Ironman 70.3

So giving my body and mind some time to recover I decided I can now write about my half-ironman experience.

I should mention now, that I am not exactly sure why I decided to run the Ironman70.3, and my main motivation seemed to be because I wanted to eventually do an ironman. This was all swell for training and to get me in the pool a bit more often. It even sufficed for my 10 minute practice swim in the 13C Lake Zurich. It, however, fell short during the race or more exactly the run, where I couldn't for the life of me figure out why I had signed up in the first place, and how little I cared about being a half-ironman.

So my training was probably sub-optimal. I didn't do as many brick-workouts as I should have to get my muscles used to running directly after biking. I also did not really think enough about nutrition, and how sick my stomach would feel after eating energy bars and gels for 4 hours. Not to say it was completely deficient, I biked better during that race than I ever have before and my half-marathon split was only 4 minutes worse than Lausanne in October.

So before the race I was terrified of the swim. I was certain I was going to (a) drown, (b) get based by fat old women swimming doggy-paddle, (c) exceed the time limit and be kicked off of the course. Accordingly I went swimming a decent amount (2 times a week) and tried to motivate myself in the pool. I really hate swimming so twice a week is already impressive

As far as running and biking went, I just did or tried to do at least something everyday without really thinking about it too much. I did a few hill rides and some faster-paced running work but nothing special. I had run the Zurich marathon in April so I figured my basal training was probably sufficient.

So the race itself was pretty cool. The vibe at expo in Rapperswil was great.

So many people from all over the place who had been planning to do this race at least (probably much longer) than I had. Plus they play music the whole time which makes you feel really special and elite.

We did a test swim in the lake (I didn't I did mine 3 days earlier when it was muuuch colder)

It took almost the whole day before I started to get excited, but by the time the pasta dinner was over and I had eaten 2 bowls of jogurt ice cream-ish stuff, I was excited enough that I couldn't sleep


Race Day
So I woke up relatively late on race day (since I didnt sleep well and decided sleep was more important than waiting around the start for hours), ate some muesli, cake, and drank a coffee. I missed my first train, but I still managed to jump in the water and get to the starting line a few seconds before the start.

The swim itself was great, water temperature fine, lots of slow swimmers. I even passed someone from the womens heat that started 20 minutes earlier. Unfortunately at the very end as I was getting out I had a huge gulp of murky, oily, smelly water from the boat dock (where the exit is) and felt a bit sick from that point on.



The bike was also good, I didnt rush through the transition at all. I felt really good and it was quite fun passing all the hard-core guys with tri-bikes and horrible gear ratios on the hills. All things considered, I rode too quickly and definitely cooked a bit.




So by the time I got off the bike and started running, I was pretty beat. I took a pee-break in the transition area and my leg wouldn't stop shaking. The first kilometer went really well, but then everything sort of fell apart. My stomach didn't feel good at all, and my legs weren't so springy. The more I ran the more I thought about why I was doing this. I didn't really think about giving up, but I promised myself several times that I would never do something like this again. It was just uncomfortably without being a rush. Something was very different about running then (as compared with a marathon), but I can't exactly describe it.



Anyways it was really nice to finish, and I didn't actually feel all that beat up from the race. I think running is much harder on your body than anything else and it was just a half-marathon.



And now I am out looking for my next challenge

Ride to Lake Como

The last week or so the weather really took a turn for the better. Nearly everyday was pleasantly warm and spring was clearly on its way.
So as the weather forecast for Zurich over the weekend was quite dismal, we (Elisabeth, Brett, and I) decided to go for a nice bike ride in Ticino were it was to be sunny and over 60 degrees.
The ride itself was beautiful (judge for yourself), and we kept a pretty decent pace although we stopped quite often.
We arrived in Como at night and the city itself was alive, it really felt like a nice summer's evening with folk just out enjoying the city and lake. We were getting quite hungry at this point so we took the first restaurant we found with a view of the lake where we could enjoy the sunset. The menu had pictures which should have been our first warning, but we went ahead and ordered. The hot food came out in microwave trays, what a crushing disappointment. It didn't taste bad since we were so hungry, but to do something like that while being in Italy is almost sinful.

Biking from Bellinzona to Como

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Beamtime

So real work as a PhD student has finally begun. I had my first beamtime this weekend and it was 8 shifts (64 hours) of experimental time from friday afternoon till monday morning at 7am continuously. Thanks to mostly luck, I had people who would come and make sure things were going well at night so I could get some sleep, but significantly less than normal. We managed to align and measure around 50 bones automatically. While less than we had planned a decent feat. It was also nice to make the first real measurable dent into my project as the first year is now over, so it's time to get grinding.
I have never as fully appreciated the differences between engineering/physics project and real biological projects. With many of the engineering (specifically image processing/analysis) ones, it is nice to be done quickly, but there is lots of room for tweaking, and fixing little bugs later. You can really for the most part write code whenever it pleases you and as long as you work hard enough, it will work out. The biology projects really demand a huge tracks of dedicated time to do experiments and everything has to work perfectly or you could set your research project back years (destroying samples for example, many of the samples are unique or at least several decades in the making)
The setup I had at the Swiss Light Source

Jake Visits

This weekend Jake (a friend from BU) visited me on part of his whirlwind euro-tour. We luckily had great weather to we made it to Uetliberg

Luckily my shirt hid sweat better than his. On sunday we got a railpass and hopped a train to where the mountains looked good, on the way we were advised by some swiss to go to Fafleralp since there was a glacier there we could hike to, and lots of different places to explore and come down. So we took their advice and the site actually turned out to be a UNESCO site.
Fafleralp Hike at EveryTrail

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And on monday we made it to the Zurich Film Fesival and saw an entertaining but perhaps not soo well thought out french-canadian movie about a kid whose life was ruined by pluto's deplanetification. A pretty decent weekend.

Sola DUO

I had heard about Sola DUO from a friend in my running group and he basically kept reiterating how amazing it was, and how really only the craziest of the crazies even attempt it. Naturally I was a little intrigued (It is no real ultramarathon, but a solid leap away from marathon on the crazy scale)
So it is a little tricky to explain. It is a team event with two people and one bike. The team must stay together at all times, and they trade off who rides the bike. I had wanted to do it, but my partner backed out, and I ended up finding someone else in the same pool and we happened to be almost exactly the same strength runner.

The run was basically invented because after running Sola (a hood to coast like relay race around the zurich area) a bunch of guys were like this is way to complicated with the logistics of getting everyone to the right start spot and making sure everyone is one time, and knows who they are handing-off to and picking up from. So they simply decided the event could be done with just 2 people and a bike. Where one person rides and recovers (navigates as well) while the other runs, and they just trade off.

It is a brilliant idea, and it was really a blast. You feel really well connected to the outcome and involved in every detail of the strategy. Plus you see the same people the whole time (basically), and everything gets a bit shaken up at every hill climb. Plus having someone ride next to you the whole time really keeps you motivated, and we ran faster than either of us alone could do a single marathon.

Plus it is fun to run in the middle of nowhere and ungodly hours, the world is so calm and silent, and having people leaving the bars look at you with utter astonishment, and again when the newspaper delivery men see everyone and just stare and cheer you on.

SOLA Duo . 50 miles St. Gallen to Zurich at EveryTrail

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Circling Lake Constance

I had heard about the ride (Bodensee Radmarathon = Lake Constance Bike Marathon) from a friend of mine and it sounded too cool to skip (3 countries, along the shore, 3rd biggest lake in central europe, sweet tshirts), but I waited until I knew how the weather was going to be before I committed to riding 220km. Plus you got a gold medal is you survived the whole thing and finished in under 12 hours.

The ride itself was great, the support every 30-40km was great with plenty of free snacks and drinks and little places to eat lunch. They even had banana flavored energy drink.
The route was relatively flat and avoided traffic areas pretty well, which was nice because around kilometer 200, I was semi-delirious and probably would not have been too safe in a high traffic area.

I also learned that the term radmarathon (biking marathon) cannot be thrown around willy-nilly. It is officially a ride over 200km so my earlier stunt in Emmental at 110km doesnt count (and after doing this, I am thinking that it definitely shouldnt)

Bodensee (Lake Constance) Radmarathon at EveryTrail

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LSG Adventure

So my running group has a Vereinsreise (group trip) every year and this year it was rafting down the Reuss river from Bremgarten to Siggental (just south of where I work). The trip was quite a bit of fun, with almost no effort required. I don't have any pictures and no-one else on the trip has bothered to upload any, but the weather was great, and it was even warm enough (with wind, just barely) to swim. We had a few bruskis on an island, and had a big bbq at the end.

Inferno Half-Marathon

So, thinking I had the hang of this mountain running thing after Belchen was clearly, one of the most horribly wrong thoughts I have ever had.
So I was supposed to go sailing but because of the iffy weather, our plans got cancelled the night before. Not wanting to blow a good saturday I looked at laufkalender.ch and found a pretty good looking half-marathon mountain run, going up some trail near interlaken. I read 2200m of vertical climbing but for some reason it didn't strike me as too big of a number (had it said 7000 feet, I may have been more apprehensive)



It was brutal. The first half was a pretty typical berglauf, with some climbs and some flats, and it was easy to keep moving along. After that it basically just turned into straight up climbing. Easily black-diamond slopes for those skiing-inclined. The air also started to get noticably thinner. My lungs really started cranking/burning (we did get to 9,700ft after all). So basically it was two races, the first was a normal mountain run, and the second was a death-march to the summit.
The weather also was pretty unpleasant (certainly could have been much worse) with heavy cloud cover and a pretty persistent thick misting rain. Although I was soaked anyway with sweat, so it was hard to tell exactly how bad the rain was.
The support, however, was mindblowing. Stations what seemed like every kilometer, with plenty of food, gu, tea, isotonic drink (2 types), and near the end boullion and cola. They even had a new long energy isostar gel, that had solid objects that tasted like oatmeal from birchermuesli, it seemed to work pretty well (my delicious chocolate gu is still in my pack). Plus the freebies included a running waterbottle holder (nice), and the shirt is pretty sweet

Inferno Schilthorn Half-Marathon

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