just make it not worth it and too... almost "decadent". Perhaps next summer we might do some short races around Munich (for example the Krailinger Duathlon in May if it doesn't rain like it seems to on that weekend every year). I will definitely keep cycling around here when I have time which is great exercise and a lot of fun; south of Munich has beautiful cycling and the Alps are just a short ride away. I think we'll both keep doing running races as they're cheap and fun and don't really need any equipment (= less stress and simpler logistics). Perhaps our next race will be the Oktoberfestlauf (as we do almost every year) in just 4 weeks from today and who knows? -- maybe we'll sign up for the Munich Marathon coming just over a month from now on October 8th. After all, I did all that training to prepare myself to run a marathon over the last six months and in the end I didn't really run one :-)

Final thoughts

If you made it all the way here, congratulations! You are a patient person (or a speed reader or someone who just skims what he/she is reading or maybe someone who just always skips right to the "final thoughts" section). My feelings about this race are somewhat paradoxical. We had way less time to train for obvious reasons and so on the one hand I expected to not do as well. On the other hand, especially for the bike, we trained smarter and I felt fitter and I know that I could have done much better -- if only some unforeseeable things hadn't happened: swimming off course, having stomach problems on the run, having an exceptionally windy day in Copenhagen (OK, that last one was pretty foreseeable). I guess that's part of what a race of this length is, though: you need every single thing to go right to put together a great performance, and that can make it very frustrating: you can't control everything, no matter how much practice and preparation you have. In the end, as I said before, I'm happy I did it. But, I'm in no rush to do it again. Thanks for reading!

P.S. And to reward you for making it all the way down to the bottom of the page, here is a very short preview of the "coming soon" Ironman Copenhagen 2017 race video! Enjoy!

They see me rollin'...

Two pieces of advice. The second linked to the first. The first consisting of two non-mutually-exclusive clauses, both of which can stand alone, but are immeasurably reinforced by the presence of the other. Number one: do not sign-up for an Ironman if you have a small child and/or are planning to move homes any time even remotely near the beginning of the race. Number two: do not sign-up for an Ironman if you have a small child and both parents of said child have signed up for that event. You will likely regret it! It's just too much! Bonus number three piece of advice (yet to be confirmed): just keep renting a place; there's so much less stress involved. So much less. But anyways...

On to a totally (well, not totally) unrelated topic: rolling.

When the weight of the world has got you down, heading out on a Monaco Velo Club "Thursday after-work ride" is a great way to unwind. You have alpine vistas, beer gardens, and even (if you could speak German) good conversation (one presumes anyways, but one cannot be sure if the conversation is actually good if one doesn't understand any of it). In any case, though, that was fun.

Believe it or not we leave for our trip to Copenhagen just one week from tomorrow. Packing should be interesting (we have to find everything that's hidden away in boxes somehow) and before we leave we both need to get a couple of things fixed on our bikes. Getting scary!

Desire hath no rest

"But the only thing you care about is pleasure!" he yelled.
"What else is there?"
"Responsibility, hard work, satisfaction."
"Satisfaction is pleasure. And responsibility and hard work are only extremely round-about means to achieve satisfaction. In the end you want the same thing but you've been taught that pain and displeasure are requirements that are on the route towards pleasure."
"That's not true. The pleasure is greater when you have weathered pain and done hard work to arrive at it."
"So we agree that in the end all that matters is pleasure--"
"No, because only caring about pleasure leads to a qualified different form of it than caring about the path towards the reward."
"You're still wrong then. Every statement you've made explicitly confesses that in the end we want to attain the same thing. Now you're making a very different argument: the degree of pleasure. You're saying that the degree of pleasure will be greater based on how one arrives at it."
"Partially, I suppose. But it's not just the degree. It's the type as well. One might try to objectively rank pleasurable experiences, and you could then add value based on the difficulty of arriving at a particular experience, but that's impossible because there is no objective ranking. The ranking itself is dynamic and depends on the experiences that you're used to; they are relative to each other."
"Now you're getting highly specific. In fact, you're showing more clearly than I ever could have that all you care about is pleasure, and that you're even aiming to optimize it by introducing effects that subjectively augment its power -- effects that can objectively be categorized as things humans by nature want to avoid: responsibility and hard work chief among them."
"I don't follow you at all."
"What is something that you enjoy doing? Something that -- despite psychological effects of experience damping or hedonic adaptation or whatever -- is more or less objectively enjoyable for you and that following some hard labor you participated in or some amount of stress you had to experience would make you feel good?"
"Reading a book and drinking a coffee."
"And what is something that we could agree on as being objectively dis-pleasurable?"
"Reading accounting records and drinking lukewarm tea."
"Agreed."
"Good."
"OK. So for me, finding a moment to read a book and drink a coffee would bring me pleasure and so I want to try to maximize the opportunities that I have for doing so. One way would be to work hard for a long time so as to make a lot of money and then eventually when I have enough I could stop working and just read books and drink coffee all day long."
"..."
"But you are so obsessed with pleasure, demonstrably caring about even more so than me, because taking your argument to its natural conclusion, you would want to maximize the pleasure associated with reading your book and drinking your coffee by consciously deciding to first spend a lot of your finite amount of time reading accounting records and drinking lukewarm tea which would in turn make the (good) book more exciting/pleasurable/intellectually stimulating/whatever and the coffee more delicious/mind-sharpening/calmness-inducing/whatever. Is that right?"
"Again, no. You're taking my argument much too literally."
"Enlighten me then."
"With pleasure [ed: ha!]... The point is that we cannot separate the concepts of "pure" pleasure and the means (which can be unpleasant) to reach that sort of happiness. If literally all you care about is pleasure then you will be bound to search it out and reject all unpleasant things which will in turn lead to less pleasure. It is not a game theory problem or an optimization problem but a life philosophy that makes rational choices leading to general happiness the right way to live."
"That sounds like a whole bunch of mumbo jumbo to me."
"You know, you're probably right. Let's go grab a coffee and stop at the bookstore on the way."
"Deal."

June Fish 2 (Langstreckenschwimmen München 2017)

It was another scorcher last-last-Sunday (i.e. 8 days ago) with temperatures hitting the low 30's in the greater München area when nearly 500 swimmers gathered at the Oberschleissheim Olympic Regatta lake some 5 or 6 kilometres north of the Munich city-limits for the Langstreckenschwimmen München 2017: two races consisting of 1 km (lame) and 4 km of openwater swimming under the Bavarian Sun [yes, this is another in the long-running series of GWMD "Race Reports"].

The 1 km version, of which we will no longer speak after this, featured just 63 participants and got under way at precisely 11:00. Five minutes later, with these individuals safely out of the way, the gun went off for the 400 or so (356 finishers) participants in the main event. Of those individuals, there were representatives from all over Germany (and outside its borders), including the eventual winner Nicky Lange (two-time German Openwater Swim National Champion), the Spaniard Fernando Santana (recent Silver Medal winner at the Austrian Openwater Championships), and, of course, Mr. and Mrs. Pemulis of GWMD fame.

With Helga in good hands, our heroes jumped into the beautiful turquoise crystalline waters of the false lake. You may have previously read that the water looks gross but that was fake news it turns out because the water was glorious. I'm sure you could have drank from it (before all those gross swimmers contaminated it over the course of 1+ hour, that is) as it was so clean. Because of the sandy bottom and the hot mid-day sun, the water appeared as an azure-tinted lagoon that you would more likely find in Aruba or Jamaica (ooo I wanna take ya to Bermuda, Bahama, come on pretty Mama) and on this fine day of late-Spring heat, jumping into the inviting waters was a beautiful reprieve before the action got under way.

Before there was any time to think in any detail about the race ahead, the proverbial gun went off (I think it was just a countdown over the loud-speaker actually) and the race was under way. I can't speak for Joelle (she is free to write her own account of said events whenever she so chooses) but Pemulis had a simple strategy for this more-or-less "out and back" event (NB: the route was basically a highly distorted oblong and at the half-way point (where you've kind of done the "out" and a tiny bit "over") you get out of the water for just a few seconds and run through a chip-time catcher so they can get your half-way time and to make sure that no yahoos out there can cheat the system) where on the "out" portion he would just swim easy to make sure the distance would be doable (man that out portion was LONG and seemed like it would never ever ever ever ever ever ever [etc x 10] end) and then on the way back try to go "fast" (as much as Pemulis could ever swim "fast"). The strategy worked out pretty nicely. Interestingly enough, however, his out time turned out to be almost identical to his "back" time. But there are many confounding variables here such as being able to swim in a straight line and if the half-way point is really at the half-way point, etc. But anyways, swimming out was a harrowing undertaking and mentally was just exhausting both because it was just soooooo long and you knew that whatever you were doing then you had to do again once you finally got to that dreamed-of half-way point (so in other words completely different from any other half-way point in any other race).

Some highlights:

- The number of participants was pretty close to being absolutely ideal. In the Vizille Aquathlon of 2012 there were I think at most 50 competitors and they were mainly real swimmers. This meant that for people like Pemulis you were kind of our there on your own for 4 km of swimming which if anyone doesn't already know is a really long way and there's no one to draft off of and you wonder if you're going the wrong way or if the race has long-ago ended. Conversely, in a big triathlon with more than a thousand people there are just too many people and you get slowed down or bashed up or both. This race had a good number of people distributed amongst different abilities and you had room to swim but also people to draft off of.

- Sighting was very nice due to a couple of factors: (1) the route was basically swimming around the whole rectangle of the lake and so on the way out you were along one bank of the water and on the way back you were along the other one. You therefore always knew where you were with respect to the intended race route; and (2) there was an underwater rope for connecting buoys for rowing races that ran parallel to the banks of the lake the entire way both out and back. This was perfect for sighting because you could just follow that rope by looking down as you were swimming and didn't have to waste much energy lifting your head up out of the water and making sure that the big turning buoy in the distance was still in your sites (at least you didn't have to that often).

- Even though the half-way point water exit only lasts a few moments having that brief rest for your arms was extremely helpful. I felt a lot more fresh as I started swimming back home after briefly exiting the water. Further, they had a table with cups of water which I hadn't expected and which was also obviously quite useful.

The Results

In the end we did OK. First, our results for the 3.86 km swim from Ironman Kalmar in 2012: Joelle = 1:10:58, Pemulis = 1:10:53 (pretty crazy how close we came out of the water, eh? there were more than 1500 people in that event and everyone looks the exact same in a wetsuit and swimcap). And before showing our results from last-last weekend, don't forget a couple of factors: (1) Joelle has gone swimming maybe twice this entire year while I [Pemulis, in case it wasn't abundantly obvious] have gone probably 50 times or more; (2) you can in theory try a little harder in a swim-only race because you don't have to save any energy for any small follow-up events like for example a 180 km bike ride or a marathon; (3) this race was 4 km rather than the IM's "3.86" so it was an extra 140 m; and (4) with way fewer swimmers you probably get less of a "drafting/whirlpool" effect and thus theoretically might end up slower for the same amount of effort. Without further ado: Joelle = 1:14:53, Pemulis = 1:10:41. Not bad! Joelle was one of the top finishers in her age category having swam less than a handful of times since having a baby and Pemulis beat his IM time by 12 seconds while swimming an extra 140 m. Fun times had by all, in other words.

What's next

After a successful openwater swim the blog heroes continued their training with some exhaustion-inducing workouts on the bike and in their running sneakers this past weekend. Time will tell whether their bodies will make it to the other side fully intact...

June Fish

Don't look now but there's something new on the GWMD! We might have missed some key events so far in 2017 but we're at least here now to give you the highly anticipated preview of tomorrow's Oberschleißheim 4 km swim race! This one promises to be a doozy. You'll no doubt have memories of the world-famous Oktoberfestlauf which has been featured more than once I'm sure here on this particular site. Pemulis and Joelle have been multi-year participants and have even both made visits to the associated podium and partaken in Erdinger Weißbier post-race refreshment more than twice. Well, if you're at all familiar with that race and its environs then you will quickly become acclimated to the setup and everything of tomorrow's Langstrecken Schwimmen München because they share the same venue! Whereas the Oktoberfestlauf is a running race that has participants running around the Olympic Rowing lake, the Langstrecken Schwimmen München is a swimming race where we swim right through it! That's right, that disgusting water that you look at as you're huffing and puffing on your second loop of the Oktoberfest run and briefly thinking "I'm so tired and sweaty and boiling hot and I would just love to jump in that (at first) inviting-looking water" and then you quickly realize it looks kind of pretty dirty and you change your mind and finish the race and just drown yourself in Erdinger Alkoholfrei instead. Yes, that's the water we'll be swimming in tomorrow. And it turns out that's all I have to say about tomorrow's swim festivities and Helga has yet to wake up from her nap so you might be in for a treat and have the option to read about other topics that will be featured just below...

What else is new around here, you ask? Let's see... Pemulis, Joelle, and Helga will finally be moving into their new place in about 1.5 months time. The new neighbourhood doesn't seem to have much to offer compared to Haidhausen (their current haunt) and the home itself unfortunately clearly requires a lot of work but hopefully it will all work out. Before the big move, however, this here protagonist-family is shortly on their way (again) to... Italy! But this time they won't be going to the fake Italy where people speak German with Austrian accents; instead, they are heading to the real Italy where people sit around in the sun, eat pasta and cheese, drink wine and espresso, and hopefully have kind older Italian ladies taking care of their children. The Pemulis family will leave by car from München for 5 sun-filled days at the end of June in the beautiful wine (and various other Italian food/drink products) region of Piemonte. They will be guests at a real live functioning farm (so novel since they've never stayed on a farm before) and they will partake in meals featuring some of the finest foods to ever grace God's Green Earth. Following this, they will travel some 40 minutes west to the town of La Morra where they will stay at a winery for a couple of nights. But this isn't just any winery. This is the very same one at which Joelle spent some unforgettable nights 15 years ago as a spoiled vacationing camp counsellor away from the Swiss rich-kids sleep-over-camp. Exciting times await. Finally, they will decamp from Piemonte and head north back towards Switzerland/France where they will meet up with Pemulis's sister Claudia (I guess that will be her alter-ego here) and Claudia's husband Jim [?]. There they will stay in a rented Chalet just outside of Chamonix featuring world-renowned views of the epic Mont Blanc. It will be a trip for the ages! (they hope)...

And now it looks like there's even time for an Ironman training update. Status? If we're following the DEFCON graduated levels of readiness scale then I would venture to estimate that we're sitting around a DEFCON 2 level (remember that DEFCON 5 is full-on nuclear war-level readiness). The big swim [see supra, para. 1] tomorrow should be good for assessing the swim DEFCON level and we don't need any particular events/tests/whatever to assess that both the biking and running need a lot of work still. However, things could be worse! We have been biking and running and though it would be nice if we could have done more than we have done, I'd say things are more-or-less acceptable at this point. But don't be holding your breath for any breakthrough performances, please.

Und... It's time to wake up Helga! Peace.

post-script: here's a picture from January (her hair is way longer now...)

The Giro Update Nobody Asked For

OK, so Woods isn't going to win the Giro in his debut grand tour. But boy oh boy is this race delivering. It's almost more than enough to make me want to take the next two weeks off of work, fly down to Florence, and follow the rest of the race. I guess I won't though. Yesterday was something else. After Quintana had attacked on the Blockhaus climb and taken the race leader's pink jersey just before the rest day, everyone knew that his 30 second lead over 3rd-place time-trial-specialist Tom Dumoulin wasn't safe. The only question was how much time Quintana might lose to Dumoulin in yesterday's time trial and therefore how much work he'd have to do in the mountains to get it back. Wowzers, though: I don't think anyone expected Quintana to lose THREE minutes (well, 2:53 to be exact). Dumoulin had hoped that he might be able to take a minute. He now leads the race, ahead of Quintana by 2:23. Interestingly, that puts 2 Dutchmen in the top 3 (with Bauke Mollema sitting in 3rd 2:38 back). The exciting thing about Dumoulin is that he is a much bigger guy than Quintana and hasn't traditionally been known as a mountain stage guy. He was leading the Vuelta a couple years back for a while on the strength of his TTs and doing OK in the mountains but then when the altitude really pushed up he faded into oblivion. He's now a real GC threat though and had been working on his climbing and on putting his body into the right shape for maybe winning. I think he lost something like 5 kg since last season and even told the media he was worried about how his TT would suffer. Well, worry no more! Dumoulin easily won the TT stage yesterday with 2nd place finisher Geraint Thomas 49 seconds back. If Dumoulin can survive the mountain stage today that will be his first test passed. But then the final week finishes in the treacherous Dollomiten... time will tell.

Woods didn't have a TT that exactly set the world on fire. He finished 144th of 190, 8 minutes slower than Dumoulin. That puts him in 22nd place in the GC (not so bad actually), nearly 16 minutes back. This is nothing too surprising of course, but too bad for Cannondale as their main GC guy Davide Formolo also had a pretty lackluster TT and now sits in 13th over 6 minutes back. The good news here, though, is that since Woods is no longer a GC threat, he will be free to go for a stage win. And today's stage was designed for a breakaway to succeed. A hilly mountain stage with many complicated descents, it will be impossible for any team to control a break (nor would they want to). Could Woods win a grand tour stage today? Doubtful, but maybe! And potentialities are the mother of something...

Giro Season

It is (finally) Giro season. The Giro d'Italia (cycling's greatest grand tour) got under way last Friday and has already provided glimmers of drama and promises of even greater excitement to come. This year marks the 100th edition of the Giro d'Italia making it something extra special, but the race is always something to look forward to for any cycling fan. It is well known to be the most difficult and also the most beautiful of the three grand tours, and this year is certainly no exception. The three week stage race will cover 3605 km, beginning (began rather) in Alghero in Sardinia last week, was in Sicily for the last couple of days, and will now have the riders make their way up all along the Adriatic coast before tackling the northern Italian mountains (where we were a few weeks ago) and finally finishing in Milano. One amazing thing about the Giro this year (and several other years including 2012 which we will discuss in great detail shortly) is that the final stage actually means something. The final stage in the Tour de France, for example, is a "show" stage where the race has already been decided and peloton arrives into the centre of Paris with the winner getting to triumphantly take a few victory laps along the Champs Élysées and then there's a completely meaningless sprint at the end for those lame sprinters. This year in Milano the Giro ends with a time trial which could very easily end up deciding the race on the final day.

The Giro isn't just the best race because it's the most difficult and the most exciting, with more challenging climbs and more mountain-top finishes than the other races (and the aforementioned "real" final stage). Its history is long and rich, but most interesting to many of the readers of GWMD, I presume, might be the Giro's very recent history: 2012, to be exact. Five long years ago when Pemulis and Joelle had recently arrived in one of the meccas of cycling smack-dab (I think people say that) in the middle of the Alps in Grenoble, and had ridden their first ever Alpine climbs up to (e.g.) Lans en Vercors, et al., Ryder Hesjedal became the first ever Canadian to win a grand tour and he did it in style. For the last several Tours de France, the winner has been essentially clear from the very first week, making for a kind of boring experience. Hesjedal won the Giro d'Italia in 2012 on the very last day in a time trial where he moved from 2nd place, 31 seconds (!!) behind Joaquin Rodriguez, into the lead, ultimately finishing 16 seconds ahead of Rodriguez. What an exciting stage and finish to three grueling weeks of racing! And it was insanity going into that final stage as well. Everyone knew that Hesjedal was a good time-trialer (including Rodriguez) but no one could pull away from him in the 2nd and 3rd last stages of the tour -- both summit finishes. Pulling together some very recent and very sad history related to the Giro, Hesjedal worked hard together with Michele Scarponi -- the 2011 winner of the Giro -- on the stage 20 ultimate climb up the Stelvio, eventually completing the stage within a couple of seconds of each other to keep them both within the top 3 positions of the general classification. Without Scarponi -- who would go on to finish fourth overall that year -- Hesjedal would not have been in striking distance for the final time trial, and would very likely have never won and continued out his career widely unknown in his home country. Tragically, just before this year's Giro, Scarponi was struck by a vehicle and killed near his home town in southern Italy while on a training ride. The organizers of this year's Giro have dedicated the Mortirolo climb to the memory of Scarponi and his legacy and history with the race. Hesjedal showed up for the unveiling of the race and paid great tribute to his one-time adversary, mentor, and partner of convenience.

This year, with Hesjedal now retired, the Giro still retains all of the excitement of previous years. But it's of course always nice to have someone to cheer for. The superstars (Quintana, Nibali, ...) are expected to win and seeing them run away with the race (like Froome in the TdF basically as far back as anyone can remember these days) contributes nothing to the soul seeking that excitement of an underdog giving everything he has to somehow eke out a victory. Choosing someone at random to be your hope might be a strategy but you need some kind of connection to really get into the race and actually feel the highs and lows as he succeeds or fails. With Hesjedal, we had the first Canadian to ever win a grand tour cycling race. Now that he has won, maybe we'll need something even deeper? Enter Michael Woods...

Michael Woods is one of two Canadians racing in the Giro this year. The other is 40-year-old Svein Tuft who has no aspirations to win but who is a bit of a hero for us getting on in age as he is still successfully supporting his team in a grand tour and is even older than me. Tuft is a domestique (basically, he helps the main guy on his team win) and so while I admire him and hope he does well for his team, he can't be the guy you "cheer" for as the general classification just isn't what he's there for. Woods, on the other hand, might be...

Woods is 30 years old and is racing in his first ever grand tour. He might have raced last year but was dealing with injury problems. One of the super cool things about him and his past is that he only started bike racing five years ago when he was 25! Woods started out as a middle-distance runner and was hailed as a future Canadian track star. The Ottawa native had a world ranking in the mile distance in the top 50 and was a "sure bet" as a future Canadian Olympic star. He won Gold in the 1500m at the 2005 Pan American Junior Athletics Championships but raced his last running race in 2007 due to a recurring foot injury. Despite multiple surgeries to try to correct the problem, he had to quit altogether and for about four years after that he worked regular jobs around Ottawa trying to figure out what he would do in life. His competitive spirit hadn't diminished, however, and in 2011 he borrowed his dad's bike to enter some local cycling races. He stood out and soon found a spot on the Canadian national team in 2012. He went through the expected trials and tribulations of finding a team that would sign him and then just last year was picked up by pro-team Cannondale-Drapac. Interesting historical side-note: before Ryder Hesjedal retired last year he raced one year with Trek Factory Racing but prior to that had spent most of his world tour career (including his much-decorated 2012 campaign) with Garmin which a couple of years ago merged with Cannondale and kept Garmin's race director. In effect, Woods is now racing for the same team that Hesjedal was on when he won the Giro in 2012.

Woods was set to make his grand tour debut in last year's Giro but was involved in a fairly serious crash at the spring classic Liège-Bastogne-Liège. His injuries were bad enough to keep him away from any racing for two months. This year he has gotten off to a good start though. He finished 11th in the Flèche Wallonne classic, 9th (instead of crashing out like last time) in L-B-L, and 2nd in the Gran Premio Miguel Indurain. Yesterday (stage 6 of the Giro), he finished in 5th, at the head of the main group of GC contenders which includes Bob Jungels, Adam Yates, Bauke Mollema, Geraint Thomas, Nairo Quintana, Vincenzo Nibali, Tom Dumoulin, and Steven Kruijswijk (et al). After six stages he sits in 21st place overall, 1m27s behind current race leader Bob Jungels. In the end, he may have to work to support his teammate Davide Formolo who is in 13th place, tied with essentially all of the other GC hopefuls at 10s back. But one never knows what might happen in this race...