Following quick on the heels of the wildly popular Oktoberfestlauf 2019 Race Report, here is another race report cleverly disguised as something else due to the title not containing the words "race report". But if you're lucky (and you will be) you will find some further surprise content that might even somehow be tangentially connected to the blog post title. Sort of.
Let's see... a couple of weekends ago it was the Munich Marathon Weekend. The MMW contains, of course, a marathon, but also the "lesser" distances known as the 10 k and the half marathon (or as those in the know call it, simply "the Half"). I was one of the 6891 participants who braved the heat in the Half because I'm just not extreme enough for a full marathon right now (but just wait) and not un-extreme enough to do the 10 k.
I had a goal and I thought it was achievable (it wasn't). The plan was to run at a pace of 4:20 / km for a total time of 1:31:25. I had done the Munich Half 3 times before and on each occasion had improved my time: 1:39:18 (2013); 1:38:10 (2015); and 1:35:17 (2016). It should have been a walk in the park (or a RUN in the park! har har har har har har har har).
Instead, it was a small disaster and right off the bat I could tell that something just wasn't right. I felt weak and tired and a bunch of other stuff and though I'd like to find some particular excuse for what went wrong, I think unfortunately it might just be that I'm getting old and that the glory days are behind me. Hopefully not though. Anyways, I didn't come close to my goal time and instead finished in 1:40:00, making it my worse time of all 4 attempts. Ah well.
In other news, I will be making the great trek across the Atlantic and across the continent in a few weeks' time for another visit to my bohemian friends in Californ-eye-A. I will not make the same mistake that I made last time when I remained for the duration of my stay in the Mississauga of San Francisco and as a result endured a bleak existence for the entirety of my stay. Instead, a colleague and I will cleverly spend our evenings/nights in the big city of SF and only reluctantly commute into the painfulness of Palo Alto for the workdays. Interestingly enough, we will also spend a day and a half with our friends in Bellevue, Washington because... why not, right?
Since there is no other noteworthy news, now is the time for the surprise content that was previously claimed to at least in some faint way have something sort of to do with the blog post title. Well, the high life in some circles refers (I think) to an existence where you're on drugs the whole time and that doesn't sound very healthy for the kids so it's not that. Another meaning might have to do with being a kind of jet-setter, living a lavish lifestyle high above the clouds. It's definitely not that either -- but I guess I could have tied my California trip to that particular definition (I will be flying premium economy, after all). Still yet another similar meaning might be related to experiencing life way up high. And that's what we will do for somewhere around 12 hours or so on June 20th, 2020 (hey that's a lot of twenties!) when both Joelle and Pemulis participate in the Zugspitz Super Trail -- a 64 km jaunt covering nearly 3000 m of elevation change from Leutasch-Weidach in the Austrian alps all the way to Grainau on the other side of the mountain in Germany.
You might ask yourself why someone would do something like this. Unfortunately that's not a question that we asked ourselves before signing up.
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