Luxembourg, year 2

How time flies. I don’t have the feeling of a year having gone by in Europe, and yet so many things have happened. I suppose this means it’s been going well.

So far, the first two weeks of the new year have brought hiking and some good sunsets. I’m glad I didn’t listen to the Luxembourg naysayers. Now for more questing.

Don’t eat chocolate on long runs!

Saturday last week, I took the train to Cologne. Florian and I were going there to run the marathon and half marathon.
Cologne boasts an impressive cathedral and several bridges that cross the Rhine.

In the morning I had to go to the marathon expo to get our materials for the race. Florian would arrive later in the day. It was beautiful weather, and I strolled around, impressed by the liveliness and the easy rhythm of Cologne.

Florian arrived after 6. We had a good walk at dusk, and I was mesmerized by the color of the sky. After a meaty dinner, it was off to bed.

We had breakfast at 8:30 on Sunday, then changed and walked to to start line. The race was to begin near noon.

And so it did. I was concerned with overexerting myself in the first half, and then crashing and burning in the second. The objective was to finish the race. So I put on a pace that was brisk but manageable. If in the half-marathon in June I was pumped up by the drums and the pleasure of running, here I was playing it cooler.

The 21 km mark came, and I was on a very respectable 1:40, a good half-marathon, but 10 minutes slower than my pace in June. Things were looking good. I had spare capacity in the heart and lungs.

I hadn’t even felt the need for food, and I had needed to drink only moderately. For food, I always avoid those glucose packets that many runners and cyclists use. I don’t trust the yo-yo effect from the sugar overload. Instead, I had packed a few squares of dark chocolate.

Around kilometer 28 I noticed that I was feeling a little less comfortable. Manageable still, and still no major pains. But I was starting to lose fluid more quickly, and my mouth was pretty dry. I started then to eat the chocolate. Bad idea! It was difficult to swallow, I wasn’t producing much saliva. It was not until I grabbed some water from one of the refreshment stations that I was able to swallow the remaining chocolate. At this point they had also started to offer food in the refreshment stations, and I grabbed a banana portion.

The kilometers were going by, but I no longer felt I had much spare capacity. Around kilometer 35, I decided to stop and walk a few meters. My legs were feeling the effort. They don’t call it the marathon for nothing! After a bit, I was back on my trot.

I was tempted to quit, but I also knew that I could make it, even if I had to walk the remainder of the way. I had started drinking fluid on all refreshment stations, even a Coke by accident. I ate my remaining chocolate portions, fragments of which would stay in my teeth, and give me an even more haggard look in the race photos.

I stopped to walk two more times, but I was still able to run decently, on autopilot. Crossing kilometer 40 was a relief, but it didn’t bring a jolt of energy or of adrenaline. I had no extra wind left.
I crossed the finish line in a huge sigh, proud of myself, but also wondering why I had put myself through this. Why anyone did.

Even on the walk back to my hotel, I had to take breaks and sit. My legs were spent.
Back in the hotel I met Florian, who had very wisely decided he was undertrained for the marathon, and had run 21km. Our hotel (Hotel Lyskirchen) graciously allowed us to have showers in the sauna area, even though we were already checked out. I vomited a bit, and didn’t feel like eating. The stomach problems lasted only a few hours, and Florian and I enjoyed a nice dinner back in Luxembourg.

I now have new found respect for anyone who finishes a marathon, whatever time they make. All the best for them. But I think I’m not joining the party. The race is too taxing, the preparation too demanding. Recreational running and the occasional race will be fine, as long as it doesn’t go above 21km.

Iceland

This being my first year back in Europe, it remained to be seen if we would manage to make our traditional long hike. We kept exchanging email, and then Guillermo hit the right note – “How about Iceland?”. We quickly settled on the idea. I learned later that Guillermo had simply seen a “Come to Iceland” billboard in Boston. I never think those things work, but there you have it.

We met in Reykjavik in mid-August. JP flew from San Francisco, Frans from Amsterdam, Dmitri and Guillermo from Boston. I took the train to Brussels and flew from there. We met up in the hotel after midnight, and at 2am went out to look for food and animation. The Icelanders turned out to be very welcoming party people. We spent the next day planning, filling the gaps in our gear, and having our last proper dinner for the next few days.

On Sunday we took the bus to Landmannalaugar, the camp where we’d be starting the hike. We were to spend the night there, and only start the walk the following day. It was cold. Colder than any of us expected. We had to bundle up the whole time, which was a sign of things to come.

As we’d admit to each other a few days later, we all thought we were not prepared for these conditions. The day was saved by the natural thermal pool next to camp. We went in around 9, and only came out at about 11, to go straight to bed. A nice thing about being so far up north was that the summer days were long, and nightfall was around 11.

The next morning, the temperature was milder. Cold, but manageable. Things looked up, except for Guillermo, JP and Frans having spent the night in underpowered sleeping bags. We decided that it would be advisable to sleep in huts whenever possible, instead of using our tents.

The fist day of hiking, from Landmannalaugar to Hrafntinnusker, took us over arid terrain with lots of geothermal activity, and the fetid smell of sulphur.

We also became acquainted with snow fields covered in volcanic ash, a curious combination.

The lunar landscapes would be a constant throughout the trip, but you can have many different lunar landscapes.

At lunch time, the wind had picked up, and it was starting to rain. We donned our rain coats and rain pants, and put the rain covers on our backpacks — this was our arrangement most of the time for the next days.

After 12 kilometers of hilly terrain, we arrived in our hut. We had managed to book place for three people only, and since Dmitri and I had the best sleeping bags, we volunteered to spend the night in the tent. But the evening we spent together in the hut, talking and reading and playing chess. Long hours.

The second day started well. It was even sunny, and we decided to climb a hill to get a good panorama.

After the hill, however, we were haunted by intense rain that lasted a couple of hours, and we also came to our first river crossing to be done on foot. It was already cold, so having to stop to take our boots off and put flip-flops on was a nuisance.

After a hard day, we were rewarded with beautiful views, and room in the hut for all of us. An organized hiking group had a cook that had prepared lamb soup, and they were very kind to offer us the remains, which tasted much better than our bags of hiking grub.

On a sad note for the day, the intense rain proved too much for the water protection that Frans and I had set up for our SLR cameras. Frans’s camera got so wet that it became unresponsive for the remainder of the hike. Mine made it by a whisker, and I decided to banish it to the backpack, to benefit from more layers of protection during the day.
From then on, all our photos were taken with point-and-shoots.

The third day was long (15km) and monotonous, although flatter than the previous two.
We walked through landscapes of green grass mixed with black volcanic ash. The day also brought some impressive rivers, two of which we had to cross on foot once again.

We didn’t have a place in the huts that day, but luckily it was much warmer than in Landmannalaugar. I retired to bed at 8, and slept an impressive 12 hours, which I sorely needed. Guillermo and Dmitri stayed up late making new friends.

We were now on our fourth and final day of hiking, which took us through some beautiful scenery. Even though we were tired, we were also happy in the knowledge that we had a place in the hut awaiting us, and that we had made it through another adventure.

Of course, we had to take our traditional BRO photo:

A bit after our last river crossing, we got to the end ouf our hike.

We slept the sleep of the just in bunk beds.

Half marathon

It was bound to happen one day.

In February, Florian and I started running during lunch break on Tuesdays. Maarten would often join us, and we’d run a relaxed 40-50 minutes. One day, Florian told me he had registered for the Luxembourg half-marathon. I thought about it a few minutes, and decided to do the same. We started running in the weekends too, and I even kept the habit when abroad in Italy and Slovakia.

The half marathon was last Saturday. It was a crazy event. There were over 3400 runners for the half marathon alone, and the runners for all races started together, at 7pm. The LuxExpo area was crowded, and Florian and I were not able to find each other before the race.

It drizzled for a few minutes in the beginning, and it was cold for this time of the year, which helped the race.
I was off to a quick start. I kept overtaking people, and the percussion groups along the road pumped me full of energy. I was running below my sprint pace, but not far below.

Maarten had told me he’d be watching from Place Guillaume, around kilometer 16. When I got there, I saw that little more than an hour had passed, and I got excited. I might make a good time! I only time myself very loosely when training, so I didn’t have a good prediction for my time.

The last kilometers were hard. There was a continuous uphill, and the finish line kept teasing me. When I finished, I was ecstatic to find 1:37 in the race timer, which, discounting the delay in getting to the start line, meant roughly 1:33. This was much better than I had ever hoped. I would find out a couple of days later that my net time was 1:31:57.

A while later Florian finished, followed by Maarten. When Florian got to Place Guillaume, Maarten came out from the crowd, reached Florian, and ran the last part of the race with him. A fantastic gesture, and a great conclusion to our running sessions from Tuesdays.

We stayed a while in the finish area, exhausted and excited at the same time. After an hour, we went to a bistro and had a proper dinner, and then we rode the bus home.

All in all, a completely worthwhile experience.

Some recent photos

I’ve been busy lately. Some photos, though.

Bratislava:

Austria:

Luxembourg:

12 km

This weekend I ran a 12km race through the city of Luxembourg. Last race I had been in was a 10km in New York, back in 2007. It was fun to do it again, and I was happy that I felt great, and found a good rhythm.

It was really not a serious race, more of a celebration in the city. Every so often, the race would stop as the runners had to climb up or down stairs. On narrow portions of the track, a pair of friends would be running side by side. Onlookers would cross the path at any point.
But once I got used to that, it was just fine.

I was number 89, out of 308 in my age group. Pretty happy about finishing the race, and finishing in a good way.
89 SILVELA Jaime 36 ESP 1:11:31

Taming my inbox / Getting Things Done

In my last job, at Microsoft, I had some difficulties managing all the many small tasks I was supposed to handle. Having lots of tiny tasks is not what I’m good at, but that’s a different story. In any case, I wanted to cope better, so, I’ll admit, I bought a self-help book: “Getting Things Done” by David Allen.
I found out later that JP had read it and followed a similar methodology, and this was a good motivation for me.

I never finished the book, but I took a lot of good things out of it. I now write all my pending tasks down, all in a single place, so I know I’ll check often. As I go over it, I’ll re-evaluate which are essential tasks, and which are superfluous. I’ll quickly get a sense of how heavily loaded I am at a given time, and adjust accordingly.

Another thing I started doing was to keep my personal email inbox clean. I only want to keep in it the messages I need to reply to. If I don’t need to reply to a message, I’ll file it and get it out of the way.

About a year ago, I decided to try to keep my inbox under 20 messages. At the time it had over 300 messages. After a couple of weekends of work, I achieved my goal, and not only that, I found that having less than 20 messages made it even easier to clean up my remaining messages, so that my inbox stayed at less than 10 for many months.

Then in the late summer of 2010 came the job hunt. The emails back and forth, until I got my offer. Then messages about moving, relocation, benefits, paperwork, apartment hunting, taxes. My inbox was always at over 40, but below 50.

This weekend, I have again achieved an inbox at less than 10 messages, for the first time in over half a year.

Birds and cranes

We’ve had some weeks of wonderful weather in Luxembourg, and in the evenings I feel like stepping out to the terrace. In my neck of town, there is often a bird show at dusk. There is a crane in one of the nearby blocks, on which the birds love to roost. They arrive in flocks and crowd the crane. Every now and then, a flock will go out for a flight around the neighborhood, then come back.
When the days start getting warmer, I’ll sit on the terrace one day, watching, as long as it takes to make sense of things. I think I saw a documentary recently that stated that the purpose of the flock flights in the evenings is unknown.

Running the Ikeathon

What a disgustingly useful weekend.
I’ve been more or less sick since Wednesday. Stomach stuff, bad enough that I left work at 1 on Thursday, and didn’t get back to the office until 12:30 on Friday. Things are getting better slowly, but there went Saturday and Sunday.

Being stuck at home has its benefits. Earlier this week, I received a shipment from IKEA, with a closet and a dresser (I miss the walk-in closets I always had in the US), an extra desk, a table-with-shelves for my under-shelved, under-surfaced kitchen, and an extra book-case. And I got all five items assembled, all without a hitch. Except, I have blisters on my right hand from using the screwdriver.

Being sick, this whole weekend I’ve only managed to eat two yogurts, a few slices of ham, and an omelette. I’d say that’s the most bang for the buck I’ve had, food-wise, in a long long time.

Marooned

Dark days, dark days. Well, no, I exaggerate. Things are moving along in Luxembourg, at home and in the office too. Little by little I’m getting settled.

But this place makes some things really difficult. All shops are closed on Sundays, and close at 6:30 the rest of the days. Reminds me of the UK. How are you supposed to get groceries after work?
Even harder for me, the wifi situation is quite bad. Luxembourg doesn’t ban smoking in bars and restaurants, and the wifi cafes/bistros I’ve seen so far reek of smoke, both new and stale.
There are a couple of organic bistros that are saving my Saturdays, but on Sundays they’re closed, so … I’m writing this post from a McDonald’s. I admit it. I need internet every day.

Ah, Luxembourg, the city that never sleeps.

On a funner side of things, even though I moved two weeks ago to my new apartment, my stuff from Seattle is still in transit. I’m so happy that I brought my sleeping bag from the US! Camping at home is enjoyable, and I recommend it to everyone:

The prospects are good for this week. With any luck, I’m getting home access to the internet tomorrow morning, and my things from Seattle should be here on Friday.

And then I’ll show these Luxembourgers just how things are done.