The train ride in had been a bit stressful, but Amsterdam quickly helped us put that in the back of our heads. When we got off the train, it was a nice day out; the sun was shining, there was only a gentle breeze and the temperature was just right. Looking around, we saw mostly people our age. Even better: there wasn’t a toddler or little kid in sight. Catching a more mindful breath of air, we remembered why.
We stayed at the Eden Hotel, which was pretty fantastic as a centric starting point to go around Amsterdam. Everything was close, and the glorious buffet breakfast gave us plenty of energy to walk to all sorts of places. There was one minor annoyance, that affected Kelly much more than me; our room was the first room on the very first floor, so we were close to the elevator and its engine room. A high-pitched screeching noise seeped the walls and into our room non-stop. However, the noise didn’t vary on volume or tone. That might make you wonder why I’m sharing this strange detail, but we spent many hours talking about how to fade a sound into the background of the curtain of noises that feed into our ears. While on the subject, we somehow deviated into spiritual chat about bodies being vessels of our true selves, and all sorts of really deep stuff that there’s no way I’m blogging about them. What’s important is that some of my favorite moments of our entire trip took place in our hotel room in Amsterdam; reinforcing my beliefs that it’s not where or why that matters most, but who.
On the note of being shmoopy and romantic, I must say that I found Amsterdam much more romantic than Paris -the City of Love. You know, having been to both those places now, I don’t feel entitled to saying snobby things like this, but I think it’s worth explaining. In Paris, the fear of a gypsy stealing your soul, the masses of people everywhere, the shitty traffic and the sheer smell of piss everywhere, make it a bit difficult to feel all the love. We certainly tried, having candle-light dinners and making out smooching at the Eiffel Tower for hours.
Amsterdam’s vibe of “be and let be” was much more conducive to romance for us. Walking everywhere hand in hand or hugged together wasnot a problem; there weren’t dozens of people trying to rush past you. We felt like sitting by a canal and let our feet dangle together; no one gave us a dirty look, tried to sell us a souvenir or came to sit right next to along with fifty other people crammed in a river bank. Not even! It was easy to feel like it was just the two of us.
We rode bikes and it was great. Although it was with a tour company, it was probably for the best. There are so many bike paths that you could get lost without a guide! Mike’s countryside bike tour was a ton of fun. We went from being downtown and an actual part of bike traffic (they really are everywhere!) to the countryside in less than 20 minutes. Suddenly, farms, lakes and windmills are all you can see. The tour took 4 hours, and it taught us a bit about Amsterdam, Holland and The Netherlands (not the same thing!), cheese (a cheese farm was the lunch stop of the tour) and those crazy and fun-loving dutch people.
We did go by the red light district. A quick walk-by of De Wallen gave us enough to talk about back home: the professionals are definitely better looking than any we’d ever seen before in real life and we saw a satisfied customer paying and saying goodbye.
Out of all cities, Amsterdam was my favorite. It felt like a little big city, with tons of things to see and do. There is a lot of interesting and entertaining history to it. There are weirdos around, lots of them. It’s easy to get around, but big enough that you need a map to know how to get somewhere. We liked that talking to the locals was super easy, because everyone spoke perfect English. But what I liked the most had to do with the same topic as our hotel room chats: noise. Or rather, the lack of it. Partly because most people are on super comfortable and silent bicycles, and because the few cars that there are, are not ridiculous SUVs, being in the middle of the city felt nothing like it to our ears. Such a nice feeling, being able to talk to the person next to you without having to yell or get a mouthful of smog.
To summarize: I’d go back to Amsterdam. One thing’s for sure: don’t take your kids there, I wouldn’t!
Time for part deux of our report, when we boarded a train in London, somehow traveled in a Chunnel (in a Tunnel under the Channel) and ended up in France.
There were several little tunnels on the way, so we weren’t sure about when exactly we had made into France. We didn’t see any signs, there wasn’t a greeting played and we certainly didn’t smell baguettes or armpits -yet. Clever enough to figure it out, we knew we were in the old Gaul when we saw that cars were driving on the right-hand side of the road.
After the first few footsteps in Gare du Nord, I knew our vacation’s time for adventure had come. Trying to hide my “holy shit, I don’t remember any French” face, I guided us to where all the taxis were hovering. I flagged one down, and the first words that came out of my mouth were not perfect French. Far from that, they weren’t even in broken French! It probably would have been excusable if I’d gave it a shot in Spanish/French, but nope. I might as well have been wearing a Hawaiian short sleeve button-up shirt, because this was me: “Excuse me, Do you speak English?”.
Luckily, the cabbie said “Yes” and we managed to get to our hotel, giggling the whole way there because we just had a small preview of what our next 3 days were going to be like.
We stayed at the Hotel Eiffel Capitol Paris, a pretty modest little place that made up for its lack of modern amenities by its service, charm and above all: location. We were three blocks away from the Eiffel Tower, which we went and saw right after we put our suitcases away. And we saw it again, and again and again.
Time for the list!
Unlike England, Paris was difficult to get around in. Sure, it was partly because everything seems to be named the same: Take two spoonfuls of maple syrup, hold your breath, and all the subway stops end up sounding the same.
In addition to the language barrier, the subway is not entirely a subway. There is a combination of underground trams, above-ground trains and inter-city long-distance trains that make it worthwhile to double-check what train you’re getting on. Fortunately, we didn’t end up taking a train to anywhere we didn’t want to go, but we did sit on a train that didn’t move for 5 minutes until an inspector came by to politely ask us to disembark, since we had arrived to the end of the line for the day, since the rest of the route was under construction.
Paris was the place where we wanted to be for our first anniversary of married life. In fact, that’s why we planned our trip! The other cities, all the other stuff… that’s just filler. Really awesome, memorable filler.
The Eiffel tower is great. We did many things around it, as it meant something for Kelly and I before we even got there (and now it means even more).
We took the elevator to the very top (reservations are the way to go!, we waited 5 minutes with a dozen people unlike the poor fools that were in line for hours with hundreds of others), took pictures and marveled at how vast and humongous Paris is.
On one evening, we decided to go have an dinner appetizer on the fields by the tower and wait until the sun set and the tower is lit up.
It turns out that this is a very popular thing to do, even amongst Parisians. Right next to us was a group of about six young adults that were not only obviously locals, but painfully superior in their partying ways: They had coolers full of hard alcohol, mixers, champagne, wine and beer. Oh, wait, they’re locals, so don’t forget to include the cigarettes that they all smoke like it’s the age before knowing that they’re cancer sticks. Anyway, these guys were pretty loud and fun to watch. We debated befriending them, but we had enough for ourselves with our modest plate of cured meats and a little wine bottle.
Besides the Eiffel Tower reservations, we didn’t have much planned. We figured we’d play it by ear, and that’s how we ended up going to the Louvre on the day that it was closed. Oh well, we still got to walk around a lot.
Since the subway was more trouble than it seemed to be worth to us, we ended up walking around a lot. This yielded a much richer experience in my opinion, there’s no way we would have walked by what seemed like an abandoned public showers underground plaza – and was now being used instead as a gigantic urinal that you could smell from a block away.
One of the most picturesque walks we did was from the top of the Avenue des Champs Élysées to the Arc de Triomphe. Walking past famous shops, seeing people ranging from dressed up model wannabes to the stereotypical fat tourist, being almost run over by someone on a Vespa or trying to take a picture without a huge tour bus in it, we could have spent all day just hanging out there and not getting bored.
Eating in Paris was pretty fun. Most of the fun comes from not knowing what something on the menu means and ordering it anyway by pointing a finger to it.
However, most restaurants cater pretty well to foreigners, despite the preconception that the French will treat you like a second class human if you don’t parler le français. Once you understand that in Europe, waiters are laid back and you have to be assertive, the whole feeling of “service sucks” goes out the window. I have no complaints about the way we were treated, au contraire.
While on the subject of food, I do have to say: The French know how to make fries, but they don’t know how to eat them. Mayonnaise is not complimentary at all!
The gypsies are present in Paris, but they share their annoying ways with trinket salesmen with some sort of African origin. The gypsies hustle with their petitions just like in London, but the African tchotchke slingers are all over the place with tiny Eiffel Towers, magnets, t-shirts and whatever else one could imagine would be a good souvenir. They are all ready to take off in a split second, with all their goods on a blanket that transforms into a bag with a draw string.
We saw this in action a lot by the Eiffel Tower, where the way of the black market (ouch, no pun intended) is to whistle when a cop is near. Suddenly, you see a bunch of thin and dark-skinned men running in one direction, and they’re all smiling and laughing because they know they could run two marathons before a pansy cop in full uniform would catch them.
Our visit to France went pretty smoothly, except for the very last hours. We boarded our train to our next destination, settled into our seats and we were away! Relaxing and looking forward to the rest of our trip, we weren’t expecting the bucket of ice-cold water that was coming our way.
The train captain came by asking for tickets, we handed him our passes. He told us that there was a problem, and that we hadn’t gotten our pass validated right before boarding, and we were going to have to pay a fine of €150 because we were missing a stamp. He gave us a shake of his head, literally asked us: “Have you not read the tickets’ instructions?”, told us to get our stuff together and that he’d be back to see what could be done.
Freaking out because that was a lot of money, we read and re-read the train pass booklets. He was right, we apparently needed to check-in before we used the pass on Continental Europe (this train pass didn’t count for the Chunnel trip, but was our transportation for everything else). It would have taken us less than 5 minutes to get it validated, but we were already miles away from Paris.
After about 10 minutes of panic, Captain MeanPants showed up again. He told us that he’d decided to waive the fine and proceeded to stamp our passes without much problem. Although relieved that we didn’t have to spend a ton of money to cover up for a small oversight, we couldn’t help but wonder why he had to be so rude about it all. Sure, we could have paid attention to every single word on the tickets, but if he had the power and ability to make it all work out with a simple little stamp, we only had one conclusion to draw from this experience: he was a dick because he could, and also, because he’s French.
We certainly look back into our time in Paris with much fondness, despite the small hiccups. The many wonderful memories will definitely outlast the bitter time on the train. Even so, we have even gotten to the point where we can laugh about it all, and that’s when you know that not even a snotty train captain can ruin traveling with your better half.
Better late than never! Our trip to Europe this past summer was tons of fun. It’s embarrassing that it’s taken me this long to write about it. So anyway, here it goes. Part one of four is about England, as you might have already figured out.
London:
We stayed at the Waterloo Novotel. It was a very nice hotel, just a couple of blocks away from the subway (aka, the Tube) and also from the Parliament. The only bad thing about the hotel was that they didn’t include breakfast. I don’t think pegging the hotel for the rude Italian tourists would be fair, so I’ll leave that for later.
England was definitely the easiest city to get around in that we visited. Perhaps this was because the maps we got were well designed, clear and understandable. Perhaps it had to do with everything being in English, and the lack of a language barrier. It definitely helped that the Tube was straight forward and not a spaghetti-like mess of lines and stops.
It only rained once on us! We were expecting to experience the famous London crappy weather, but we saw the sunshine more than half the time we were there. However, when it did rain, it was pretty awesome, and we walked around under an umbrella in the early evening as we tried to find a place to eat. The day after the rainy night, there were puddles everywhere.
For anyone traveling to London for more than a couple of days, look into the London Pass. We had one, and it helped us figure out what we wanted to see, and there are plenty of discounts in there that in the end, the Pass ends up paying for itself. We even got a free canal trip out of it, which saved us time and gave us a unique view that we probably wouldn’t have sprung for if we had to pay for it.
There are tons of tourists everywhere! Specially with the “nice” weather, walking around the major attractions (the Big Ben, for example) was pretty hectic. People pile up trying to get a picture, gypsies bring on the hustle and try to get you to sign a petition of some sort(which I think is a distraction to get into your pockets, bags and purses). On one hand, it’s a pretty colorful experience because there are people from all over the world, but it can be a bit stressful if you’re not ready for it. Luckily, we didn’t have any bad experiences (or got robbed by a gypsy).
On one day, we walked several miles and tried squeezing in as many sights as we could. Our feet got pretty tired early in the day, but we kept on keeping on.
An early morning, we took a trip to Abbey Road, which turned out to be lots of fun and costing us a trip on the subway and nothing else. We crossed Abbey Road on the same intersection as the famous Beatles album cover, and got tons of pictures.
Kelly told her mom that we’d be there, and since it was early morning, it was only about 10pm in Reno. Kelly’s mom happened to be looking at the Abbey Road webcam, and saw us goofing off live over the internet! She says that she could hear us laughing and yelling “Go over there!” and counting down for pictures and the like. Good times!
As many will tell you, the most forgettable thing about London is the food. Our best meal was at an Indian restaurant! We did experience “pub food” at a very friendly little joint near the hotel.
If I had to talk about our culinary experience in England, it’d be pretty simple to explain: Fish & Chips, Indian food and above all: beer.
Liverpool:
We took a day trip to Liverpool because we wanted to do the Magical Mystery Tour. Kelly is a huge Beatles fan and looked forward to this for a long time. I like them too, but I pale in comparison to Kelly’s knowledge of their history and music.
The trip started by taking a train from London to Liverpool. It was my first time on a train, ever!
From the Liverpool train station, we walked all the way to the Beatles Story museum. It’s a self-guided audio tour that takes a good hour or more to go through. I learned lots of new Beatles trivia, got to hear some music from before the band was official and enjoy my wife being a happy fangirl.
After the museum, we got on with the actual tour. The bus was pretty goofy, very old fashioned and smelled like cabbage. Ok, maybe it didn’t smell like cabbage, but it wasn’t a fresh smell either.
The bus took us around to many places in Liverpool, like the houses were each of the Beatles were born or raised. Everytime we went to a place that had a song named after it, they played the song through the bus; for example: “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields”. Pretty fun!
We’d stop at most of the places and take pictures. A total act of herding tourists, but we enjoyed playing our part and we absolutely got out, took pictures and looked around with big eyes taking it all in.
The tour guide on the bus definitely made this worthwhile. We had to look him up after we got home, so we’re not 100% sure about his name being Neil Brannan. Anyway, he was funny, witty and shared a lot of cool stories about the Beatles. He was even in the movie “In His Life: The John Lennon Story“. Here’s a YouTube clip I found of him giving out the tour: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZFAk8lqrSQ. If you’re going to Liverpool, do this!
Liverpool was a perfect one-day trip. We got in, we did everything we wanted to do and we even had time to spare to hang out downtown. We debated going to Stonehenge and having a day trip for that as well, but it just didn’t happen. No regrets though, Liverpool was definitely worth it and a very cherished memory.
Last weekend was the 7th Annual Reno-Tahoe Odyssey. This is a race I’d done back in 2008 and 2009 (didn’t do it in 2010 because that’s when I trained for a triathlon), so I knew what I was getting myself into… and that’s exactly why I was excited to do this race when I first signed up with my team a few months ago.
When Jason, teammate from the 2008 RTO, reached out to me asking if I wanted to put together a team for this year, I said yes (of course!!), and our team ended up including some classic teammates from before and some new faces – who were also first time RTO runners.
A quick breakdown of how the Odyssey works out:
It’s a 178 mile course, broken down in 36 legs. There are 12 runners per team, which makes each runner run 3 legs. I was runner number 11, which meant I was going to run legs 11, 23 and 35.
Now, there are usually 2 vans per team: on the first van go runners 1 to 6, and on the second van go runners 7 to 12. While one van is out running their legs, the other van is resting (sleeping, eating, going to the bathroom, gambling in a casino). This is repeated until runner 12 runs his last leg (leg 36), and there is much rejoicing afterwards.
The Tater Trots (that’s our team’s name!) started the race at 11:30am on Friday. Since I was on the second van, after cheering at the start line when Jason took off, we had some time to kill. We decided to invest into some quality carbo loading at my favorite pizza place in Reno, Eclipse. We then spent some time decorating the van, and baking some Tater Tots to have as a quick snack on the road. We absolutely needed to have those!
At around 3:45pm, John took off with leg #7, his and our van’s first. John was a last-minute addition to our team, filling in for some last minute drop-outs, but he had just ran a half-marathon, so we knew his legs could stand the challenge. However, his first section of the run wasn’t easy, and when he finished climbing the hill I wondered if he was about to call a cab and tell us all off. I’m happy to report that this did not happen! John instead proceeded to kick ass and very gracefully finish his leg well before his projected time.
Next runner up was Marlaina, who was also a last-minute addition. She is a co-worker, and when I needed to fill in another hole in our roster, I immediately asked her to join us. In fact, when I asked her, she had just run a 50-mile race the previous weekend, and he calves and ankles were all sorts of bruised and sore… after I described the RTO to her, she smiled and said yes! Anyway, she is obviously one tough cookie, and she made a breeze out of her leg. I knew what she was going through, because I was runner #8 when I did the RTO for the first time in 2008. I’ll just say that Marlaina did much better than I did.
After Marlaina, it was Nicolle Morrison’s turn. This was something I was really looking forward to seeing, since Nicolle was a star runner in her youth, and she picked running back up when I invited her and her husband. She even kept a very fun to read blog about it all, here: http://theroguerunner.blogspot.com/
Her first leg started a little abruptly, because we barely made it in time to the exchange point before Marlaina finished her leg, but Nicolle made lemonade out of this. Since she was running along CA-89, it was pretty easy to drive the van to points where we could see her run. It was particularly enjoyable to see her set her sights on a runner ahead, and soon after sailing past the competition. It was only the beginning of the multiple roadkills she was about to rack in.
Mr. Steve James was runner #10, and he went for his run at 5:48pm. Steve is an avid cyclist, and told everyone that he wasn’t going to be a big asset to the team. Whatever, there’s one thing that is certain about Steve: he’s a big sandbagger! See, we had a spreadsheet with everyone’s distances and their estimated pace, and with some very basic math, you can project how long someone is going to take to cover a certain distance. Steve was supposed to run his leg in about 49 minutes. He brought it in after only 41:25!
My turn was next. I was ready and eager. I used my iPhone with the Nike+ GPS App, so you can see some of my run info here: http://nikerunning.nike.com/nikeos/p/nikeplus/en_US/plus/#//runs/detail/408105819/972367474/all/allRuns/. However, the GPS or the watch must have been off by a bit, because my “official” time was 41 minutes, 54 seconds for 5.3 miles, which brought me in at an average of 7:54 minutes/mile, which was a good 20 seconds faster than my target pace. Yay!
My run was pretty awesome. The course was the little bike path that goes from Squaw valley into north Tahoe, which is very scenic and separated from vehicular traffic. Right after the exchange, and no less than a few minutes of me starting my run, I passed two girls. Getting a roadkill is a pretty nice boost, and having two of them is even nicer!
I ended up passing a total of 5 people in my leg, which made me feel pretty damn good about myself. I loved feeling fast yet smooth, and even though I forgot to bring my heart-rate monitor for the race, I was at the top of my comfortable zone, and I maintained that throughout the whole thing without problems. A+ run, would run again.
When I finished my leg came another moment I had been looking forward to a lot. My handoff was to Don Morrison, a good friend of mine of a few years now. Don tells me I’ve influenced him by inspiring him to run, and that it’s because of me that he has discovered something he enjoys.
I’m not sure when, but it was over a year ago, I told him about the Couch-to-5k running plan. He stuck to the plan and has been running since. We’ve done a couple of the Run Amuck mud races together, so I had already gotten to enjoy his company while running, but this RTO was going to be something bigger, something much more difficult and competitive for him, so I had been thinking about this moment for a while… and then, it happened:
I handed off the baton to Don, and he was off! He got to run next to Lake Tahoe, with snow-capped in the distance (which was actually very near, it was cold!). He looked great, specially with his bright running shoes and the fancy reflective safety vest.
As customary with everyone else, we pulled the van over 3 or 4 times along the way of his leg, to cheer him on and hand him water (and take some pictures!). Every time Don swooshed by, I smiled.
After Don’s leg was over, Van 2 took off towards South Lake Tahoe for some food and rest. We almost slept through all the phone calls from Van 1, but we made it to the van exchange point at almost midnight, and we did it all over again!
John climbed all the way to the top of Kingsbury grade, which is one brutal way of waking up from 45 minutes of sleep. Marlaina and Nicolle flew down the other side of Kingsbury grade into the Carson Valley, beating their estimated times by over 10 minutes each. It was amazing. Steve coasted on his leg and into Genoa, where I was waiting for him… inside a Porta-Potty.
I walked out of the dark and cold (but clean!) portable bathroom at around 2:27am. I figured that since I was about to go on my leg, I’d trot on over to the start line… where all of a sudden I saw all of my teammates waiting for me! I had apparently taken a little too long to go pee (but that’s because I did more than just pee) and I just switched it from warm-up trot to cruising speed. Once again, here’s the Nike+ info: http://nikerunning.nike.com/nikeos/p/nikeplus/en_US/plus/#//runs/detail/408105819/1039314567/all/allRuns/. This time, the fancy iPhone app clocked everything in right, and I did indeed run for 6.1 miles in the middle of the night, with an average of 8:47/mile.
Running in the dark is pretty fun. My headlamp gives me a strange goggle-effect, where my eyebrows cast a shadow around the bottom of eyes, and it feels like I’ve got blinders on. Regardless of that small annoyance, it’s a fun time: All you can hear is your own breathing and the constant sound of your footsteps. It’s easy to fall into a trance, a zen meditative state, where all you do is put one foot in front of the other as quickly as possible, and rhythmically take air in, push air out.
The only distractions from this”zone” happen when a team van drives by, or when you catch up to an unsuspecting runner. I passed 5 or 6 people in this leg, and I’m pretty sure I startled at least a couple of them because they were in the trance themselves!
Anyway, this leg ended with a long and smooth uphill that I wasn’t mentally prepared for. I felt very slow going up, but I eventually made it, covered in sweat even though it was probably in the low 40s outside.
After Don ran his leg – which happened to be a 5k, and also happened to be his fastest 5k time ever – we were ready to get some rest. Lucky for us, old teammate Nate has a little farmhouse just 5 minutes away from where we finished, so we headed there to crash on his quiet lot.
Well, that was the plan anyway. What really ended up happening was that Nate cooked some awesome waffles and Steve, John and me talked to him for over an hour while Don, Nicolle and Marlaina slept in the van. When we realized that we had about 45 minutes left before we were going to have to get going, we got in our sleeping bags and snoozed a little bit.
Funny story about Nate: He was originally supposed to run in the RTO with us this year, but had to drop out. His was one of the holes that John and Marlaina filled. I didn’t ask him why he didn’t run the RTO, but I can only assume it had to do with him wanting to be with his baby boy… or the fact that Saturday was his birthday! Yes, the same day that he woke up at 4am to make us waffles and let us sleep on his porch! We were all oblivious about this detail until after the fact, but it just went to show what a class-A gentleman Nate is: he welcomed us, treated us to a delicious and nutritious homecooked breakfast, and went back to sleep when we left. Yowza! Thank you, Nate! I hope you had a great birthday!!
At 7am on Saturday, we were in good old Virginia City, ready to get started with the last 1/6th of the course. The weather was particularly unwelcoming then and there. The cold temperatures from the last 24 hours had now been joined by some pretty strong winds, which definitely made more than a few bones shiver as we waited for Joe Dito, who was running his and his van’s last leg. By the way, Joe has ran in every one of the 7 Reno-Tahoe Odysseys! He’s a super cool guy to know.
Poor John had to run some more hills on his last stretch, but at least he did get to squeeze in some flats and downhills in this one! And once again, Marlaina and Nicolle had a feast with their downhills on Geiger Grade. By the time Steve’s turn came, we were at the very south-east end of town, on the valley floor, and bringing in it. Calculations were starting to happen, it was 8:45 when Steve took off, and if we finished before 11:30am, we’d be done in less than 24 hours, which is a pretty awesome little accomplishment. Steve, me and Don had to nail our runs, and we’d clock in at exactly 24 hours… but we each had some pretty long distances to cover, and we were tired. It was going to be difficult.
My run started off pretty well. There was a girl in front of me setting a pretty mean pace of about 7:45/mile. I figured I’d hang on and just try to keep up with her, and see if I could push it harder for the last stretch. But my strategy went to hell after about 10 minutes, when my stomach turned into a knot and I felt a combination of a sideache and a few shoryukens. I decided to let the girl go, and slowed down the pace a bit.
My legs were starting to burn too, with a particular focus on my quads. I didn’t want to slow down anymore, so I swallowed up a PowerBar gel…. and while that helped my legs feel better, it didn’t help my stomach situation. When the guys in the van offered me some gatorade, I asked for water instead, because I couldn’t take in anything else with any kind of flavor. The water helped, and it was just a matter of pushing through the grossed-out feeling until it went away, or until I was done running.
The run went on for what felt like forever. If it wasn’t for my iPhone telling me every 5 minutes how I was doing, I would have thought I was dragging ass. It turns out, even with all the discomfort, I was doing alright, just a little bit above my projected pace.
When I turned into Lakeside, I knew I was close to done. I had to run up Windy Hill, and then it was literally downhill from there. So, inspired by the HTFU mantra, I pushed it. I climbed Windy Hill with what I felt was a respectable pace, and as soon as I got to a parallel, I turned on the jets and went as fast as I possibly could. I know I was tired, but it definitely felt like I was going faster than 7 min/miles, and that was good enough for me to finish once and for all, and feel proud of my effort.
I ended up running the think in 53 minutes, which put me in at an average of 8:32/mile for my leg 35, and I was (and still am!) OK with that.
Don took it from there, and he had exactly an hour to do his 5.4 mile leg. And that, he did. In fact, he ran it in less than 50 minutes, which brought us in with an official finish time of 23:48:52, which put our team in 23rd place out of 204 teams.
When Don crossed the finish line, I gave him a big hug, and words failed me at the moment and all I said was “good job”. I have since then corrected this and told him how proud I was of him and his performance, and that it meant a lot to me to have him (and his wife!) on my team.
But instead of having sweet emotional conversations, we did what everyone should do after finishing the RTO: We got our team picture taken, we received our medals, we exchanged high-fives, and eventually all went on our separate ways.
Regardless of goals broken, or how many roadkills we got, or how awesome John’s hair looks in all the pictures, there’s one thing that assures me that this year’s RTO was a success: As soon as we finished, everyone started talking about next year.
But what I liked the most had to do with the same topic as our hotel room chats: noise. Or rather, the lack of it. Partly because most people are on super comfortable and silent bicycles, and because the few cars that there are, are not ridiculous SUVs, being in the middle of the city felt nothing like it to our ears. Such a nice feeling, being able to talk to the person next to you without having to yell or get a mouthful of smog.
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