2024 – the Next Iteration

S.m.a.r.t. goals:

10k of walking per day.

Sauna/pond dip minimum twice per week.

52 non-fiction books.

No sugar.

Weight training every day when at home.

One weekend trip per month.

Swim 20 minutes per day when temperature allows.

20 minutes of French, German, Dutch, and Danish per day.

Ditto piano.

Starting to think it will take a miracle to manage all these lofty goals. Well. So be it. It’s a year that sounds like it belongs in a Science Fiction novel, after all. Nothing is impossible in sci-fi. Engage warp speed (and discipline)!

The Way of the Librarian

One of my ambitions for this year was to read at least 25 books of non-fiction. I figure that exercise works on the brain much like on any other muscle – push it, and it will develop. So, in order to encourage others to follow the Way of the Librarian, here is a short overview of the books I’ve read thus far this year:

Life Leverage (Moore) – a self help book to get more out of life, based on efficiency, a creative mindset and economies of scale. Quite good, actually. 4/5

Consider This (Palahniuk) – Palahniuk is an extraordinary writer, and this book on writing doesn’t disappoint. 4/5

Take a Thru Hike (Mills) – on the joys (and tribulations) of long distance hiking. Not great. 3/5

Awol on the Appalachian Trail (Miller) – a personal account of thru hiking the AT. Not in the same league as A Walk in the Woods, although it covers the same ground. 😉 3/5

Leaders Eat Last (Sinek) – I like his TED talks, but his books are not reaching the same heights, to my mind. Still good. 4/5

The Emperor (Kapuscinski) – fascinating eye witness accounts of life in Ethiopia under the last emperor. 4.5/5

Humankind – a hopeful history (Bregman) – a very good AND uplifting book. Like a more optimistic Jared Diamond. 5/5

Shah of Shahs (Kapuscinski) – similar concept to The Emperor, but set in Persia/Iran, and unfortunately not as complete. 3.5/5

Utopia for realists (Bregman) – a look at ways in which to reinvent society to better cope with our new reality. Thought-provoking. 5/5

A Burglar’s Guide to the City (Manaugh) – written by an architect, I loved the idea of getting into burglars’ mindsets, but unfortunately the author doesn’t quite deliver. 3/5

Walking the Bowl (Lockhart) – an account of street life in Losaka, Zambia. Horrid, and unputdownable. 5/5

Beyond the Beautiful Forevers (Boo) – a very similar take on the slums of Mumbai, and equally engrossing. 5/5

When we cease to understand the world (Labatut) – a somewhat fictionalized account of some of the greatest brains of our time, and their achievements. Fascinating, but would have been better without the fictionalization. 4.5/5

So there it is. An eclectic mixture, but mostly enthralling stuff – to me at least. Hope something on the list speaks to you as well, gentle reader. Oh, and none of this affiliated sales crap – I just put in links in case you wanted to head straight to the book store. I don’t stand to earn a penny from this. Eek!

Time of my life with Corona


It took 26 months of quarantines, lockdowns, social distancing, home schooling, no work, too much work in weird modes, toilet paper hoarding (remember that?), mask wearing, protests, antivaxxers, ever-changing rules and regulations, and three shots of vaccine, but I finally got Covid-19.

First off, I should say that I have been lucky. No fever, no difficulty breathing (which would be horrible), just cold-like symptoms paired with fatigue and occasional heart palpitations (scary, but apparently not lethal), so holding out to get Omicron rather than the earlier variants seems to have been well worth it. (And, to quote a friend, “if it hadn’t been mild after three shots I’d turn antivaxxer myself!”).

I’m also happy to report that the Belgian health system works, overall. I got symptoms Thursday evening, did a self test in the morning and had it confirmed at a local pharmacy within a couple of hours (in the backyard, so as to avoid contaminating other customers), then got an online notification in the afternoon. A quick call to my boss and my family GP, and suddenly I was on sick leave for eleven days.

And so began the time of my life with Corona, confined to my house and garden. The first couple of days I was too tired to do anything much apart from worrying that the disease might get worse. I went from my bed to the sofa and back, pretty much. Since I couldn’t go grocery shopping and didn’t have the energy to cook I subsisted on toast, musli and instant noodle soup – all thankfully available in abundance. Something else to be thankful for: I never lost my sense of smell or taste. Although I will say that eating the same instant noodle soup four days in a row can make you wish you had lost your tastebuds.

After the first few days I did get better, and was desperate to get out, having stared at the walls for too long. However, with the weather being what it is the garden wasn’t an option, as it resembled a rice paddy more than anything (Remember the first spring when life in the time of Corona meant the virus had us all lounging outdoors in glorious sunshine? No such luck.) It was so wet I thought I saw goldfish from the pond make little excursions, but I might have been mistaken. Equally desperate for some sort of physical interaction, I snuck out early mornings to visit the deer that live in an enclosure at the edge of my village. Turns out they enjoy old carrots and broccoli (which was all I had in my fridge by this stage) and I could even hand feed them.

It sounds silly, but those mini-walks made a difference. I can see why prison inmates feed birds – it’s not that the birds represent freedom, it’s the fact that you are doing something for another living being. Not being allowed to see anyone was much harder than I thought it would be. Thank goodness for WhatsApp, Skype, Facetime and Signal, but it’s just not the same. I’m a very tactile person, and not being able to hug my kids was the worst part of it all. As for online chats, the children had school, and in what little time that remained after class and homework they didn’t want to talk for long to their snotty, sleepy dad who wasn’t doing anything fun anyway.

In a way this was a scary premonition of what life in retirement might be like: limited energy, little social contacts, and no real goals or ambitions. That thought alone was enough to keep me working towards my new year’s resolutions as much as I could. I meditated, stretched, played the piano and chess, planned trips and investments, and read three books. But then of course on my second to last day of isolation Putin decided to invade Ukraine (again), so maybe war will break out and I won’t have to worry about retirement at all…

Ponderings

Last year during the lockdown, the garden was my refuge, my oasis, my paradise, and yet there was something missing. And so to mark my 50th circumnavigation of the nearest star (and what a strange thing that is to celebrate) I decided to get myself something that I have dreamt of for as long as I have lived here: a swimming pond.

What is a swimming pond, I hear you ask, obligingly. Well, it isn’t a pool, first of all. You aim to create something that mimics the functioning of a lake to the largest extent possible, so as to have a real, beneficial effect for the local wildlife, that can use it as a habitat (think frogs, newts, water fowl, koi, the kraken) or a drinking hole (everyone else, to feed the kraken). But of course the idea is to be able to enjoy it if you happen to be hooman, too, so how do you combine the two?

The idea is to have a natural, self-cleaning system instead of having to add chlorine or similar. Water is pumped through a combination of aquatic plants and porous lava rock, and so is kept filtered and aerated much the same way a lake or a brook is. The difference is that in order avoid having to swim through too much muck, the plants are kept in a separate compartment inside the pond basin. Excess rain water is stored in two underground cisterns, and on days when heat causes evaporation the system automatically uses that stored water to ensure a stable water level.

So, that was the plan. After a couple of failed attempts I found a company, Ecoworks, that specialises in these types of ponds, and who sounded professional. There were several planning meetings where loads of ideas were tossed about, and eventually out. Instead of islands, Japanese bridges à la Monet, or waterfalls, we decided on a simple oval shape with a round wooden terrace at one end.

(In a way, that is a rather nifty description of life at 50: the more outrageous notions might never have come to fruition, but hopefully what you are left with instead is a harmonious, graceful entity – and if there is an occasional wistful yearning for islands and waterfalls, well, that is life, right?)

And so, after some hiccups (the first measurements were wrong, and the guy who was subcontracted to do the digging bowed out as a result) the project got underway in August. I was mightily stressed out by the sheer volume of work that needed to be done, and frankly concerned about the impact heavy machinery would have on the rest of the garden, but I needn’t have worried – the builders were pros, and friendly to a fault.

As load after load of soil was carted out of the garden and the lawn turned to muck, the project began to take shape; the outsized cisterns were sunk in the ground and covered up, the enormous, made-to-measure rubber liner was somehow wrangled into place, the plant scheme decided upon and executed, and finally this enormous moat was filled with water from the garden hose over a period of four days, and it all worked smoothly, in spite (or because) of last minute adjustments here and there.

The lesson here: if you have a dream project, the time for doing it is NOW. And if it doesn’t scare you, you ain’t dreaming big enough. Also – and this just might be universally applicable – chances are your dream project will look like a big muddy hole in the ground right up until it finally comes together.

And so we arrive at today. Mid October, mid life, a cold day and me with a cold to boot, but I wasn’t going to miss the premiere. If I can live the second half of my life in a way that reflects my pond – straddling the natural world and modern technology, adding beauty and doing good for the local flora and fauna (including my darling children) – then I shall be content. After all, if life is a beach, it is nice to be able to go for a swim, and sometimes you have to splash out on yourself…

Me, a Sugar daddy?

(The one blog post I ever wrote that got thousands of hits was one that alluded to sex (but didn’t really have anything to do with it), so if you have been taken in by the title I apologize. The rest of you, read on:)

A cubist photo?

To say I have a bit of a sweet tooth is akin to saying African elephants are slightly buck-toothed. Not for me any other white substance; no Peruvian powder, no Bolivian blow, but good ole-fashioned simple sugar. Sucrose. I have a sugar habit that would make a hummingbird seem abstemious, and it is the one vice to which I unfailingly return.

I long since quit tobacco, I gave up coffee for over a year, I’ve been vegetarian for two years, and this year I resolved not to have any alcohol (luckily, as various Lockdowns and Quarantines certainly made booze look more attractive!), so I’m no stranger to overcoming vices, and yet Sugar Ray has me on the ropes, pummeling me relentlessly throughout every round. I’ve tried quitting before, but the longest I managed was a month or two.

In fairness, it is by far the easiest addiction to cater to – no restrictions apply, no eyebrows are raised in the supermarket when you load up with knock-off Snickers the way they would be if you were buying cheap plonk – and yet it is an addiction. Substance abuse. What else would you call it if you down a quarter of a kilo of chocolate in one sitting, or a quart of ice cream?

The effects of refined sugar on your body are devastating. It affects your heart, your sleeping patterns, your brain synapses… and that’s before we get to the horrible effect it has on your clothes – they all stop fitting! Suffice to say sweets are unequivocally bad news for you. If you know me a little you know I’m quite interested in living healthily, so this is anathema to me, and yet I haven’t managed to shake off the yoke of Candyland.

Cotton eye candy…

Of course, there are no Betty Ford-clinics for recovering sugar addicts. No posh hangouts with a safe, fructose-free environment for you to adjust to a life without sugar highs. Incidentally, the latter are the reason why refined sugar is so addictive; such grade-A product is incredibly rare in the natural world, so our bodies are pre-programmed to cram as much of it down our gullies as we can on those (originally) precious few occasions when an opportunity presents itself. The reward is a rush of endorphins akin to what you get when falling in love. And this makes sense when you have a once-in-a-lifetime chance to steal honey combs and have to be double-quick gobbling it down before being stung to death by a black cloud of wild bees; it isn’t the least bit helpful when there’s an endless supply of it in your local supermarket (and no killer bees to prevent you from overindulging!).

In fact, resisting said temptation is an age old problem. All indigenous people go out of their way to get that sugar rush. Even the Original Sin was caused by sugar – Eve didn’t go for a starchy root vegetable or a protein-rich Egg of Knowledge in the garden of Eden, no, she and Hubby binged on fruit, which of course employ fructose to make themselves attractive to passers-by for propagation purposes (and information sharing, incidentally). My point is, the struggle is real.

So. I will sugar-coat things no more. Literally. My name is Chris. I’m a recovering sugar addict. It’s been ten hours since my last binge. From here on out I vow to live a life without refined sugar.

Life in the time of Corona

There’s this book called Love in the time of cholera. If you haven’t already read it, do. I won’t tell you what it’s about, but there is a hint in the title. As for me, I had already realized that life hasn’t changed all that much for me in this time of Corona, with the ongoing lockdown and isolation, but an Italian friend’s question got me thinking about why that is the case.

There are several reasons: having no family nearby apart from my children and few close friends – those who are close live far away, if you see what I mean? – has meant that I’m used to spending my time on my own, and/or interacting with people via WhatsApp.

Having worked part time ever since the children were born I have become accustomed to spending a lot of time at home, and I am in the habit of scheduling my time to make sure that I get things done, so even before the lockdown my day would consist of an hour of French, reading, piano, gardening, workout, drawing, etcetera. I have a treadmill in the garage and a basement gym, so I don’t have to leave home for my fitness, and the garden provides plenty of opportunity for outdoor activities and fresh air – if anything I’m grateful that I now have enough time to keep up with the weeds… All this means that my daily routine hasn’t changed – on the contrary, it has meant I was readily equipped with a roadmap for how to navigate lockdown.

As for shopping, I’m happy to do most of it online. Groceries are a bit of a hassle to buy without venturing to the store, but I tend to buy in bulk anyway, so nothing has really changed in that regard, apart from there being fewer people (and goods) in Delhaize. I bake my own bread, so the sudden Belgian interest in yeast and flour is the only real drawback of the hoarding that I have experienced so far.

I do tend to travel a great deal, and that has obviously been interrupted by recent developments, but part of me rejoices in the fact that mass tourism is presently interrupted, and besides, spring has sprung and it’s lovely to behold in the little paradise thatnis my backyard – birds are scoping out nesting sites, sleepy bumble bees have started to appear, and every branch is covered with the first coating of tender green that heralds sun, warmth and growth. There’s wonder and wisdom everywhere if you are willing to look for it.

It might sound depressing, as another Italian friend put it, but I honestly think my lifestyle is quite harmonious. If anything – and I don’t want to sound flippant here; people are dying from Covid-19, after all – I think the world would be a much better place if we practiced lockdown regularly. Let’s close Earth for business a couple of months per year. Let people concentrate on what is really important in life – happiness, relationships, tending to the earth (worshipping it, as the Danes would have it) and all living things instead of chasing wealth and power. It would be a better world for all.

Bookends

As one of my resolutions for this year I set out to read more non-fiction, and I did – even though many of the books in the original pile didn’t get read for some reason. Amongst the books I did read, the following stand out (in the order my eyes happened to fall on them on the bookshelf):

Recovery (Brand): Russell lends his own mix of philosophy and humour to the AA brand of addiction overcoming.

Homo Deus (Harari): a mind-boggling exposé of the past, present and future of the human race.

Prisoners of geography (Marshall): How landscapes determine the political efforts of nations. An eye opener.

Through a window (Goodall): chimps, and what they teach us about humanity.

Hjärnstark (Hansen): On the paramount importance of ensuring a healthy body to accommodate a healthy brain.

Bird by bird (Lamott): lessons in writing and life, drawn from a life of writing.

Thinking, fast and slow (Kahneman): possibly the best book this year; how rational are we, really? Mind: boggled.

Underland (Macfarlane): this man has written several books I wish I had written. This is probably his best.

Touching cloudbase (Currer): not necessarily the best book I’ve read, but essential if you want to learn paragliding.

—-

So there. Something in there for everyone, I hope. For every one of these I have probably acquired two more, so I will keep this challenge for next year, too. Join me, maybe? #onenonfictionbookpermonth

Notox filler

You know that feeling when you arrive at the train station only to see the train you need to be on pull out? That was me this morning. Why? Well, I was slow, due to being dead tired from having been unable to sleep most of the night, and the reason for that was undoubtedly the two large whiskeys and enormous chunk of gingerbread dough that I had late last night.

As I stood there watching the train disappear in the distance it felt like I was watching an illustration of what was happening, as if life itself was showing me a metaphor; everything you put inside your body is either helping it or destroying it, and this was a clear picture of what I had been allowing myself to do more and more of lately. Eat and drink enough poison (sugar and alcohol) and you cannot act surprised when the metaphorical train of life leaves without you.

So. It was decision time. It’s not like I haven’t stopped before. I gave up both sweets and booze in the past, but those were just trials, test balloons if you will. Just like I knew it was time to give up on a carnivorous lifestyle over a year ago, so now the time has come for refined sugar and ethanol.

“Rewarding” ourselves by consuming chemicals that are harmful is hardly intelligent, nor particularly evolved. Humans are happy to munch on sugar as soon as opportunity presents itself, because it is scarce in nature, so evolutionarily speaking it is a good thing, but with the abundance now on offer that instinct works against us. On the other hand we need not be dogs who get treats when behaving correctly.

The same is true for alcohol – several species are known to enjoy a tipple; moose eat fermented fruit, dolphins get high on puffer fish, and so on, but these are rare treats (koalas spend most of their STD-infested lives high as kites on eucalyptus, but we won’t go into that now…) unlike the constant availability of wine, beer, spirits that humans face nowadays.

So no more. Detox is a load of mumbo-jumbo, but notox will be my watchword from now on. As of today I will live without all kinds of refined sugar (juices, marmalade, candy, confection, cakes, ice cream, you name it) and any and all Ju-Ju juice. Having put on four kilos in three months isn’t sustainable, and hopefully this change will bring about an improved situation in this regard as well. I will not bore you with the details, but I will publish updates here below of how my body changes (not to worry, no nudes forthcoming) and together we will see what happens. Only time (and my new, smart scales) will tell.

Update: So that was the starting point. Two weeks in (2/12), and the picture is looking brighter already; total weight down 700g, fat percentage down 0,4%, V-fat down 0,5kg. Less good: muscle loss 0,3kg, but then I haven’t met exercised at all.

On balance

January is at an end, and as always when things are ending there is a bit of apprehension: did I do everything I could? In my case, the first month of the year is always a bit of an indication of how I will fare over the rest of the year in my intentions and ambitions, so how did I do?

I’m still vegetarian, but my attempt to continue to stay off sugar floundered almost instantly in Italy with the discovery of the world’s greatest tiramisu, and it hasn’t improved since. Time to start afresh in February.

I am still plagued by injuries, but indoor biking has worked remarkably well, as has core exercises and stretching, which I hope will eventually see me back on my feet. In total I biked some 250 kilometres in January, which is a good start. I have to ease off on the weights for the time being, so having the bike is a bit of a life line, honestly. 

I learnt a new piece of music on the piano (Bohemian Rhapsody), and I read two non-fiction books (one guide to Stockholm’s culture and history, and another on the failed polar expedition of Andre – the former so-so, the latter spectacular -) but I didn’t study enough French. 

I was in Sweden twice and Italy once, and I kept my diary going, so all in all I’m doing well as far as my new year’s resolutions are concerned. Thus far, at any rate. How are you doing?

2019 according to Socrates, Aristotle and… Hugh Grant.

We’re in for a new year again, and I feel I have found a model that works for me (no, not Claudia Schiffer): Keep your ambitions S.M.A.R.T. and make sure to make the most of time,.

So I’ll stick with the familiar format – develop as a human (intellectually and physically), travel, have new experiences, and set myself new challenges – one trip or challenge per month on average, for a total of twelve.

Trips: I have nothing planned (beyond the fact that I am in Rome celebrating New Year as I’m writing this), but hiking somewhere with my brother, taking the kids on several trips (the first one in February), and paragliding in either Spain or Switzerland (back allowing) are definitely happening.

Challenges: As last year was plagued with injuries, I don’t dare set any fitness goals at the moment. I do hope to improve my fitness, but in what way remains uncertain as of yet. The ideal is a workout per day, of some sort.

In the workplace things are equally up in the air, with my job as a roving reporter having come to an end, and nothing concrete to replace it. I want to keep writing and working with communication one way or another, tho, and I have a few ideas – let’s see what happens.

I already know I want to stay vegetarian for the coming year (having stuck with it for two months I see no reason to change back to a carnivorous diet), and I want to continue to stay off refined sugar, so that’s two. I really want to learn how to paraglide properly, which makes three. Also, limit time spent on social media (more difficult than it sounds?) – four. Keep a diary – five. Read (at least) one non-fictional book per month – six. Improve my piano and French skills, for a total of eight. And linked to all this: use my time more efficiently and wisely.

There is a funny passage from the book About a boy (later filmed with Hugh Grant in the lead) that has stuck with me:

His way of coping with the days was to think of activities as units of time, each unit consisting of about thirty minutes. Whole hours, he found, were more intimidating, and most things one could do in a day took half an hour. Reading the paper, having a bath, tidying the flat, watching Home and Away and Countdown, doing a quick crossword on the toilet, eating breakfast and lunch, going to the local shops… That was nine units of a twenty-unit day (the evenings didn’t count) filled by just the basic necessities. In fact, he had reached a stage where he wondered how his friends could juggle life and a job. Life took up so much time, so how could one work and, say, take a bath on the same day? He suspected that one or two people he knew were making some pretty unsavoury short cuts.

The protagonist of the book is a time waster, but the concept works: divide your day into time slots, and make sure to use them. That will be another challenge.

Why do this? Well, first of all, because, as the poet Herrick wrote in To Virgins, to make much of time:

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,

Old Time is still a-flying

and this same flower that smiles today

tomorrow will be dying.

The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,

the higher he is getting,

the sooner will his race be run,

and nearer he is to setting.

In other words: Our time is limited, and every breath takes us closer to death. That’s grim, as realizations go, but if that doesn’t light a fire under your ass to get things done, nothing will. Also, to quote Aristotle: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.”

Let’s make this a year of excellence.

-W-h-i-t-e- Christmas

One of the first challenges I ever undertook was going without sweets and candy for a year. My parents came up with that one, and the gauntlet was eagerly picked up by me and my sister, since there was pecuniary compensation involved – money which was then spent on an obscene amount of chocolate on January 1st the following year.

That one-day indulgence aside, we did very well to avoid sugar, since there is a great deal of scientific evidence that it is very, very bad for you – and the more refined it is, the worse it is for your organism.

Alas, we didn’t keep this up for more than three years. Now fast forward 35 years and we’re headed towards the end of 2018, a year during which it’s safe to say that I haven’t been abstemious so far (at least not where sugar is concerned), so I will set myself one last challenge for the year:

Starting today and until the end of the year, I will eat no sugar. Not candy, nor cookies, chocolates, cakes, and whatever else is brim-filled with brain-addling white poison. If I can manage that, then I will continue throughout next year. It won’t necessarily make for a Merry Christmas, but it will bring a healthier and Happy New Year!

Gone Green

Notice anything different about me?

A month ago I set out on a journey. I was going somewhere very special. I was going to go vegetarian.

Like all ventures into the unknown it was preceded by trepidation, as I contemplated the prospect of future challenges as-yet vaguely comprehended. This journey didn’t involve me actually moving, but I felt like an intrepid explorer none-the-less – I needed to discover whether some long-held notions about myself really were true: Was I really going to be able to survive on vegetables alone? Would I not wilt just like the greenery I’d be eating? Would not my natural carnivorous instinct to devour meat take over, and have me clawing at the butcher’s door the very first evening, like an alcoholic sitting outside the liquor store all night?

One month on, I know the answer to all these questions is simply No. It’s telling however that the real hurdle to succeeding at this endeavour was the initial uncertainty, the step into unchartered territory. I am still not well versed in vegetarian cooking by any means, and it is a little cumbersome sometimes to find appetising food in some places when you go out, but these are minor hindrances – the real obstacle to going green was in my head.

So it can be done. Fine. I knew that. I’m stubborn and disciplined enough that if I set my mind to something I can do it for a month. But what about how I feel? What about the training regime?

Well, I’m happy to report that I feel just fine, as energetic as ever. I injured my back, and then had a week when I was ill, which meant I didn’t work out as much as I would have otherwise, but I’ve still racked up twelve training sessions in the last month, so the diet isn’t doing any harm to my energy levels.

I didn’t keep track of what I ate in the end, and I know I ate more sweets than I usually would, but I didn’t gain (or lose) any weight, so I assume it’s not been a bad diet in terms of nutrition. I’ve obviously eaten more greens than I normally do, too, and my body is still – erm – adjusting to the amount of lenses and beans I’m consuming, but all told I think I’m eating at least as healthily as before.

And of course no animals had to die for me to live this month, which is a really nice thought.

So will I continue? Yep. I don’t see that I can justify not doing it. I do miss some things, like salmon sushi when we have our family Friday sushi dinners, but not enough that I can’t do without, and as long as that is the case, I feel a moral obligation to try to do so. I might not stay vegetarian forever, but for now I’ve officially Gone Green.

Diary of a Hesitant Herbivore, part 3

Why are you staring at me? Is that a fork…?!

And so I passed into week three of my salad-munching new lifestyle. Actually, I lie: no salad was harmed in the making of this vegetarian*. At least not yet. You see, Monday eve saw the first delivery to my doorstep of a box full of veggie ingredients and (more importantly) easy-to-make recipes.

And so I started cooking vegetarian food with some confidence for the first time. Courtesy of Hello Fresh! (The French-speaking world has a love for English names that is only matched by their inability to come up with ones that make any sense…)

The recipes ranged from familiar with a twist (mac ‘n’ cheese with pumpkin and lasagna with eggplants and soy milk) to weird and wonderful (chachouka and dhaal). Those are actual words, by the way, not onomatopoeia describing how I sounded trying to eat these newfangled dishes. Newfangled to me, that is: the people of Mexico and India might have an ax to grind with me over that description.

The kids were not enamoured with it all, but then neither were they when I served meat dishes in the past, so I’m not that concerned. Funnily, my daughter (who was the one that wanted to become vegetarian) is less enthused than my son, to whom eating with bread is a brilliant improvement upon cutlery, and who now speaks of digging up the old sand pit and turning it into a vegetable plot. Go figure.

Mmmm… yummy!

Unfortunately I came down with strep throat and had a temperature for four days, so I wasn’t particularly hungry for most of the week, but what is surprising is that at no point during these three weeks have I had a yearning for anything animal to eat. I thought I’d be going through withdrawal symptoms akin to those I experienced when I gave up nicotine or caffeine, but… nothing. No cravings, no seeking out illicit bacon dealers on deserted street corners, nothing.

That bodes well for next week, after which the challenge is complete. I really don’t know what I will do after that. Watch this space.

——-

* Although the trees in the garden are starting to look very good to me. Coincidence?

Diary of a Hesitant Herbivore, part 2

A sea of greens, see?

The second week of my vegetative state was spent in the most vegetarian-friendly of states: Italy.

I was travelling with my son, who is of that age when nothing beats pasta and pizza, so we were both enjoying the food on offer (something that wasn’t the case during the first week…!). Here’s how it went:

Their breakfasts aren’t very healthy, but cornetto alla crema (pastries filled with vanilla) and cappuccino are both veggie-approved, so that’s what we had, more often than not. (Hey, I didn’t make the rules…!)

Then there’s the fact that every unassuming restaurant consistently serves really good food; everywhere we went, plates were filled with gourmet-level cooking. And thanks to the abundance of locally grown quality veg this was equally true for us salad-munchers: every tomato sauce is nectar of the gods, every mozzarella di buffala ambrosia, every antipasta and primo is a deceptively simple dish made to perfection.

So simple, so perfect.

They really have no excuse with their markets looking like they do, I know, but still, other countries have those, too, and they don’t manage to pull this off. In short: if I had to pick anywhere in the world where I could live happily as a herbivore, this would be It.

It-aly may have its drawbacks and weak points (such as rarely holding on to a government for longer than a few months and collapsing infrastructure), but you can’t beat the boot in culinary matters. India might have more to offer due to its sheer size, but since all Indian food could also double as rocket fuel I’m going to give Italy pride of place in this man’s vegetarian food pantheon.

If you are a reasonably well-travelled veggie you may already know all this, of course – a case of “bean there, done that”, as it were – but if not: what are you waiting for?! Avanti!

Diary of a Hesitant Herbivore, part I

So I decided to try life as a vegetarian. It didn’t get off to an auspicious start.

Like an addict, I spent the last couple of days gorging myself on my chosen poison before finally taking the plunge, testing if there really isn’t such a thing as too much bacon (there is – a family pack for breakfast for one) and if three cheese burgers in one sitting isn’t better than two (It isn’t!).

My last evening before this experiment begun I dined on goose liver. It was divine. Next morning I played it safe – a known luxury brunch place in town would see me through most of the day (cakes are vegetarian, after all), and the next evening I had arranged delivery of a whole box of meals (well, recipes and ingredients) to my doorstep, which would carry me through most of the week.

It didn’t go according to plan. The brunch place had crispy bacon on everything (or so it seemed), but that I could manage. Worse was the realisation that the food box company wasn’t going to be delivering anything for another week.

Back to the drawing board: Sunday afternoon I prepped as much roasted veg as I could. My vegetarian acquaintances weren’t very forthcoming; all their dishes seemed to require hours of work. A friend tipped me off about lentils with butter for breakfast, which sounds like a cruel joke to me; another veggie friend chimed in with his own top tip: don’t eat anything that has a face. Possibly useful as a guideline, but not helpful when I was staring forlornly into the fridge, wondering what to do.

In the end I survived my first week without any real difficulties, in fact. Sure, pasta and various sweets featured more prominently on the menu than I would have liked, but I didn’t actually crave meat at all, and I certainly didn’t go hungry – if anything I ate more than usual, in an attempt to get enough protein. And I got six workouts in in the gym, so clearly my energy reserves weren’t completely depleted.

So far, so good. Next week I’ll be in Italy for the most part, and if a feller can’t be a vegetarian there, I think India is probably the only place you’ll survive. Watch this space.

October morn

That magical hour of dawn,

when all across the dewy lawn

a ray of sun so bright

sets autumn leaves alight

They’re glowing as they’re falling,

thus heeding nature’s calling

to die, they’re copper, blackish blood,

their meaning finally understood

They roll and tumble: amber tears,

spring time dreams and silent fears

of trees that are a-dying

and yet nature’s kind, this golden rain

will come to live and bloom again;

it’s rebirth I am a-spying.

Going green

Hot on the heels* of the UN report on the catastrophic consequences of climate change, I have decided to act.

I stated at the beginning of the year that I wanted to try to go vegetarian, and since skipping meat and dairy is apparently among the top things a person can do to combat global warming, it seems only self-preserving to do so.

Of course, the notion of devouring other living beings is only normal because our culture tells us it is**. I will have to challenge my own inherent belief system.

Besides, having read the great book The Inner Life of Animals I can’t morally defend taking the lives of other sentient, feeling beings for my (unnecessary) pleasure any more, if I can learn to do without. The real question is, can I?

It will be a big change, that’s for sure, and an even greater mental leap – merely thinking about forsaking meat makes me have visions of entrecôte, bacon, smoked salmon… carnal thoughts indeed.

This personal carnival will also entail quite a steep learning curve, as none of my go-to recipes are the least bit vegetarian. I have identified as a cis-carnivore all my life, after all. I’ve not been as much as a little bivorous – I didn’t even experiment with veg during my college years. Salads were for bunnies when I grew up, and that was the end of it.

Luckily I have two good veggie restaurants near my work place, so I can eat out, but cooking is a different matter. Simply put: I will have to re-learn how to fend for myself in the kitchen. I have asked vegetarian friends to provide me with recipes for their favourite, easy-to-make dishes, but still, I anticipate that the transition will not be entirely smooth, and certainly not easy.

Since I’m continuing with weight-lifting for fitness, getting enough protein is another concern, but I won’t be going vegan, so eggs and cheese and other dairy are still on the table***, at least. I’ll track what I’m eating via the MyFitnessPal app to be sure I get what I need.

Will it work? Time will tell, I guess. I will publish weekly updates, so if you want, you will be able to follow my progress (or lack thereof) here in Diary of a Hesitant Herbivore. Any and all efforts to help will be greatly appreciated!

—–

*Literally…

** And yet we curiously delineate between this and that species – no one I know thinks eating cats or dogs is normal, and yet they happily munch on piglets and lambs.

*** See *.

Iron-ic Man

No Arnolds were harmed in this experiment.

One of the things I wanted to try this year was to work out more consistently in the gym. If running proved too difficult after multiple injuries, I figured it would be a good opportunity to try to improve my fitness in a new way.

Going to Denmark for three weeks in August seemed a good time to start this experiment, and so I sought out a gym (the excellent fitness.dk) and made sure I went every day. Every day? Yep. Every. Single. Day.

To ensure that I didn’t overdo it, I followed a simple schematic: a rotating schedule, focusing on arms/shoulders day 1, chest and back day 2, and legs day 3. Rinse and repeat. This seemed to work. Sure, I’d have muscle aches, but since I isolated muscle groups as much as possible, it never interfered with the workout of the day.

I tried to eat well, three or four meals per day, staying clear of sugar and fast carbs (but not avoiding beer – I was in Denmark, after all!). I took magnesium and turmeric every day, plus a supplement called Clear Muscle.

So how did it go? Unlike the runstreak, my iron streak feels like it’s actually increasing my strength, rather than slowly grinding it down. This experiment has been going on one month today, and I have no intention of stopping, even though I’m now back in Belgium. I feel great. I have gained one or two kilos but don’t feel bloated or pudgy, so am hopeful it’s actually due to increased muscle mass.

Being a skinny guy (ectomorph to fans of word porn) I will never get beefy, so you won’t be seeing my face on a Schwarzenegger bod with air bag-pecs and biceps like normal people’s quads (unless my photoshop skills increase exponentially) but it feels like it’s probably a worthwhile pursuit for all people, young and old, skinny, fit or flabby – after all, tuning the engine will make it function better, longer.

Next step will be to find a gym close to work, so I can get out of the basement (where I keep my weights at home!) and keep up the good work. For that, if nothing else, I feel pumped!

Danish and the Danish 4: fabulous food and where to find it.

From word porn to proper pleasures of the flesh: eating.

Copenhagen is home to NOMA, voted the world’s greatest restaurant several years in a row, but what about other Nordic food?*

I’m very happy to report that I have found some real gems while here, and they are both wonderfully traditional and nydannet – a word that means contemporary, newly created, whilst happily incorporating the Danes themselves – coincidence? I think not.

So, without further ado, here’s the ultimate guide to eating like a Dane:

For breakfast, you cannot do better than pay a visit to a recent addition to the culinary landscape of the capital, Grød. It’s a splendid example of how you don’t need a complicated concept to succeed, as long as you do what you do to perfection. Grød means porridge, and that’s what they serve, with as many as a dozen toppings. The porridge itself is very satisfying, creamy and fresh, and the extravaganza on top ensures that you never get bored. Oh, and you will be full for a looong time afterwards!

It’s porridge, Jim, but not as we know it!

For lunch, foodies and workmen alike have smørrebrød – open sandwiches with a plethora of different toppings, often incorporating traditional components such as herring or roast beef, but with interesting twists. My favorite place is a non-assuming place on Nytorv square, Mät, where you can have as many of these little delights as you like for a fixed price. Buyers beware, however: Danes are environmentally conscious, and the menu specifies that customers will be charged 15 kroner extra for each smørrebrød left unfinished!

Let’s just say I didn’t have to pay the forfeit…

No culinary expedition to Copenhagen should leave out JaDa Café. The name means “Oh, yes”, and I dare say that’s what most people whisper under their breath as they enter the establishment: JaDa makes the most gorgeous, custom-tailored ice cream I have ever seen. A perfect spot for an afternoon indulgence, and one likely to be as pleasing to your palate as your eye.

It even comes with the proverbial cherry on top.

It’s a good thing you’re biking around, because by now you have probably gained about 10lbs. However, dinner still beckons. I’ll give you two options:

Just down the street from Grød lies another interesting trendsetter: Manfred’s. Awarded by Michelin, this basement establishment is very relaxed and cozy, but what makes it stand out is that it’s vegetarian, and everything on their menu sourced from the restaurant’s own local farm. I had a seven course meal, and every single dish was surprising and good, from the cold cucumber/buttermilk soup starter to the red beet/blackcurrant/algae dessert.

If instead you want less food, and perhaps some animal protein, I would suggest a visit to Blaaregn, a local eatery where, if you have guts enough, you can find yourself face to face with a cod head on a platter.

Sink your teeth into this cod piece if you dare!

Baked to perfection, this fish – the only one that can compete with the herring for most traditional Danish food – was quite possibly the best seafood I’ve ever had. Baked to perfection with capers and nothing else, its meat was tender, succulent, and somehow a marvellous metaphor: if you dare to go back to your roots (and can face the prospect of putting someone else’s tongue in your mouth) there is no end to the gourmet experiences you can have here!

—–

*NOMA is an abbreviation for NOrdisk MAd, meaning Nordic food.

Days and Deities in the Dolomites, part 1

91A59578-166D-497B-88DC-B2E1AE4F2F3D”Closer, God, to Thee”, I mumble to myself through gritted teeth. It’s the song the orchestra played as the Titanic went down, and I share their sentiment – and yet I couldn’t be further from their ordeal. Nor is it the Christian God I have in mind, when now I stand to meet my maker, but Thor, or Jupiter, gods of thunder. 

I’m in the Dolomites, the UNESCO-protected Italian-Austrian outlier of the alps, and it’s the first of four days of hiking. Only now I’m beginning to wonder if it will be my last. And yet it started out so well.

I arrived in Val Gardena last night and took the funicular first thing in the morning. True, there had been an almighty thunder storm in the night, but now the skies were blue, the air imbued with that particular cool freshness that follows a summer rain. And to start with the hike was as bucolic as can be: through the pine forests lining the sides of the garden valley, where intensely pink alpine roses covered the forest floor, to pastures with an astonishingly rich flora, where mountain cows of the Milka variety grazed happily, quite unconcerned with the lone wanderer in their midst. 

My plan was to hike la Curona de Gherdëina – the crown of Gardena, a circular route taking me all around the valley in question, staying at different rifugios, mountain huts, along the way.

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All together now: 🎶The hills are ahlaaahhiiivvvveee…!

The first rifugio I came upon was a working farm, in a setting so picture perfect that you’d expect a von Trapp to come dancing past at any moment. The meadows were all aflower, an old woman was churning butter in the morning sun, and a smiling serving girl got me my Aplfelshorle – apple juice and sparkling water. It was wonderful. To the right loomed one of the sharp, jagged mountain ridges that are emblematic to the Dolomites, like the broken teeth of some buried giant with a serious dentist aversion, but I wasn’t overly concerned, since I felt sure the path would skirt around it. How wrong I was!

As I set out again it became alarmingly clear that the path wasn’t going to swerve – instead it went straight up towards the escarpment and then continued in the shape of a via ferrata (literally “iron road”), with crampons and steel wires hammered into the rockface for the intrepid hiker/climber to hang on to. Like a very small and inefficient dental floss I struggled onwards and upwards between the serrated teeth, acutely aware that mistakes were not an option, only to suddenly reach the crest, and the astonishing view of a gently sloping valley filled with restaurants and scores of elderly day-trippers. 

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This is where I came up. Still can’t quite believe it.

I felt quite annoyed at this sight: having worked so hard, surely I deserved better than to have groups of selfie-taking pensioners blocking my path? (It turned out that this was the result of a Seilbahn nearby, making for easy access to all and sundry.) I pressed on, and soon entered another valley, this one gorgeously empty apart from a dry river bed made up of the white sandstone that abounds here. It was like having a pristine, meandering road to myself, leading into the interior and away from the unwashed masses. I was overjoyed. 

Alas, the only way out of a valley if you move away from its mouth is by climbing, and this is where my troubles began. By now it was close to 30 degrees in the shade – and no shade – and my legs were fair shaking after four hours of hard hiking when the climb up the escarpment began in earnest. Looking behind me I was also aware that dark clouds were beginning to form, so I didn’t want to linger, even though my muscles were protesting loudly.

Sweaty beyond belief I made my way higher and higher, over gravel of the kind I learnt to loathe in France, past the first patches of perma-snow – somewhat surprisingly a pretty pink colour, which is apparently caused by bacteria. I might have been a pretty pink colour by this stage as well for all I know, climbing up sheer rock walls in the midday sun. When I finally reached the crest high above it was to find an illustration from Tolkien immediately in front of me: the darkest, most evil-looking clouds I’ve ever seen were hanging around the next broken-toothed ridge, itself an ominous sight. All that was missing was a fiery eye in the sky, and I would have been staring at the gates of Mordor. 

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We ain’t in the Shire no more, master Frodo…!

As it was, the very real danger was that the thunder clouds would catch up with me and I would find myself stuck on this ridge. Quite apart from the downpour rendering the sheer rock dangerously slippery to traverse, the combination of me swinging on iron crampons near the summit and lightning from on high was one I didn’t particularly care to contemplate. I also knew that I had precious little to protect myself in the event of a real downpour – only a very light rain jacket and an emergency blanket – so I didn’t fancy my chances much if I had to try to bivouac, but what choice did I have? 

Only one. On shaky legs – exhaustion and fear and adrenaline being a potent brew – I half walked, half ran the last three quarters of an hour to the refugio where I was to spend the night, caught up in the cold front that precedes proper storms, shorts and tshirt soaked through with icy sweat, but I made it. 

Not half an hour after I dash through the door to the refugio, the world outside was lost to clouds and lightning and torrential rain, but by that time I was bedded down in my bunk, utterly exhausted and trying to regain some warmth, dry and pleased with having outrun Jupiter. 

The rest of the day was spent acclimatising to life in a refugio; the dormitories have a dozen bunk beds each, piled three high, with the commotion this brings. Showers are four euros and five minutes each, and only available after six, dinner is served between seven and eight. Thankfully, in this regimented microcosm I’m seated with a lovely New York couple and an equally charming English ditto for dinner, which makes it a very pleasant affair, but I am spent and back in bed by nine. 

Sleep comes hard, however, as I mull over the possibility that I have bitten off more than I can chew. The second day promises even more kilometres and height difference – will I really manage that, with my body already one big, dull ache, and more thunder storms a distinct possibility?

Ramadan, done.

So I decided to try intermittent fasting. Not for religious reasons, but to see if all the beneficial things I had read about limiting your food intake to a restricted number of hours per day were true. Depending on who you ask, this alternative eating pattern will decrease your blood pressure and cholesterol, increase the efficiency of your metabolism, and even invigorate you on a cellular level. Now I have no way of knowing if all this is true, but I do know Hugh Jackman claimed intermittent fasting was an integral part in his transformation to play Wolverine, and the evidence there is pretty good…!

Me after a month of intermittent fasting. Not.

I’ve done it for a month now. Eating between noon and eight in the evening, and nothing but water the rest of the time. So how did it feel? I was afraid it was going to be incapacitating and overall horrible, but it wasn’t. Turns out you can function quite well on an empty stomach. You can even go running for two hours on a hot day with high humidity and feel none the worse for wear (well, in terms of hunger and stamina – don’t ask me about my Achilles’ tendon!). If anything I felt a lot better for skipping breakfast. You feel sharper, less prone to carb-induced lows (since you haven’t had any!).  There was suddenly a lot of free time in the morning, but that never seemed to be a problem, and quite apart from that, the fact that I was genuinely hungry by the time noon came around meant that I really appreciated what I ate – hunger really is the best condiment.

What about all the health benefits? I don’t know. I didn’t lose any weight (and that wasn’t the purpose of the experiment anyway) but I feel slimmer. Researchers have shown that what will happen when you fast is that you’re depleting the liver of glucose, which means your organism will have to start burning fat instead. This is known as ketosis, and since this happens within 16-24 hours of your last meal pretty much regardless of what or how much you eat, maybe I achieved ketosis in spite of eating lots of carbs. That’s my story anyway, and I’m sticking to it. 

More to the point tho, will I be sticking with this new eating regime? In as far as it is practical, I think I will. Like other changes to my diet – notably giving up coffee and alcohol – people around me seem to think it a little weird, but just because we have been brought up to take three meals a day as a given doesn’t mean it should be. Our ancestors certainly couldn’t count on that kind of regular food intake, and – as is the case with the paleo diet – I think there are strong arguments for trying to emulate the way nature intended for us to live. That’s not to say I won’t have the occasional all-out breakfasts occasionally – after all, what’s the point of evolution if you cannot have American pancakes with butter and maple syrup every now and then?

Runstreak, runstroke, runstricken

For my first challenge this year I signed up for a runstreak in January. The concept is straightforward: you run every day for as long a streak of days as you can muster. The notion had intrigued me for a while, but two factors made me decide to give it a go; first my need to do rehab to recover from my paragliding injury, and second the fact that Paceonearth initiated a Facebook group for people who wanted to give it a try for a month.

The rules are simple: you have to get changed into running gear (so having to run to catch the bus doesn’t count), and you have to run for at least twenty consecutive minutes per day (so ten minutes in the morning and ten in the afternoon won’t do, and neither will running forty minutes one day and nothing the next). And so run I did.

You would think that it would be easy to find twenty minutes per day, especially if you are used to making space for workouts, but an increased workload and a couple of unexpected trips to Sweden presented certain logistical challenges – often runs were squeezed in between shopping groceries and picking up kids from their activities, and on travel days I sometimes had to run at ungodly hours to fit them in at all (squatting at night in a forest because I’d been doubled up in an airplane all day and the run had initiated hitherto suppressed and therefore quite urgent bowel movements? Memorable, as was the realisation that I had no toilet paper…). Running in a crowded Marrakesh (with a woman!) presented its own challenges.

I’m not entirely convinced that it is good for you to run every single day. I certainly felt stiffer and slower than when I was mixing running with biking and swimming and lifting weights. In fact my one gripe is that it steals too much time away from those activities. Of course, my decreased capacity could also be the result of my injury. 

But still I ran. As did the other participants. The one aspect of this challenge that I hadn’t anticipated was how much I would come to appreciate the fellowship I felt with the other runners, none of which I ever met in real life (with the exception of my sister). There were 700 initially, and although many fell by the wayside (some unfortunate souls quite literally!), we shared laughs (an informal competition for worst-looking running gear was an assault on the senses), gripes, hardships, cheered each other on, and ran in all kinds of conditions – neither rain nor storm nor gloom of night may stop these couriers, as the postal services once put it. In a sense it is not unlike an ultra – you do run for a month, after all, you just take reaaalllly long potty breaks 😋 – in that the main obstacle is in your brain, telling you it can’t be done, and in that respect (much like in an ultra) your fellow co-runners can provide invaluable help with just a word of encouragement at the right time. 

So the question is, will I continue? I’ve done 40 days now (OK, so I jump started a little…), and I am tempted to go on, but I honestly think it is better to mix things up a little, so I will change my runstreak to a cardio streak instead – I will continue to run OR bike twenty minutes or more every day. On top of that I will add an iron streak – lifting weights (including body weight) for the same amount of time per day. Bring on February!

2018 and the art of being S.M.A.R.T.

I was thinking about what I want to try to achieve in 2018 when I came across some good advice that really resonated with me. If I have failed to reach my goals in the past, it’s nearly always been because I haven’t made sure they were S.M.A.R.T. – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound. So that shall be my credo for 2018: be smart about what tasks I set myself.

The fundamentals haven’t changed: I want to develop as a person, intellectually and physically, by testing my limits, working diligently and hard towards certain goals, and I want to travel to see the world and broaden my horizons, ensuring that by the end of the year I can look back and see progress and time well spent.

So: smart intellectual challenges – the ones I’ve worked on for a couple of years now still remain the same: I want to read more non-fiction, get better at piano, French, and chess. That’s not very specific, tho, so measuring progress will be key; I need targets I can quantify. One book per month. One new piece of music learnt every two months. One hundred French words per month. And as for chess… well, getting a rating of 1400 before the end of the year would be an easily measurable goal, if not necessarily that easily attainable. (I’m hovering around the 1300-mark as I’m writing this…). Plus I will note down every half hour spent on each activity, thus keeping a tally for accountability purposes.

So I’ve got all of those down to an A.R.T. Physical challenges are a little different, mainly because of the uncertainty I’m living with at the moment, so for 2018, I have decided to change tack a little. For my first challenge in January I will do a runstreak. Running every day will hopefully allow me to rebuild what was damaged in the accident in November. If that goes to plan, Paris marathon in April will be another milestone on the road to recovery, and if that goes well I’ll sign up for either another ultra marathon, or a full length Ironman. Or both.

Alas, there are too many unknowns at this stage for me to know if I will be able to run such distances again, but if I can, then a total of 1500k each of running and biking seem attainable goals overall. At least I know I can bike, so if running is out then I’m doubling that number for biking (and only watching Netflix while on the stationary bike will kill two birds with one stone – limiting my Netflix binging AND encouraging more time in the saddle!).

Weights have never been anything but a complement to my other workouts – now more so than ever as I try to strengthen my weak leg – but again, if I find I don’t recover my running capacity, I will focus more on getting strong/building muscle. Having always been skinny it would be interesting to see if I could actually muscle up.

As for swimming, I want to learn how to crawl properly! At present I can hardly do one length in the pool, and even though I managed the Ironman 70.3 anyway it would be nice to shave off five or ten minutes from that time, so learning how to crawl at least a kilometre is another challenge.

I will be working more in 2018 than I have for a decade, which will hopefully have the dual effect of giving me the opportunity to take on more interesting work on the job, and allowing me a bigger travel budget, as, happily, my children have said they want to travel more with me, so that will affect what trips I take this year.

2018 promises an Arab spring once more, as I’m going back to Morocco in January and have another trip to Egypt in February (with the kids). I have a week of holidays in March that I don’t know what to do with yet – downhill skiing would be nice, but again it’s dependent on me making a complete recovery. I want to go back to Spain and get a fully-fledged paragliding pilot’s licence. Hiking in Iceland would be lovely, the last part of Bergslagsleden still beckons, and I want to do at least one journey further afield – maybe watching the great sardine run in South Africa? Or taking the kids to the US? There’s no shortage of possibilities.

Other challenges: I wouldn’t mind doing more for the environment. This could involve installing geothermal heating in the house, keeping hens for eggs, joining a wind power collective or other changes. One thing I do know I want to try is becoming a vegetarian. At least for a month.

Not eating any sugar in any shape or form may be another challenge, and limiting my social media intake to half an hour per day wouldn’t be a bad idea either.

And of course I want to continue building my blog, writing about my experiences for the joy of writing, but also as a living testament to what I do with my life when I don’t have my kids. Hopefully my readership will continue to grow, but that is less important. If I can inspire only two people, that is more than enough for me.

Here’s to a S.M.A.R.T.er future!

P.S. All this goes out the window if I were to get my dream job, of course… 😄

#runstreak

I still haven’t run since the accident in Spain three weeks ago, but rehab is progressing and I remain optimistic. I really, really want to get back out there and start running again!

And then today a couple of ultra runners I follow on Facebook (Paceonearth) posted about a challenge that would suit me really well: doing a runstreak through the entire month of January. I signed up immediately!

If you’re not familiar with the concept, it means running for at least a mile and twenty minutes per day. Incredibly, there are people who have done this for decades, never missing a day. One half of the couple behind the initiative (Ellen) has done it for over four years, and shows no signs of stopping – even going out for a shuffling run the day after completing the UTMB!

Anyway, the idea is for people to sign up for this and find motivation in others doing the same, so if you want to join up, you can do so here. Let’s beat the elements, fatigue, laziness, and accomplish something together!

2018 – a year of running?

Shedding a tear

Well, it’s hard to believe it, but 2017 is almost over. I said I’d take on a challenge or go on a trip per month this year, and I had some ideas about what I’d do for December, but alas, events have overtaken me.

As some of you may know, I have an old injury in my left leg, which leaves me with a structural imbalance. It’s always been a fear that this would someday get even worse, and, well, one forceful step was all it took: As I was running down a hill in Spain last month I heard something tear in my groin, while a flash of intense pain shot up through my buttock.

I was hardly able to stand afterwards, let alone walk or run. I managed to do the rest of the paragliding course, literally limping across the finishing line, but the damage was done, so now I have to undo it as best I can. This will have to be my challenge for December then: Operation Shed A Tear.

I signed up with a physiotherapist, which is a misnomer. She gets very physical, that much is true. Therapeutic? If you’re a masochist, perhaps.

Now, it would be wrong to say she gets Medieval on my ass. More Chilean – under Pinochet. There’s horse liniment, a plunger(!), electrodes hooked up to a car battery, duct tape, needles. All these things go onto or into my ass. And groin. Then there’s exercises. Core exercises, balance, stretching – all those things you should do all the time, but never do (at least I don’t). Plus biking, as much as I can take. And drinking lots of water to keep the cells nice and supple.

I haven’t run for two weeks (the scales know this already!) but I seem to be working out as hard as ever. Hopefully I’ll be back on track (again quite literally) before the end of the month. That’s the goal. It’s already taken blood and sweat. If it can alleviate the tears? We’ll see. Paris marathon in April is still on, as far as I’m concerned.

Alpine Adrenaline II

The Bavarian Alps. The most German setting imaginable. Marvellous mountains, nestling green valleys with villages taken straight out of Grimm fairy tales. Birthplace of the grimmest of ideologies. 

I’ve come here for a week of peaceful hiking with my friends Florian and Iris. It doesn’t quite turn out that way. 

We come by train from Munich (where a local beer hall made our layover as enjoyable as can be), through pleasant rolling hills, and arrive in Oberstdorf (lit. “The highest village”) in sunny, warm weather. That’s a nice surprise in itself, since the forecast is promising thunderstorms and rain for most of the week. 

Florian suggests a “light” hike for the first day, climbing the nearest alp, Rubihorn. Coming in at 1,950m high, it’s no more than a 500-metre climb from the first lift station, but the sun is out in force, and by the time I reach the summit I’m wobbly-legged and woozy from the effort. That’s nothing compared to F and I, however. They arrive wheezing and gasping for air. But once heart rates have come down to something resembling normal we have a splendid 360 degree view for our efforts. We are at the edge of the alps, so to one side are the lowlands, and on the other there are hundreds of peaks as far as the eye can see.

What draws the eye more than anything, however, is the incredibly blue waters of the lake hidden right underneath us, shimmering in the heat like a Fata Morgana. Declining the kind offer of summit schnapps from a friendly local, we begin to make our way down a slippery slope towards it. When we finally reach its shores I’m so hot that the lure of the cristalline water takes over, and I join the friendly local and his buddies going in for the coldest dip of my life. 

Afterwards I will read up on it and learn that the lake is source-fed from below and therefore maintains a steady – low – temperature all year around (never glazing over in winter), but getting out of the water Iris sums up the experience rather succinctly: “I see it was this cold”, she says, grinning, showing a most unflattering distance between thumb and index finger. Suffice to say when the offer was made anew, I gratefully accepted the (plummet) schnapps this time around. 

Playa del Rubihorn

The next day we make for Fellhorngrad and a ridge walk that would have been ideal as a first day introduction to the area. Straddling the border between Germany and Austria, it’s a pleasant enough hike, but too crowded and pedestrianised for my taste. The best that can be said for it is that it offers splendid views into the Austrian valley where we will be exploring next day. 

The vale is effectively an Austrian enclave in Germany, because there is only one real road into the valley and it arrives there from Bavaria, which must have made everyday life for the inhabitants rather cumbersome back in the day of border controls. More importantly (to us) it’s also home to one of the more impressive gorges in Europe, the Breitachklamm. And so our third day sees us going to Austria.

Getting off the bus well above the Klamm (“pinch”) itself, we follow the Breitach downriver in glorious sunshine along a very pretty road that would have been a joy to run. I say as much to my hiking friends, forgetting the adage that you should be careful what you wish for. You see, after an hour or so of hiking Florian discovers that he has left his outrageously expensive camera hanging on a bench where we took a break. It’s a good kilometre back up the road, so I offer to run and get it before someone else does. 

Unfortunately someone else already has, and so I continue running back to the last lodge we passed, yet another kilometre upriver. When I finally arrive I’m drenched in sweat, but the camera is there, handed in by the finder (hikers are nice people!), and so all that remains is for me to race back to my friends. By the time I get back after this unexpected detour I’m once more so over-heated that I just tear my clothes off and let the river cool me down, with unexpectedly homoerotic / rubberducky results, as captured by my gleeful friends. 

When I post a pic of me on FB/when I’m tagged in one.


The Klamm itself is gorge-eous. The valley narrows, steep walls looming above us, waterfalls forcing their way ever deeper into the rock beneath us, as we clamber along walkways hewn into the cliff-face or precariously hanging on to the outside of the bare rock. Like a cut into the flesh of Mother Earth, the gorge is so deep that some of it hasn’t seen the sun for two million years. The debris left behind by winter floods bear witness to the brute force of the water: entire trees are lodged between the walls in places, and markers show the water levels sometimes reached, metres above our heads. It’s awe-inspiring.

Since Florian is leaving in the afternoon to visit a friend, Iris and I decide to try something both of us have been itching to do for a long time: tandem paragliding. We’ve signed up to do their longest flight, using the thermals to stay up in the air for up to forty minutes. Unfortunately, the flight school is incredibly badly organised, with numerous reschedulings and one pilot not showing up until an hour and a half too late, by which time it’s so late in the afternoon that the thermals are gone. This in turn means our flight is less than half the length promised, but for all that it’s an incredible experience!

We run off the top of the Nebelhorn and take flight as easy as anything, then go down the valley close to the forest-clad sides, gliding effortlessly and smoothly through the air. It’s such a high I’m just grinning and laughing the whole time. Iris, meanwhile, is screaming at the top of her lungs – something she has forewarned both me and her pilot is a sign of joy. She soon has cause to scream for other reasons, though, because then they start showing off their skills, making us swing around our axes, spinning around in half loops in the best roller-coaster tradition. It’s fantastically good fun, if quite disorienting. 

Iris earning her new nickname, with me in the background.


Before we land I’m given the reigns and told to steer towards the village church, which I do as best I can, before finally we come down soft as can be on a field, grinning from ear to ear from the adrenaline high, and me at least more convinced than ever that this is something so want to learn for myself! The rest of the evening is spent in a Biergarten, mulling over the minutest of details, riding the air waves over and over again.

Next day Florian is back, but the worse for wear from last night’s birthday do, so Iris and I ride the Bergbahn to the top of the Nebelhorn on our own. We set out along the ridge together before parting ways, with me attempting the Entchenkopf alone. 

It’s sits across from the Rubihorn, but is 300 metres higher, and significantly more difficult going, with several passages being senkrecht climbing. I had been wanting to try the via ferrata, the climbing paths that you traverse with guides and equipment, but nae more. This is worse by far. With no back-up or climbing gear, the ground slippery from last night’s rain, and drops of anything between ten and fifty metres onto sheer rock, any mistake would be my last. It’s no coincidence Todesangst is a German word, I think. 

What do we say to Death? Not today.

 

When I finally reach the summit, my legs are shaking from fear-induced adrenaline, and I don’t dare stand up for quite some time. But fear is good. Fear – if harnessed – makes you more alive, more focused. As I sit there, taking in the never-ending views, the air as clean as can be, I feel like a million bucks. 

And then the moment is over, and I slide down the other side of the mountain towards the Hütte where Iris awaits my return, and the best Kaiserschmarren pancakes known to man.

That was Iris’s last day, so next day Florian and I set out on our own to do the Sonnenköpfe, three lower peaks that form the continuation of the Entchenkopf. They looked more like rolling hills from the summit the day before, but as we hike them they turn out to be quite formidable, too, and it’s only the knowledge that there will be even more of the same Kaiserschmarren that spurs us on til the end. 

Next we want to try the stony Gottesacker plateau (lit. “God’s plowing field”), but when we get there the lift is under repair, and faced with the prospect of an additional 1,000 vertical metres in full sun – the weather forecast having turned out to be quite wrong yet again – we opt for an alternative route through a Naturschutzgebiet up to another lodge, seated on the Austrian-German border, and down the other side. It turns out to be Florian’s favourite walk of the entire week, but I can’t help feeling a bit wistful about having missed the plateau, especially since it looks just like a sleeping dragon from below…

Climb every mountain!

 

The very last day the weather forecast is finally correct, and the rain is pouring down. F can’t be bothered to leave the Gasthaus, but I go for a quick run and then a solo hike in the southernmost valley in all of Germany. It’s wet and misty and moist and slippery, but I don’t mind. The low-hanging mist lends the nature here a mystical aura of veiled beauty, and besides it’s reminiscent of the hikes of my youth, when – as I remember it – the alps were always clad in clouds. 

And so my travels with Sonnenkopf and Nebelhorn (lit. “Sunny head” and “Fog horn”) are at an end. The lovely Martin and Andrea, who run the Gasthaus Birkenhof where we have been staying, hug and kiss us goodbye and drive us to the railway station, and then all that remains is one more visit to a beer hall in Munich (with succulent Schweinshaxe and Augustiner beer), before finally flying home. 

The alps, however, are already calling me back. 

 

Tri as I might…

Three shades of tri…

…there’s no denying that – with less than three weeks to go before Luxembourg, my first Ironman 70.3 – this whole triathlon idea is starting to feel quite intimidating!

I mean, I can swim my “granny crawl” (you know that stately progression through the water ladies of a certain age who’ve just come from the hairdresser specialise in) well enough, and I can run – if not fast, then at least for a long time – but I have yet to go more than 30k on the bike in one session (In my defense, I only got my race bike less than a week ago, but still…) And then of course there’s the small matter of putting it all together, all three disciplines one after the other. Who in their right mind does that??

Like all participants I got the email containing race rules and regulations this week. You get penalties for everything, it seems. Some of them things I didn’t even know existed! Like drafting. Apparently you can’t stay close behind someone when biking, because that way you benefit from them pushing the air out of your way. I would have thought that was a bit superfluous as a rule. No one objects to that when swimming or running (in the first case because you’d get your teeth kicked out if you tried, and stumble in the latter), so is it really necessary to have a rule like that? 

There’s also the “no indecent exposure” rule… in my experience, people participating in a race don’t give a damn (mass peeing before a marathon, anyone?), and if someone were to actually expose themselves “with intent” I reckon he would have to answer to every other participant present, rule or no rule, but better safe than sorry, I suppose. 

You even get a penalty if you hang a balloon or similar from your bike so as to find it easily after the swim. That’s a bit stingy, isn’t it? It was one of the best tips I picked up reading about triathlons, and I was looking forward to seeing a sea of bright balloons, scarves, and what have you in the transit area, but that’s not to be, it seems. 

Anyway, those are just minor details. For now, the main challenge – beyond the ever-present question of whether you’ve trained enough – lies in the logistics of the thing; How do you transport your bike safely? How do I organise all the kit so as not to forget something vital? What do I bring to eat/drink? Will I be able to drive back after the race or will I be stranded from sheer exhaustion? 

I guess freaking out a little is normal at this stage. I try to tell myself, One step at a time. Before long, that principle will apply to the race day itself. 

Diary of a cave man (2/2)

Howling at the moon…

The second half of my month of eating paleo looked like it might be considerably harder than the first. Eating nothing but what our most distant ancestors might have eaten works fine when not exerting oneself utterly, but as my triathlon draws closer that’s not an option. Plus I would be going hiking for five days with my brother, and goodness knows how my body would react to that, paleo or no. This is what happened:

Day 16: 10k bike / 2k swim brick-session (i.e. one follows immediately upon the other). No problem.

Day 17: 18k bike, 8k run, 6k run, all with hour-long pauses in between, and 28C temperatures. By the end of the day I’m exhausted, but somehow I don’t think the diet is to blame. I cheat a little afterwards, drinking half a litre of pure apple juice – it tastes like the nectar of gods!

Day 19: I discover that smoked trout and boiled eggs make a good breakfast, but leaves your mouth smelling like fart. Learn something new every day. 

Day 20: New PB on 5k. Wonky reading on the Garmin tho, so won’t count it, but still: clearly paleo isn’t hurting more explosive efforts either. 

Day 21: Prepared massive batch of protein cakes to bring on next week’s hike. Tweaked the recipe to include maple syrup and chocolate. All caveman kosher. Biggest problem will be not eating them before actually on the trail…!

Day 23: Hiking all day. 18k in hard terrain in Tiveden. Protein cakes yummy. Freeze-dried food better than expected. Energy levels stable and high.

Day 24: Hiked 20k. Ate big plate of macaroni and cheese in the evening and literally passed out for half an hour afterwards. Just laid down on the ground and fell asleep. Felt hung over on carbs the rest of the evening. Disgusted.

Day 25: Hiked 23k. In the evening an old friend met up with us, and served us cold beers and Brie sandwiches. Couldn’t say no out of politeness. Didn’t want to, either. Paleo regime officially toppled, then. Will mount a counterattack. Tomorrow.

Day 26: Got up at 0400. Hiked 32k over ten hours. Gratefully accepted a beer in the evening from kind strangers, but otherwise toed the line.

Day 27: Last day of hiking. Family reunion. Lots and lots of food. Decided to forgo paleo for the evening.

Day 28: Back in Belgium. Rest day.

Day 29: Rest day.

Day 30: Went running for the first time in over a week; shaved another sec off my PB on 5k. Celebrated daughter’s birthday with huge, distinctly non-paleo cake. 

Day 31: 10k bike (PB), 8k run, 7k run. Weighed in: 77.2kg. 

So, strictly speaking I stuck with the diet 100% for three weeks. After that circumstances conspired to make things more difficult, as I had predicted. That’s never an excuse tho; I chose to give it up for the sake of convenience. 

But that doesn’t change the fact that I was able to work out as hard as I ever have in my life during those three weeks, and it felt great. I lost five kilos during May, without losing any muscle, so it seems the theory holds water – your body will switch to burning body fat if carb intake is significantly reduced, and do so without lowering your performance levels, over either short or long distances. 

It will be interesting to see what happens at the Ironman triathlon in three weeks – that will be the real litmus test. I will be writing about that experience too, of course. One thing’s for sure: I’ll be continuing on this prehistoric path. 

Diary of a cave man (1/2)

The usual suspects. I'm somewhere in the middle, I guess.So for the month of May I challenged myself to go on a paleo diet, in order to see how this might affect my well-being and physical performance. Here are some of the highlights of what happened:

Day -1: Panic. I’m supposed to not have any sugar for a month!?  

The healthy thing to do would have been to research recipes and prepare. What do I do? I run out to the local night shop and get an overpriced bucket of Haagen-Daez ice cream and down it all in one sitting, then – predictably – feel horrible about it. At least I didn’t have a beer as well.

Day 1: Breakfast is made up of bullet-proof coffee (black coffee with a dollop of coconut oil in it) and left-over oven-baked chicken with mozzarella; how’s that for high fat, low carb? It feels a little weird, eating chicken first thing in the morning, but hey, embrace change, right? Only I have the same thing for lunch AND dinner, and now I do feel a real need for change.

In terms of training I don’t do anything more strenuous than a short run, which a post-workout banana covers just fine. It remains to be seen how longer bouts of exercise affect me…

Day 2: Reading up more on paleo, I discover  all legumes are banned. No beans. I literally had cans and cans lined up on the kitchen counter to make a big batch of chili con carne! No sweat, old bean.

Also, no dairy is allowed, so my buffala mozzarella yesterday wasn’t caveman kosher either, in spite of the fact that trying to milk a buffalo is a pretty Neanderthal thing to do. Crud. Two days in and I’m failing. There’s a learning curve to this, clearly. 

I buy a spiralizer to make zucchini “pasta” for dinner and find it surprisingly edible. The kids threaten to go on hunger strike, then devour almost an entire cheesecake with raspberry coulis for dessert while I watch. 

Day 3: Weight-lifting after an English breakfast goes well. A banana, a date and some walnuts plus lemon water with a shot of flax seed oil replaces my usual (milk-based) protein shake. So far so good. 

In the afternoon the kids have an hour each of breakdance (L) and hiphop (R) with an hour in between, so the plan is to run while they dance. First hour is no problem, the second one I struggle, but more because I’m tired from this morning than anything else. And three workouts in a day is a fair amount, caveman or no. 

Day 4: Brought carrots, strawberries, dates and walnuts to work to tidy me over until lunch. Worked well. 

Dinner I’m invited to an Italian friend whom I’ve completely forgotten to inform about my new habits. Shit! In my mind’s eye I see a mountain of Parmesan-powdered pasta looming, followed by troughs of tiramisu, but my gracious host is very understanding, and beyond the guilty pleasure of a smallish plate of spaghetti vongole I don’t stray from the path. 

Day 7: I want to test myself (and the diet), to see if no carbs for a week will mean bonking when keeping up a sustained effort. So I do an hour of swimming (2k) followed by a three hour walk (13k), stop for lunch, then go biking one hour and a bit (25k). Admittedly this isn’t anywhere near as much as a marathon or triathlon, but I do it all without getting particularly tired or feeling any need for carbs. Yay!

Day 9: 16k run. No problem. 

Day 10: Becoming accustomed to eating “nuts and roots”, as my sister put it. Breakfast is dates and cashew nuts, carrots and hummus, plus a couple of eggs. Apart from the coffee, it feels like something the first guy to climb down from the trees might have eaten. He probably didn’t read his New York Times daily briefing while doing so, but so what?

Day 12 I run equal parts nuts (pecan, walnuts and cashew) and medjoul dates in a blender to create the simplest and best “cake” ever (1 cup of each; calories: approximately 1 gazillion). Who said troglodytes didn’t know how to party?

Ate it all in one sitting, and a good thing too, because Day 13 I swim 3,000m for the first time since I was 18. And then do an hour of weights.   

Day 14: Brunch with a friend. Half of what they serve is bread, or sugar, or both. I try a teaspoon of tiramisu (which I normally adore) and it’s so sweet I can hardly bring myself to swollow. Luckily the other half is made up of yummy veggie dishes, so emerge quite sated.

In the afternoon I run a half marathon on nothing but water. 1:52:50. Good time, given previous day’s workouts. Still don’t feel the need to refuel during the run. Scales show I’ve lost three kilos in two weeks.  Not a bad first half! 

—–

(A friend objected that people get paleo wrong, in that they eat meat a lot more often than our palaeolithic forefathers and -mothers did; this is an objection I would say is probably correct. Even so, I’m buying a lot more veg than usual, and I feel good: slimmer, lighter, never quite as ravenous nor as zonked out before or after meals as I normally get.)

Great, gravity-defying tits 

I’m so sorry. You came here hoping for mammaries, didn’t you? 

No can do, I’m afraid. But despair not. Today was a day of wonders greater than surgically enhanced bosoms. Today was the day when the hatchlings from the nest of great tits in my hedge took the great leap into the void, and I was there to watch it. 

Think about it for a second. Your whole life you’ve been confined to a cosy bed, your parents bringing you yummy, wormy treats all day long, and then suddenly this urge strikes you: I must throw myself into the air and soar. It’s a crazy notion, but it might just work, right?

Wrong. There’s a steep learning curve to flying even if you’re born to do it, it seems. The three chicks are emphatically not good at it. They crash into things, miscalculate distances and generally make, well, tits of themselves in the process. It’s painful to watch, really. 

They call to one another and their parents, but there’s nothing the elder generation can do but watch as their offspring fail Aviation 101. One particularly unlucky fellow smacks into the trunk of the crab apple tree where the rest have managed to congregate, and gets irrevocably trapped in the undergrowth. 

I watch it struggle for a long time, reluctant to intervene, but in the end there’s nothing I can do but pick it up. It’s the tiniest little thing, short wings and scruffy head, but it’s plucky and perky, and stays on my hand without a worry in the world, seemingly sunning itself and calling to the rest of the family as if to say “Check ME out!” (Tits do that).

I have to nudge it to finally convince it to hop onto a branch of the tree, but once reunited – and having received a restorative maggot from mom or dad – it seems content to continue its aviary adventures. 

Me, I spend the rest of the morning at a respectful distance, listening to their calls from afar, a big, big smile on my face, thankful that my garden gives me such moments of unadulterated pleasure. If you can’t fly yourself, then surely the next best thing is to watch the next generation do it?

Three great tits. Not a caption you’d normally want to see.

May, me eat meat.

Urgh. Gruff. What is this M&M’s of which you speak?


Remember the bit in Pulp Fiction where Marcellus Wallace promised to get medieval on someone’s ass? Always sounded like a good threat to me. (I imagine it would involve building cathedrals and trading in relics…) 

However, the whole world seems to be hellbent on going much further back in time, with Trump wanting to bomb everyone into primordial soup (presumably to level with his intellectual discours). So in keeping with that spirit, I figured the month of May might be a good time to challenge myself in a new way: by getting Stone Age on my own ass. 

It’s not as mad as it seems. I’m not proposing to go live naked in a cave and hunt mastodons for breakfast (although that would be fun, too), no, what I will do is go on a Paleo diet for a month, to see what happens. Paleo is essentially about eating the way our earliest ancestors did, in an attempt to get away from starch, sugar and carbs – something which those early hunter-gatherers didn’t find much of on their menu.*

It will require quite the change to my eating habits: no more oatmeal and milk for breakfast, no pasta, beer or pizza post long runs, no sushi on Fridays, and certainly no sneaky Haegen-Daaz ice cream orgies late at night. 

I’m getting hungry just writing about these guilty pleasures, and chances are you are, too, which is due to the fact that our bodies are hard-wired to like this kind of food. The problem is it used to be a very rare treat back in the palaeolithic, whereas now there’s sugar everywhere, and our bodies cannot deal with such quantities of the stuff – hence diabetes, obesity, cardio-vascular diseases; the list goes on and on.

The physical effects of switching to paleo are interesting for another reason too, because after a while – anything from a few days to a few weeks – the body goes into a state where it stops craving carbs and starts using fat as its  prime source of fuel. This will supposedly make you much more efficient in long distance races, as the body’s supply of fat is vastly bigger than its stores of sugar (the difference between your muffin top and the muffin you just ate, if you will). 

Now, I experimented with this prior to running Ultravasan, but chickened out during the race. But my triathlon is coming up, and if I can do that without craving sugar then this diet must be the real McCoy. 

As always, there will be an update afterwards to account for how I did during the challenge – the practical aspects of it as well as any changes to my physique/performance. Now, what’s the best way to cook mastodon for breakfast?
————-

*This sounds like an excellent idea to me, particularly since some studies show dementia to be caused by an accumulated inability to break down sugar, similar to diabetes, and I really don’t want to go down that path. 

Majestic Madeira

After Pemba and Mallorca, my island-hopping circumnavigation of Africa has taken me to Madeira, off the northwestern coast of the continent. Unlike no man, Madeira is an island, but also the name of the entire archipelago, somewhat confusingly. 

Known as the Isles of the Blessed to the Ancient Romans (although no one knows who the blessed in question were), Madeira has been part of Portugal for most of the last 500 years, but geographically speaking it is a part of Africa – and geographically this is probably the most dramatic landscape I’ve ever seen; the volcanic mountains rise up steeply everywhere, and verdantly lush jungle covers every square metre not claimed by man. This is Sardinia on steroids, a place where Kong might feel at home. 

Funchal, the main city, is my base. It rises up the mountainsides in a natural amphitheatre facing out towards the sea. This means the whole town is terraced, with houses literally being built on top of one another – a car parked on the roof of a house, or a house where the entrance is on the topmost floor because it’s perched on an outcrop far below; these are common sights – and traversing it is calf-killing business. 

On my first day I want to see the Monte palace gardens, which lie at the top of the town. There’s a funicular that takes people up there, but the asking price is staggeringly high (much like the gardens) so I make my way on foot from downtown. Three kilometres of hiking and over half a vertical kilometre later, I arrive at the gates, legs shaking and dripping with perspiration, questioning my sanity.

The gardens – first created by a British consul – were beautiful and well worth it, however, with bulbous clouds of bougainvilleas spilling out over the paths, palm trees and jacarandas and tulip trees and African lilies and Austin roses and bottlebrush flowers and endless arrays of other plants. Azaleas the size of trees, ferns taller than I am, and water features everywhere. It was a sight to behold, once my breathing and heartbeat were back to normal. 

There is a lovely little church next to the gardens, where the last Austro-Hungarian emperor rests (having lived the last few months of his life in exile here after he lost his empire), and his grave was filled with ribbons bearing greetings like “our last emperor” in German and Czech. Some people never learn.

The only other claim to fame for the church (beyond having the best views and the sweatiest congregation of all time) ought to be its altarpiece, which consisted of a printed picture of a painting of Jesus with the words “Jesus, eu confio em Vós” printed in Times New Roman (italics) on it. Why anyone thought this a good idea, I don’t know. It looked like the religious equivalent of the first Christmas card you ever DIY’d online. A far cry from the faux perspective cupola in Gozo, it was. 

Pro-empire statements to the left, pro-EU statements to the right…

 

Below the church are the famous wicker toboggans that tourists are ferried down the mountain in by surprisingly beer-bellied Portugeezers wearing white outfits and jaunty straw hats, nattering away while the tourists shriek with delight. The asphalt is worn silky smooth by their passage. It looks fun, but the prices are as steep as the roads, so having recovered somewhat, I walked back down again. 

This was a fitting overture to the main reason for my coming to Madeira. I want to hike the levadas. Levadas are ingenious works of engineering that the Portuguese set about creating immediately upon discovering the island (It was known to the Romans but subsequently lost to history, before Portuguese seafarers “rediscovered” it in 1419, and never mind that it was inhabited by runaway slaves and others when they did.). For five hundred years they have expanded this network of aqueducts hewn out of the cliff-face to channel fresh water from natural sources in the centre of the island out towards more habitable areas. 

Today, they make for perfect hiking trails, taking wanderers straight into the laurissilva forests that cover much of the centre of the island – it is literally a walk in prehistoric environs, as this type of laurel trees (many of them a thousand years old) covered large swathes of Europe tens of thousands of years ago, but only continue to exist here nowadays due to the island’s unique climate.

And so I find a company that takes small groups of people into the mountains to hike the most scenic routes. I had initially planned on bringing my tent and thru-hiking the island from one end to the other, but that didn’t seem possible, so here I am, doing the light version, coming home to a bed and breakfast every night instead of camping out.

First off is Levada do Rei, the king’s levada, or the king of levadas, I’m not sure which – my Portuguese being somewhat nonexistent. The hiking is easy as can be, but it’s not for the faint of heart. More often than not there is a ledge no more than fifty centimetres wide between the levadas and a drop-off of dizzying height. Fifty or even a hundred metres below, the roar of the river can be heard, and one false move will send you tumbling. It’s a puckering thought, and the last to go through the mind of many a slave (before the rest of them did) – as they were often forced to work on these projects (a fact that guidebooks find convenient to gloss over).

Trail with built-in shower.

 

 The levada goes six kilometres inland, through the most dramatically inhospitable terrain imaginable – once even inside a waterfall – to finally end in a gully where every leaf and frond is dripping water into the stream. Having left the group far, far behind, I explore the area, have my lunch in a spot that looks like it’s straight out of the Jurassic, and a bit of a rest before setting out again. I finally reencounter them ten minutes away from the gully. Possibly this group hiking thing isn’t for me…

On the way back, the guide drops me five hundred metres from my hotel. Whether it’s punishment for having strayed from the group, or just bad service, I don’t know. 

The next day, the pickup is fifty minutes late due to no-shows, and the guide (another one) is in an understandably foul mood. I try to not let it affect me, but he is frankly rude, repeating “I’m sorry but it’s not my fault”, when no one has claimed as much. The drive across the island is breathtaking, climbing up these alp-like jungle-clad mountains that dwarf everything humans can ever hope to create. 

We reach today’s levada, and I go on ahead again, leaving the group behind, enjoying the solitude and the different fauna of these higher altitudes. Here, it’s tree heathers and laurels forming a roof over the path, ferns are back to normal size, but blueberry bushes tower above me, and the odd wild geranium brightens the shade, while little trout swim in the levada by my side. It’s lovely.

I reach the halfway point of the “four hour” trail in under an hour, and spend a pleasant while by a beautiful waterfall and rock pool reminiscent of the ones I plunged into in Switzerland when canyoning, sharing my lunch with a chaffinch that happily takes pieces of cheese from my fingers. 

Who do you finch took the picture…?

 

By the time I’m done, the others have arrived, but trundling back the same way doesn’t appeal to me, and after some talking to the guide he grudgingly gives me leave to take a circular path. This is proper hiking – all roots and rocks, not strolling along a concrete sidewalk – and I nearly slip a couple of times, but in the end I’m back by the minibus well before the rest of the group. 

By this time the guide’s temperament and the false marketing combined have most of the hikers grumbling, so he takes us on an extra loop of a kilometre through an area destroyed by forest fire last year. It’s difficult to know how to react: on the one hand he is trying to make good on the company’s overblown promise, on the other hand it’s not like we’re just looking to walk any old where just for the sake of it. And he’s clearly pissed off, so that even if he is genuinely looking to do something for us, no one feels inclined to take him up on his offer. 

In the end we call it a day, and I say nothing, but a couple of exchanged e-mails later I’m looking at a third day at a third of the original asking price. Seems fair. 

Next day couldn’t have been more different: the pickup is on the dot, the guide Duarte is a real Mensch who has me pegged in seconds. “You go on your own, you fast”. And so I do. We go into the mountains proper, to hike between the two highest peaks on the island, Pico do Areeiro and Pico Ruivo, both over 1,800 metres. The path used to take in a third peak, but it’s been closed to hikers since a rockslide obliterated a stretch of it – a stark reminder that geological time is now. 

It’s an old path that locals on the north side of the island used to ferry their wares to the south side market place, however unlikely that sounds. Nowadays at least it’s paved, and a good thing too, as the ever-present tufa pebbles make for easy slipping. 

It’s hard going but incredibly beautiful: the path snakes its way up and down the sides of mountains, balancing on razor edge crests and burrowing through sheer rock. The fauna here consists of heather trees and broom, and the ground is covered by alpines such as indigenous orchids, buttercups, saxifrage and sedums, with oversized bumblebees brumming about. It’s overwhelming in its splendour. 

What’s more, it is all to be a part of the Madeira Island Ultra Trail tomorrow, so every so often there are waymarkers attached to the scant protective wires. I doff my sweaty cap in the direction of the runners: the race is 115 kilometres across the island, and I would not want to try to run many of the metres I cover here today…! (I did 15k today, with 1k elevation loss and 1k ditto gain. The X-trail is four times as much. Lord knows what the MIUT equivalent is!)

I predictably arrive long before the rest of our party, so when they do show, Duarte simply tells me to go on for another hour and then meet them back at the Pico. I happily do, taking in the utter isolation that is the Village of the Nuns way below in the next valley. It’s hard to imagine a more secluded place, and it looks quite magical, nested in between the mountains, but alas, the clouds come in and cover the nuns (and everything else) from my prying eyes, which I take as a signal to turn around and go find my posse, incredibly pleased with my day. 

I spoke more to Duarte on the way back, as he was understandably interested in the previous day’s debacle, but he also tipped me off about a longer trek that he recommended I do, even going so far as to find me the right bus to take, so my last day will be spent hiking properly on my own, just as I had originally envisaged. 

And so my last morning sees me boarding a local bus that will take me up the Ribeira Brava valley (the same one that blew me away two days ago). It takes its time getting there, but I enjoy every minute of the two hour drive, moving at a stately place down the coast, the driver navigating hairpin bends while I gaze in amazement at the landscape and all the gardens. 

The bus stops twice for ten-minute breaks – once to give passengers a chance to take a look at Cabo Girão, a glass-bottomed walkway over a cliff that drops 580m straight down into the ocean, and once, at eleven o’clock sharp, for coffee. My father would have approved – of the latter. 

When the driver drops me off, it’s in a place that almost defies description. At 1,500m, its high above the valley floor, offering breathtaking views, but unlike previous hikes, I move along this path in glorious solitude. For the first hour I encounter no one at all. Lizards rustling in the undergrowth, birdsong and the burbling brooks are the only sounds I hear as I walk through the dappled shade of a eucalyptus forest, the warm aroma of the trees’ esoteric oils filling my every breath. Truly, this is forest bathing at its finest. 

Jump in at the deep end!

 

By noon, just as the trail starts ascending, I come upon my first runner. He seems in good shape, considering he’s been running for twelve hours by now, but he’s only done some 50 kilometres, and yesterday’s trail is still ahead of him. We talk a little, and I encourage him in his efforts, offering a few choice tips – I am the author of Seven Tips for a Painful Marathon and a successful ultra marathon runner myself, after all! ?

After that, I overtake more and more runners as I make my way up to Pico Grande, and then steeply down the next valley to the village of Curral das Freiras. 

See the people on the trail?

I make it to the village and down two cold beers in quick succession at the local bar (at the very fair price of 1€ per bottle), thankful that I haven’t traversed 65km, nor have 45 left to go. There’s only one problem: the only bus back to Funchal isn’t  leaving for another two hours. 

I arrived just before the halfway break-off point of the race – any runner who hasn’t made it there by 15:30 isn’t allowed to continue – and this proves to be a stroke of luck for me, as the volunteers begin to pack up and get ready to leave. I start talking to a group of five women all in MIUT sweaters, and they offer me a lift back to Funchal. 

 I would have been super happy with any ride, but the women turn out to be sweet, chatty and very interesting (children of emigrants to South Africa and Venezuela who have returned to their “homeland”). I simply couldn’t have asked for a better end to my holiday here. 

Now if only I could go to S:ta Helena next week…

Monastic Mallorca

I’m in a cloister on the east coast of Mallorca, having taken vows and joined an order. At least that’s what it feels like. 

Joining the Celestial Order of the Brethren and Sistren of the All Inclusive Resort is a strange experience. Much like its religious counterparts, life for the inhabitants of this enclave is strictly regulated, and therein lies its attractiveness to the many seekers of enlightenment who come knocking on its doors. Pilgrims looking to lay down their worldly worries and lead a life of contemplation find their way here, much like real monks and nuns joining monasteries and nunneries, albeit for rather different reasons. 

The grounds of this cloister are littered with cold water pools, where the penitent are encouraged to immerse themselves as much as possible, to purge their carnal sins from their earthly vessels. To ease our way, there is a plethora of contraptions aimed at luring us to stay in longer than is strictly good for you – the favourites being a bouncy hill and a slide of quite breathtaking steepness and height. The kids love it, and only give up their watery self-flagellation when their lips are blue and their bodies shaking. Then we retreat to loungers and allow the sun’s rays to beat us into submission until the cycle is repeated anew.

Penetenziagite…!

 

Of course there are certain differences from a normal cloister. Our cells are more adorned than I’m led to understand is usually the case, and the refectory where we take our two daily meals isn’t exactly an oasis of silence, nor does it feature divine choirs whose hymns allow the spirit to soar – it’s more like a high school cafeteria into which has been let loose a battery of beastly bairns of all sizes. It’s the main attraction for families with bawling baboo– small children, after all, the fact that in this microcosm no normal chores have to be carried out. No cooking, no cleaning, no leaving the premises for any reason at all unless you really want to. Add to that the anestesia provided in liquid form at all meals, and you begin to understand the appeal.

Watching this antropological experiment unfold is certainly an eye opener. The tired look on the faces of so many parents, the way they barely grunt at each other beyond what is necessary to ensure their offspring is fed and dressed and slathered in sun lotion, makes me feel alot better about my own parenting (and previous marital) efforts. The singles I encounter here are universally in agreement that ours is the happier solution.

Overall it makes for a radically different holiday from my last experience of Mallorca, when it was just my brother and I, and we stayed in a hermit’s quarters, walked in the mountains all day, often not encountering another soul for hours – but to my surprise I find this existence does offer me a kind of solace. In spite of the abundance of obese, tattooed and over-cooked humanity surrounding us, and the constant sound of squealing kids, it’s summertime (at a time when my family in Sweden is dealing with seven inches of snow) and the living here is easy. It’s not the kind of holiday I would choose, but it is the holiday the children wanted – bathing, sun and ice cream being their top criteria for what constitutes a good trip – and so I’m happy to enjoy this for what it is, a brief break from my mortal toil, knowing as I do – much like a real monk – that the end is neigh.

Who knows, I might even resort to resorts again in the future.

Having the time of my life


“People’s life do flash before their eyes right before they die. The process is know as ‘living’.”  – Terry Pratchett

I don’t want to come to the end of my life feeling I haven’t accomplished and experienced as much as I might have. In a way, that realisation is the main reason for this blog; by charting my adventures and self-imposed challenges I can look back and see how well I’m doing in this regard. 

This year, I set out to achieve measurable progress in a number of specific areas, and I determined I would go about it differently from what I have done previously.

Whereas in the past I set lofty goals for how many books I should read, how many irregular verbs or piano pieces I should learn – and then not doing it – I now avoid such targets and focus instead on ensuring there are slots in my day for the activities in question. 

This means I plan as much of my time as I can in advance to ensure I get everything I want done, writing a schedule for the day; one half hour is devoted to reading non-fiction, the next to studying French, the one after that to playing the piano, et cetera. 

In fact, it’s the same principle I’ve been applying to travelling; by planning trips in advance – giving them an allotted time – I ensure they get done. I just never thought of using the same principle in my day-to-day life before. 

Now, three months isn’t a long time, but I’m really pleased to report the method of structuring my time is bearing fruit already. I’m not a machine, so the actual time I spend on these activities often doesn’t correspond exactly to the schedule, but even so the results are better than I dared hope for: in the last three months I have logged over 50 hours each of reading, piano playing and French studies, plus 150 hours of workouts. This works. 

In fact it works so well that I have decided to add another activity to the list: chess. I hadn’t played for a long time when a colleague challenged me to a match in February. This rekindled my love of the game, and I haven’t looked back since. In Pemba, I even played a Danish national champion and won 2-0 (he was a national kite-surfing champion, but never mind…).

If you want to play me, I’m on chess.com – improving my game for half an hour every day, as per schedule.

300: a race report

King Leonidas, of chocolate fame.


One of my goals for this year is to run the equivalent of a marathon per week, so why not get an actual marathon in early on, I thought, as I sat on my cozy couch, slightly woozy from the heat of the fireplace and the inner fire lit by a fine single malt. Why not indeed?

One month later and I’m in a pine forest on the outskirts of Genk, in the Belgian rump region of Limburg. It’s cold and has just stopped raining. Looks like it could start again any moment, too. 

There are three hundred of us (the maximum number of participants allowed in the Louis Persoon Memorial Marathon), lined up like lambs for the slaughter, or a band of brothers (and a few sisters), and maybe that’s why, or maybe it’s just the mood I’m in these days, the first of the dystopian nightmare that is the Trump regime, but my thoughts go to Thermopylae. 

The tradition of running marathons comes from the first Persian invasion of Greece, when Pheidippides was sent to tell the citizens of Athens about the victory at Marathon. This wasn’t the Persians’ only attempt, however. They came back for more, and when they did, they came via the Hot Gates (i.e. Thermopylae), a narrow pass through the mountains. 

There, three hundred Spartans under King Leonidas made a stand, and held off an infinitely superior Persian force long enough that democracy could live and flourish. They knew they would perish in the process, but they did it anyway. 

It’s a little like that today. The three hundred of us fight through a seemingly endless onslaught of kilometres, battling it out up and down long inclines, pushing against the waves of oncoming Persian pines, lap after lap. 

The seven laps of the race are essentially made up of three kilometres uphill, then another three back down, both taking their toll. A month isn’t enough to prepare for a new record, and after the (still fairly good) first half, I realise that it won’t happen. I can’t help but feel a little defeated. What’s the point? 

My feet hurt so much from the repeated impact of poor soles against the asphalt that I’m forced to walk even if I could have run otherwise. Dehydration proves another obstacle. I simply hadn’t taken into account how much more you sweat wearing multiple layers, so my muscles start cramping, and when I pee it’s the colour of Earl Grey. Nutrition becomes a problem, too, as I get heartburn, which turns every breath into Greek fire, but thankfully a Pepsid allows me to keep that more or less under control. 

The rain holds off, but the overcast skies stay with us all day. When told the Persian archers were so numerous that their volleys of arrows would darken the sky and block out the sun, the Spartans’ only comment was “then at least we will be fighting in the shade”. I try to channel that super-cool attitude in the face of hardship, but my heart isn’t in it.

But then THAT’s not the way to take on a challenge like this. As the Spartan queen told Leonidas, “Come home with your shield, or on it”; quitting simply is not an option. With that in mind I make it a point to go into these races with three goals, where the first one is – always – to finish, the second one is a reasonably good time, and the third a personal best. 

I’m nowhere near a PB, but that’s ok. I came fairly close to the second, which was sub-four hours, and I reached the most important one. I persevered. Maybe sometimes that’s all one can hope for. We need to fight seemingly insurmountable odds, knowing that something is impossible and doing it anyway, sacrificing for the greater good. 

And whatever doesn’t kill you…

Before and after. No way of telling how bad it was in between…

 
P.S. At Thermopylae there is an inscription in a rock that’s been there ever since the battle. It says, simply, “Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie.”

Words to live and die by. I recovered from the race by eating a whole box of chocolates. Leonidas, of course.

20-20 hindsight 


2016 is coming to an end. It seems not long ago that I sat down to set out the goals I had for the year, and now the time has come to summarise what I have accomplished, and what targets I failed to reach. 

I wanted to challenge myself, have new experiences, travel, go on adventures and develop as a person. Overall, I think it’s fair to say I have. 

I overcame my fear of diving, and went not only to Nemo33, but also on two marvellous diving trips, to Thailand and Malta. On top of that I travelled to Mallorca, Luxembourg, Barcelona, London, Leeds, Edinburgh, Sweden, Rome, Switzerland, and Sardinia, so I certainly fulfilled my ambition to go on adventures. 

I challenged myself in other ways than diving: bungee jumping and canyoning demanded overcoming myself mentally; and taking on not one, but two new roles at work has certainly brought new intellectual challenges and opportunities into my life, for which I’m very grateful. 

I tried abstaining from caffeine and alcohol for a month, and lived to tell the tale; I tasked myself with reading more non fiction as a way of contributing to the fight against the dumbing-down of our society; I try to be more mindful of what I eat.

The main challenge of 2016 however was gearing up for the immense task of running an ultra marathon. It took two marathons to prepare for that adventure, along with untold hours of physical exercise, but I did it, and couldn’t be happier with the result. 

Not everything went according to plan, however: my grand design to develop as a piano player looked set to succeed until too much travel meant having to give up on regular lessons, which in turn left me disinclined to practice. 

The same is true for my ambitions to improve my French – I started out well, but a lack of structure meant I let it slip by the wayside, almost without noticing, and I didn’t read as many books as I planned, either.

I didn’t bike as much as I had planned – the lofty goal of 2000 kilometres turned out to be more than twice the distance I actually covered, and I didn’t participate in any kind of Ironman. I did run the 1500 kilometres I had set out to do, however. 

Oh, and I did write about it all here – no mean feat in itself, either.

So, what to learn from all this? First of all the importance of setting goals. I set out to do something every month, and on average I did, even though some months by necessity were more intensive than others. 

Secondly, the need to have clear-cut, measurable targets if you want to achieve something; having UltraVasan as a goal allowed me to plan what I needed to do to reach that level of fitness, week for week. 

Third, to push beyond your comfort zone. If I don’t, I tend to not get anything useful done, but by forcing myself to face up to my fears I have had a much more rewarding year than would otherwise been the case. 

What I take with me most of all going into 2017, then, is that excellence is a habit. No goal is achieved in one great leap, or overnight, but by chipping away at it, you can do wonders. 

Here’s to making next year a Year of Wonders!

Eating order

It’s December already. Who’d have thought way back in January? I’m still working on my to do list, though, which I guess is a result in itself.

I did say I would try something new and challenge myself every month, and since I cannot go travelling (no more holidays, plus December is a busy month as it is), I have decided to challenge myself at home: I will try to improve my eating habits. 


Now, I already eat fairly ok. No eating disorders or anything like that, but altogether too many carbs, too much sugar – and the holiday season hasn’t even begun yet. So… I have begun writing down every last thing that I eat and drink. Nothing fancy, just a list that I keep in my phone. 

To my delight I find that the act of writing it down is in itself really useful, because I can no longer hide from myself what I’m eating. It’s culinary mindfulness, if you will. Knowing I will have to write down whatever I eat, I hesitate to allow myself treats that I would normally turn a blind eye to, or justify as “deserved”.

That last statement is particularly absurd, if you think about it. You don’t “deserve” something unhealthy for having done good. First of all, you’re not a dog, you shouldn’t reward yourself with treats, and secondly, surely a good deed should be rewarded with something good, not something you know is bad for you?

This one simple act has other knock-on effects as well. Suddenly I’m more keen on vegetables and clean protein (vegan ultra runner Scott Jurek’s book Eat and Run helped with the former, if not the latter!) and preparing meals in large batches makes more sense, since having ready-made food at hand reduces the likelihood of my straying from the path, be it at home or at work. 

So Sunday saw me making oven-roasted sweet potatoes and other veggies and frying up lots of lean chicken, and yesterday I made a double batch of lasagna (admittedly a carb fest, but working out hard you need some carbs, too), and I’m looking forward to trying other stuff as well.


I figure the worst is yet to come – Christmas and new year’s aren’t exactly known for being bastions of healthiness, after all – but I reckon this way I will at least think twice before going Cookie Monster on any of the upcoming feasts.

I’m not going to publish the list itself, but I will let you know if it has any effect. I started this month of traditional gluttony at 83,6kg, which is well above what I feel comfortable with. Changing nothing else in terms of training, it will be interesting to see if this one act of documenting my food intake will have any discernible effect on the scales. Can I get down to my match weight of 80kg whilst eating well and orderly? Well, we’ll see. 

One Challenge without fries, coming up!

 

Sober October

So I decided to quit coffee and alcohol for October. From a habit of five to ten espressos per day and the equivalent of a bottle of wine per week, I would go cold turkey on both. The results? Well…

First of all, actually doing it was surprisingly easy. I taped my Nespresso maker shut just in case I would need an extra second to reconsider in moments of weakness, but those moments never really materialised. People around me were generally supportive, even though they often couldn’t – wouldn’t? – understand why I was doing it. I was worried about becoming a social pariah, but I spent pleasant evenings out in wine bars and cocktail bars without feeling awqward or any need to sample their wares (the Latvian creationist/lesbian porn star/children’s book author I encountered may have been a figment of delirium-induced imagination, I guess, but I doubt it.). I will admit visiting Rome and not having neither cappuccino nor limoncello was difficult, but apart from that I was fine. 

And how did it feel? I had light headaches for a week, and wasn’t able to concentrate too well during those first days – something which my chess partner took good advantage of. But apart from that I was unaffected, really. And I experienced less heart burn, muscle soreness and pain in the liver (although I might have imagined that last one in the first place), plus felt better rested and energetic overall, so that was a big bonus. 

Add to that the pecuniary aspect of easily saving 10€ per week on coffee and twice that on alcohol, and you’re looking at savings to the tune of 1500€ per year, or three roundtrips to the US annually. Not bad as exchange rates go. 

So what now? Should I continue my abstemious lifestyle? I honestly don’t know. I still yearn for that first shot of espresso in the morning, and a glass of Rioja with my entrecôte, and a cold lager after a good, long run in the sun… My problem is I don’t do things half-heartedly, so there’s a risk that one coffee doesn’t remain one coffee very long, and the same goes for drink. So for now, like a good goalie, I think I will just keep the zero for as long as possible. 

Tempus fuggit*

“Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.” G. Marx

This is probably my favourite quote of all time. It contains three undeniable truths, all of them vitally important, yet oft overlooked: 1) your time on this Earth is brief, 2) some things just are, and you can’t do anything about them, and 3) while 1) and 2) irrefutably suck, you might as well try to have a laugh.

So, on this day, the 45th anniversary of my having been born into this world, I would wish for all my loved ones, friends and family alike, to take a moment to consider this.

Done? No. Take another. It’s quite heavy to digest. 

Now. Embrace it. Within the framework just given to you, time’s a-wastin’. So. You are going to die, you can’t change some stuff but you can use as much of your time as possible to do things that make you happy. Do something today that makes you happy. Then do it again tomorrow. And again after that.

 Take a long, hard look at your life and decide what’s worth doing, cause you ain’t immortal, and you’re a long time dead. 

Dare to say fuggit*. Nothing would make you (or me) happier.

Giving Death the Kiss of Life. (photo L. Woodruff)


*Tempus fugit means time flies. Fuggit is a feeble pun. Works best if pronounced like an Italian-American gangster would do it. Fahgeddabahtit. Fuggit.

Power to the people

I might have mentioned that I run a bit from time to time. And like most, when I go out for longer runs or bike rides, I need a dependable source of energy. I’ve got a Camelbak that is just the right size to see me through just about any outing, and there are various energy drink powders you can mix in your water, so fluids isn’t a problem, but I have never really found a solid source of energy that I like. 

There are gels and tablets and goo and bars available to buy, but they all have their drawbacks – they’re too sticky/icky/wasteful or difficult to digest, so I’ve decided to forgo them. Enter Miss Adventure, who apart from being a keen diver/yogini/hiker/biker also is a dab hand in the kitchen. She has been making her own power bars for ages, and kindly let me have her recipe, which I promptly adapted for my own purposes. 

So, without further ado, let me present what I humbly claim is the world’s greatest power bars, easily reproduced in the comfort of your kitchen:

350 ml almond butter

350ml rice syrup

Heat in a large pot on the stow, bringing it to a low boil. To this, add a mixture of:

300g oats

100g each of crystallised ginger, cashew nuts, walnuts, pecan nuts, chia seeds, goji berries, cranberries, coconut flakes, chopped dates, and 1-2 tsk of raw cocoa powder. (For protein powder bars, add vanilla protein powder to the mixture)

Stir it all together until a good consistency, then press into a pan greased with coconut fat, and leave it in the fridge to cool for a few hours, before cutting it into 5×5 cm squares, each containing a whopping 330 kcal, 15g fat, 10g protein each (more of the latter if powder was added, obvs.). Wrap individual squares in clingfilm or wax paper, stuff them in your flipbelt (don’t repeat my ultra marathon mistake!) and you’re good to go for as many miles as you like. 

Oh, and you never tasted anything near as good. It’s got to the point where I now have to work out to compensate for all the power bars I’m eating…! ?

Bokashi – the Way of the Eco Warrior

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You don’t even have to chop stuff into pieces. Unless you want to.

You may have heard of Bushidō – the Way of the Warrior in feudal Japan. It was literally the code of moral principles that the Samurai should live their lives by.

I have a great fascination for that epoch, but today I won’t talk about the Samurai – instead I want to introduce you to an equally venerable tradition from Nippon, namely Bokashi. It, too, encompasses a moral code, namely the most basic principle of ethics we have to live by: give back as much as you can of what you take from the Earth. In a word – recycle. The Way of the Eco Warrior, if you will. Or the Eco Worrier, perhaps.

Bokashi is a composting system that enables users to completely avoid wasting food. I had been looking to find an indoor-compatible compost for several years when I came across it. Having discarded the idea of having a worm compost as being too fiddly (and also likely to leave me abandoned by my family), this seemed to good to be true when I read about it – no smell, no creepy crawlies, and an end product that could go directly into the flower beds without attracting rodents and the like, even if I put fish or meat in it? Where do I sign up?

The volumes of food and leftovers that are thrown away annually in the western world are stunning, and I’m no better at this than anyone else – quite the contrary! – but this type of compost – an improvement upon a centuries old technique consisting of burying scraps deep underground makes me feel almost virtuous about chucking out stuff that’s past its sell-by date, and has made me less prone to harass the kids in an effort to get them to eat up their Brussels sprouts – both decidedly good things.

So how does it work? When you buy a bokashi kit you get two plastic containers (thoughtfully designed to fit under your average kitchen sink) and a bag of Bokashi brans – essentially saw dust enriched with particularly beneficial microorganisms that kickstart the composting – that you scatter a handful of on top your scraps every time you add something to the container. Why two containers? Because once one is full it should ideally be placed somewhere cool and dark to ferment before the process has run its course and the end product can be placed in your garden compost/borders/potted plant. There’s even a handy tap that grants you easy access to the juices that collect at the bottom of the vessel, which can be used to revive any dying plants. Sure, it seems expensive, but given what potting soil costs per sack, you will soon break even.

image

Ya should’ve seen the other guy!

Now I have never in my life gone on record endorsing a product. Normally I don’t even endorse product endorsement, but this thing is too good not to tell people about. So what are you waiting for? Buy yourself a kit, buy one for your dear old mum, or give your loved one a present they will never expect – and if they complain, tell them it will all come up roses in the end.

The Adventures of Spike

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It all began with a dying duck. A mallard, to be precise, that the children had discovered in their mother’s hedge. It had clearly been hurt, and they were very upset about it all, especially Childe One, who has a soft spot for all animals, down to and including insects. This happened on a Sunday, and as their mom was going to be away all week, it was up to me to don the shining armour and rescue the poor critter first thing after school Monday. Shining armour – or rather a big blanket and the cat’s travel cage – stowed in the car we set off, and found the sad-looking thing hiding not a metre away from where the kids had found it in the first place.

It was almost too easy to grab the mallard, its one leg and one wing hanging at odd angles from its body. I realised with a sinking heart that we were going to have to deal with a death in the family, but off we went to an animal sanctuary, where the bird was duly handed over to the volunteers amid furrowed brows and shaken heads. To distract the kids I asked if there other animals in residence, and was told that there were, in fact, four hedgehog babies that the kids were welcome to have a look at if they cared to. You can see where this is going, right?

Three weeks later I’m back at the sanctuary. The news of the duck’s demise has been drowned out by tidings of joy (suitably, as we’re entering the month of December soon): one of the hedgehogs is to be given a new lease of life chez nous. I install a special hedgehog house in the kitchen, and bar the entrance with a couple of planks. The transition is easy, as the prickly little thing is hidden in a bunched-up ball of straw, so I simply lift the whole thing from the cat cage onto the floor and put the house on top.

And there it stays. Not a sound, not a movement for the first couple of hours. Misty the cat comes and inspects the house – essentially a man-made cave, complete with tunnel entrance, and nothing. I wait up until midnight, and nothing. The second evening is different. Spike (as it has been named) emerges, and explores its new environment, stopping along the way to nibble at the pellets I’ve placed around the room. In spite of my presence Spike is totally unfazed, even hiding behind my seated frame – a hedgehog can famously never be buggered at all, after all. That’s only as long as I remain still, however. If I move the spiky one growls at me and rolls into a ball in time-honoured fashion.

We keep Spike in the kitchen for a couple of days, and apart from becoming less and less careful about where to go potty, our less-than-sonic friend seems to settle in well. But of course it was never the idea that we would keep it as a pet, so one day I again lift the entire house and its contents unto the terrace. I figure it will be warmer there, and so hopefully a nice place for Spikey to spend the winter.

Alas, only a few days later when I carefully sneak a glance inside, my fears are confirmed. Spike is gone. Famously prickly(!) about where they hibernate, hedgehogs will not easily accept homes that are thrust upon them – and in fairness, a home that occasionally levitates would not feel safe to most of us. There is still hope, however. The garden does have a shed in the furthest corner, which could easily accommodate a hedgehog underneath it, and since the garden is surrounded by fences and hedges, the risks are limited, as long as it doesn’t venture onto the road.

And so there is little to do but hope for the best. A hedgehog’s greatest enemy is the car, against which it has no defence – indeed, the hedgehog has become endangered in many areas precisely because it’s meandering nocturnal searches for food leaves it particularly vulnerable to traffic. Many people have never seen a hedgehog in any other state than flattened, sad to say. But we have fond memories of Spike, at least, and imagine that one day it might reappear. Until this week, when I’m lunching on the terrace for the first time. Suddenly there’s a stirring in amongst the tulips and aquilegias, and I grind my teeth, thinking that our kitchen compost has attracted rats, in spite of us using a bokashi. But my fears prove groundless, because there, not a metre away from where I last saw it, is Spike, or if not Spike, then at least a very healthy-looking hedgehog, rooting about and occasionally peeping out to check on me.

It’s about twice the size Spike was when we released it, so clearly adult, and doesn’t seem to mind my intrusion, particularly not as I present it with a bowl of lovely mealworms. If it is Spike, it must have hibernated nearby, at least. The kids are super excited, and me, too. I’ve always wanted a garden that is wildlife friendly, and this is certainly an example of success in that regard. Who knows, we might even have a whole new set of hedgehog babies before long…

 

If you want to adopt a hedgehog there are plenty of sanctuaries out there that will happily provide you with one, as long as you have a suitable habitat for them – that means a fairly large garden, preferably quite overgrown and protected, and with no dogs. If at all possible, there should be no way for the animals to reach roads, but that’s almost impossible to ensure. Do get in touch with your local sanctuary. We used Birdsbay, and they are typical in that they rely on volunteers to care for rescued animals. 

Fun, forest, fun!

After a hectic week at work, is there anything better than getting out in nature?

It was a typical April weekend, with clouds, rain, sun, blue skies, hail and snow, all mixed up good, but I managed to spend hours and hours in the garden, weeding my way through the borders until my fingertips ached at the merest touch. It’s a tough job, but satisfying, especially since the difference is immediately noticeable, and besides, this is my favourite time of the year to be in the garden: everything is in bloom, and birds are chirping everywhere.

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From a distance the weeds are invisible. Up close, invincible.

Speaking of blooms, this is also the season for bluebells, and nowhere are they more impressive than in the Blue Forest Hallerbos, near Waterloo, where Mother Nature has seen fit to put on a real extravaganza for about two weeks every spring, when gazillions of the dainty hyacinths turn the forest floor into a carpet of the deepest purple blue imaginable.

We braved the dark skies and went late in the afternoon on Saturday, eyeing the clouds as we drove, but by the time we got there the clouds (and the crowds) had dispersed, and we had the whole glorious display almost to ourselves (Relatively speaking. It’s so popular, and the time of flowering so brief, that there are always people around, but at least we didn’t outnumber the bluebells, which apparently sometimes happens…).

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Why it’s called the Blue Forest is anyone’s guess.

Sunday brought more of the same weather – a perfect setting for my first duathlon, a local race in the English park of Chateau La Hulpe in the neighbouring village, and the stately forest behind it that is my playground par preference. A duathlon combines running and biking, and in this case the set-up was two loops of 2k running, followed by two loops of 11k biking and ending with one final 2k loop on foot.

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Vertigo is normal at dizzying heights, right?

It was a fun way to switch up my long workout of the week, and my experience left me with a newfound respect for mountain bikers – I don’t recall ever having scared when running, but whilst rocketing down steep, narrow slopes on my bike, with other bikers trying to overtake me, I did consider my mortality, and how the impact of an unseen root or a false move could affect me in that regard. Thankfully neither occurred, and I made it through without incident, although getting off the bike to run the last lap was hard, stiff legs and numb bum and all.
This was my first official foray into combined sports, and although it was hard it certainly wasn’t impossible, so it did whet my appetite for more. A quarter ironman triathlon is 1k swimming, 40k biking (not mountain biking tho!) and 10k running – something to ponder, that.
All in all, not a bad weekend of outdoor adventures – both peaceful and less so – right on my doorstep!

Reality check

Most people’s resolutions for the New Year flounder by February. Actually, most resolutions probably find themselves stillborn on January 1st, but even for those people who do honestly try to effectuate change in their lives, habits die hard, and so I figure it is high time I conducted a health check on my ambitions for 2016 and see what happened to them.

If you recall (and even if you don’t, never fear – all is revealed just one click from here), I set out to improve myself in terms of physique and skills and experiences and whatnot. My idea was to have specific targets for each of these areas, the better to be able to track my progress. So how have I fared thus far?

In terms of improving mentally and intellectually, I have been playing more piano than before, and I have been taking lessons, even though these were temporarily disrupted by my teacher moving to Vienna. I’m not sure I can claim to have played 30 minutes per day, though. I listened to the theme from The Piano and didn’t take to it, so am looking for alternative pieces to learn – Claire de Lune is the current front runner, but suggestions are welcome.

On the other hand I have been diligently studying French, and have accumulated a total of 506 words and phrases thus far, which is a lot more than I would have thought. Have I learnt them all? Not yet, but using CardsOnGo on my iPhone has proven to be a really good method, as I can pick it up whenever I have a moment of downtime and go through my lists. To be recommended.

I’ve only read two non-fiction books thus far this year. I experimented with audiobooks, but found the medium not much to my liking – possibly due to having to wear headsets all day at work – so have gone back to analogue books now, and am ploughing through Bill Bryson’s latest even now (I’m writing this in between chapters).

Staying healthy and getting fitter made up the second chapter in my to do-list. I can’t say I have been wholly successful in staying away from alcohol, as it seems intrinsically linked with going out – something I’ve been doing more of this year, too – but I have stayed away from carbs and sugar for the most part, at least.

Working out is an area that’s been, well, working out well for me so far this year. Even with a week of no physical activity whatsoever due to a persistent cold, I have managed to notch up 69 workouts over 70 days, which is a LOT. It’s been mainly running and strength training, as I had the marathon in Barcelona looming last weekend, but I’m hopeful that biking and swimming will enter more prominently into the equation as the weather improves.

Finally, my ambition was to go on adventures and/or experience something new every month. January saw me go diving down to 30 metres in Nemo33, but in February I didn’t find anything new to do. I did take the children skiing in Sweden, which turned out to be more adventurous than we would have wanted, as one of their cousins fell and broke her leg, but it wasn’t a new experience as such*. All the more reason to look forward to Thailand next weekend!

In conclusion then, I don’t think I’ve been doing too bad so far. Some things haven’t materialised quite as I imagined them, but I’m on track, at least. After all, a map can never fully predict a path, merely point out its direction and features more or less accurately. I will be back with more updates later on.

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*Having said that, I doubt even Scott (of ill-fated polar expedition fame) had to coax and cajole his companions into pushing on as much as I and my brother-in-law did when stuck on a wind-whipped slope far from the cottage as the sun started to set on day one. Then again, if his fellow explorers had been ages seven to ten and he had promised them unlimited access to iThings once home, I dare say they would have overcome any obstacle.

Seven Tips For A Painful Marathon

imageYesterday I ran the Barcelona Marathon. The goal was to improve my personal best by over half an hour, from 4h33 to anything sub-four hours. A tall order at best, as preparations didn’t exactly go according to plan.

It occurred to me that with three marathons and one ultra marathon under my belt – all of them marred by difficulties, injuries and insufficient planning and experience – I could probably write something on the topic of how NOT to go about training for them and running them in the best manner possible. After all, every runners’ magazine, web page and blog is already filled with that stuff. Instead, I figured I could provide you with

Seven Tips For A Painful Marathon

1. Overtrain
The importance of this cannot be overstated. There’s nothing quite like showing up at the starting line with a wonky knee, a smarting hip or a stiff back to ensure a painful experience. Acquired through Zealous Adherence to a Plan no matter what (you can follow in my footsteps and go running in primordial goop for two hours on a given day because the Plan decreed it should be so – causing an inflammation to the hip three weeks before D-day) or simply by training too much – nothing like preparing for a marathon by running one, right? – they all but guarantee a torturous outing.

2. Don’t sleep/eat enough before the race
During my last marathon I burnt 3,600 calories, or the equivalent of almost one and a half days worth of calories, so carb loading is essential. Overdoing this might have adverse effects on your sleep, however: having duly inhaled a couple of pounds of pasta and some jolly good Spanish cervezas the night before, I found myself tossing and turning between two and five in the morning, as the sheer quantities of food left me feeling like a beached whale; again something that begets a less than enjoyable run.

Another essential part of preparations if you want things to run smoothly – quite literally in this case – is the application of

3. Vaseline and/or Glide
Imagine you were to suggest to someone that they take a piece of cloth, soak it in briny water and rub it back and forth over their nipple, oh, say, 50,000 times without stopping. All but the most ardent masochists would surely balk at the suggestion, as no other method is more fool-proof in terms of dropping you into the seventh circle of runners’ Hell. To avoid this, apply Vaseline or Glide to all your intimate areas – nipples, crothes and ass (every crack, fold and crevasse), you name it, a liberal dollop of the gooey stuff is the only thing – again, quite literally – between you and utter, agonising, blistery chafing pain.

I’ve been told that those of a female persuasion would do well to look after the seems of their sports bras the same way, but regardless of gender, a top tip is coating your eyebrows with it (preferably before you go to work on other, more delicate areas), as this prevents sweat from reaching your eyes and stinging them like acid rain. Or not, you know, depending on your preferences.

4. Footwear and headgear
In a good story, the beginning and the end are the most important bits. Get these right and the stuff in between will fall into place. And so it is with the body during a race; make sure your feet and head are doing ok, and the rest will follow (it has no choice, really, does it?).

Feet need proper, well-fitting shoes, but since feet swell during a race, and shoes generally do not, you must either run with shoes that are initially too big or wear compression socks that help fight the swelling. Having ignored this in the past (with consequences that are outlawed in the Geneva convention if inflicted upon others), I opted for the latter solution yesterday, and it seemed to work. Having said that, as I’m writing this one of my toes has a pustule that is to normal blisters what Krakatoa is to a pimple, so it’s clearly not a perfect method.

As for the head, wear a baseball cap. It’s going to protect you come rain or sun. Pour water on it if you get too hot, but keep it on. If you do not, you will get sunburn/rivulets of sweat/rain in your eyes/headaches from squinting in the sun, all of which is dispiriting and painful.

5. Don’t study the map beforehand
Almost all serious organisers provide runners with a good map of the race course, and – even more importantly – a topographic outline of it. Ignore this at your peril. In Berlin and Barcelona you can get away with it as the courses are quite flat, but nothing brings your spirits down quite like suddenly facing a seemingly never-ending ascent that you didn’t even know was coming. Also, studying the map will help you avoid social embarrassment, like when I managed to run right past La Sagrada Familia yesterday without noticing, an involuntary faut-pas my proud and architecturally-minded hosts were understandably quite upset about.

6. Run with your heart, not your head
And so you’re finally ready to step up to the starting line. You’ve done your homework and are well prepared, physically and mentally, and know what pace you want to be going at, but once the speakers start blasting music (“Barcelona” with Freddy Mercury and Montserrat Caballé yesterday) and the crowd cries out, you charge ahead, blood boiling, adrenaline flowing, and you find yourself running fast, too fast. Much too fast.

I did exactly that yesterday. I had set my Garmin to alert me if I ran too fast or too slow, the better to ensure that I kept the speed I had decided on beforehand, which would take me to the goal in just under four hours. Due to my inadequate programming skills, however, it only beeped when I ran too slowly. Before I had noticed this I was five kilometres into the race and going almost a minute faster per k than foreseen – a recipe for disaster. I tried to slow down but couldn’t. By ten kilometres I was panicking, by the halfway mark I was becoming fatalistic – it was do or die.

Another thing to avoid is straying from the path; the bigger marathons nearly always draw a line on the ground that demarcates the official length of the race, so professional athletes actually run the distance. Stay on this, and you will, too. The problem is that you are crowded by people, some of whom you will overtake, so walking the line (or more accurately running it) becomes impossible, and inevitably you run longer as you zig-zag through the throng. By the end of the race I had done a kilometre and a half more than 42,195 metres, which is quite frustrating but seemingly inevitable. You can counter this at least in part by running in as straight a line as possible and under no circumstances interact with the audience, but where would be the fun in that?

In fact, I counsel you to do the latter as much as possible, and if you pay for it in sweat and additional steps then what you get in return is certainly worth the price; having whole swathes of the crowd clasp your hand and shout your name as you go past merely because you were the only one of all the runners who gave back something by smiling and thanking them for their support is priceless, and I promise that the pain you felt a moment ago will melt away under the adulation of las zorras.

7. Don’t take pride in your results
What’s a marathon, after all? Anyone could do it, right? Well, maybe they could, but they sure as heck don’t. Less than 1% of all people do. It’s going to hurt, it’s never going to be not painful, and you will walk like a stop-motion John Wayne puppet afterwards, whatever all those articles tell you, but if you embrace it (and maybe heed a piece of advice or two along the way) and enjoy it, there is every reason in the world to be proud and rejoice; after all, you just ran an effing marathon!

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P.S. Did I make it in the end? Did I beat my personal best? Did I do a sub-four hour marathon? You betcha. I improved my PB by over three quarters of an hour and it wasn’t even (that) painful. Which only goes to show, I guess, but what, I’m not sure about.

Antibes, France

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One year ago today I found myself in Antibes, on the French Riviera. I was there to run the Nice-Cannes marathon. Instead of the sunny, lovely experience I was expecting, however, the race turned into a harrowing trial when a freak rain storm hit the coast, turning the marathon into a 26.2 mile gruelling gauntlet. In short, the race turned into an allegory of my life.

Crucified in Cannes.

Crucified in Cannes.

You see, six months earlier the woman I thought I had partnered with for life came home one day and announced she wanted to separate. The mother of my children had fallen in love with another man and that, apparently, was that. We had been together for eighteen years, and not all of them were good, but to my mind we had made the ultimate commitment to each other – having brought new lives into the world that we were now responsible for together – and I thought it would be us ’til the end.

I was wrong.

And so it was that my life was instantaneously changed from the long slog I was counting on – not always great, perhaps, sometimes a downright struggle, but always enjoyable – to a hellish fight for survival, the downpour threatening to drown me at any moment. This wasn’t the cold, quiet rain lamenting a summer coming to its end, it was torrential torture, a vivid, livid, thrashing cat o’ nine tails trying to wear me down to the bone by sheer force, and I raged against it, hating it for doing this to me, for ruining everything I had envisioned. It was by far the most horrific thing ever to happen to me, a sense of falling only to realise that the floor underneath my feet was gone, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

And yet here I am today, back in Antibes. I’ve gone down here on a whim. I briefly considered enrolling in this year’s edition of the marathon (under way even as I write these words), but I’ve realised you cannot rerun a race. What’s past is past. Instead I enjoy a weekend sampling of what the Riviera has to offer: hiking the sentier littoral, eating astonishingly good sea food at the fishmonger’s, getting lost in Old Antibes’s labyrinthine alleys, going to piano bars, drinking absinthe in vaulted cellars and flirting with yachties – the always young and beautiful crews of the billionaires’ boats that are moored in the harbour.

"So this is absinthe? I don't feel a frglgnphprrrt..."

“So this is absinthe? I don’t feel a frglgnphprrrt…”

It’s sunny and warm, the Alps clearly visible in the background, the sky and sea competing for bluest hue, and I thoroughly enjoy my time here. Is it still an allegory of my life? I’d like to think so.

It’s been an interesting year. I’ve launched this web site, gone on well over a dozen trips abroad, and I’ve met and befriended some wonderful people.

I’ve tried surfing and kiteboarding for the first time, I’ve gone rock climbing and diving again for the first time in ages, I’ve run an ultra; at 44 I am probably in better shape than ever before.

So far, so good – at hiding the fact that half the time I cannot be with my children, the two people that mean more to me than life itself. I sit in my house, staring at nothing, doing nothing, waiting for Sunday evening to finally arrive so that I can welcome them through the door and have a sense of purpose once more.

There is nothing I can do to change that. All I can do is run the race as best I can, accept the freak storms of life and hope for sun again further down the path. So as the runners go by the marina, sweating in the heat, I applaud them without envy. All races are different, but all must come to an end.

There’ll be other races.

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Autumnal addiction

I have a confession to make. I am a anthocyanin addict.

Like any addict I can go to great lengths to get my kick. Why, only recently it took me all the way to the northeast of the U.S., but I have spent quite a lot of money on it here at home as well.

It’s a seasonal thing, and this time of year is when my addiction really surfaces. You see, anthocyanin is the agent in some deciduous trees and bushes that turn their foliage a bright red once the temperature drops below a certain level, and I’m a complete sucker for it.

New England

A fix for the aficionado…

Whereas yellow fall colours are simply the result of chlorophyll draining away from the leaf, anthocyanin has to be produced by the tree, and the reason I have to travel to other continents and/or import exotic plants to get my fix is that anthocyanin doesn’t occur naturally in plants in Europe.

The explanation for this is that it’s quite taxing for plants to produce anthocyanin, and that at a time when they would be well adviced to store their energy for the long cold period ahead. So why do these American and Asian trees do it? The answer is to be found 35 million years ago.

After the Appalachian mountains (along with the rest of the North American continent) were torn away from Scandinavia*, the Ice ages affected the evolution of deciduous trees differently. Europe’s mountain chains being mainly west-easterly oriented, they stopped insects from migrating away from the warm south (where they are more abundant), unlike in North America, where mountain chains tend to follow a south-north axis, creating corridors where insects could travel freely.

Trees in North America therefore evolved throughout the years to protect themselves from many of the species that never spread in Europe. Their answer to this challenge? Anthocyanin, a substance that helps ward off insects and protects them against sudden cold spells (which is also happily why red leafs last longer on trees before they fall in the fall).

Japanese acer, chez moi

But can you smoke it…?

So next time you take in the stunning colours of an autumnal garden (be it mine or the entire New England wilderness), you can enjoy your fix – like I do – knowing that it’s an addiction that does both you and the trees a world of good.

 

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*It’s all part of the Greater Swedish Empire, really.

Paris II

September 2015

I’m back in Paris, and for a very specific reason. It’s their Car Free Day Sunday, and I’ve come to test run the Paris marathon, or at least parts thereof, to see if it might be my cup of tea (or verre de vin, as the case might be).

I get there early to soak up the atmosphere and enjoy that particular joie de vivre that is so uniquely Parisian. A freelance colleague has kindly offered me the use of a pied à terre in her possession; it’s in an old Hausmann building, made up of two chambres de bonne – maid’s rooms – where the wall has been opened up to create a bigger space. Bigger is a relative term, of course, as it is still minute, but it feels very authentic and even has the obligatory view of the Eiffel Tower that all rooms in Paris must have (according to movie laws, at least).

We make the most of the sunny weather on the Saturday and take the train out to Giverney, where Monet lived and painted his famous impressionist works (including the water lilies that adorned every other dorm room I ever set foot in as a student). I’m cautiously pessimistic, thinking that September might be the worst of time to visit, but I am soon proven wrong; the garden is overflowing with flowers, different Dahlias in their hundreds foremost amongst them, and the adjacent pond park (actually not a part of the gardens proper) is magical, all bluish-green hues, dappled sunlight, and of course the Japanese bridges (plural – I always thought it was just the one) serving as focal points. It’s only a shame Monet was too short-sighted to do it all justice in his paintings… 😉

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Sunday is carefree if not exactly car free; Parisians don’t like to be without their cars much, it seems, so the car free zone is limited in space and time to the centre of town and is enacted only as of 11 AM. It’s a glorious day, however, and once we get out (using the claustrophobically closet-sized elevator) we make good use of the Promenade Plantée – a disused elevated railway that predates its New York cousin by a decade – to get downtown, where we continue running up and down Champs Élysées, along the Seine, through the Louvre and the royal gardens all the way to the Eiffel Tower and back. People are out and about everywhere, strolling, long boarding, skating, biking and generally enjoying the novelty of not being subjected to the bull run-like conditions that normally rule the streets of Paris.

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For three hours we run at a leisurely pace, and even though we don’t quite manage to recreate the marathon it’s still a very special feeling to run here. My colleague, who is more Fighter than Lover (of running) does show real fighting spirit, and actually runs her first half marathon that day, before sending me off back home again (presumably with a sigh of relief and a groan of pain).

As for me, chances are I’ll be back for the real thing next spring, car Paris (car free or no) l’oblige.

On skiing

March 2015

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Skiing is a strange pastime. You drive endless hours to get to a mountain somewhere, dress up in outfits that make you look like the Michelin man in a space cadet’s armour, only to let yourself get literally dragged into an environment that is as harsh as any you’re likely to find; an ascent into hell.

It’s the Greek version, an icy inferno, featureless save for the stunted, gnarled trees that the relentless winds whip into submission, like howling demons tormenting the shadows of dead people. You assume the foetal position, curled up in the lift, questioning your sanity for submitting yourself to this torture, your extremities going blue in the whiteout, and then suddenly you’ve reached the summit, and it all makes sense as you enter a powdery paradise.

It’s Fifty Shades of White*, and you might as well be blindfolded as you hurl yourself down the slope, your body moving instinctively, hard steel against sinuous curves, skis caressing the snow, nothing existing but the sounds and the feeling of your body against the land itself.

It’s elemental, exhilarating and exhausting, and it’s over in a matter of minutes, only for the process to begin again. Insane? Maybe, but they say being in love is temporary insanity, and I’m in love with skiing.
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* Like all good SM-relationships, you get as much out of it as you’re prepared to put into it, but this mistress doesn’t take any crap; one false move and you wipe out. Or so I’m told.

The South West Coast Path, England

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First day of hiking. Getting out of Falmouth proved more difficult than expected, as gale force winds meant ferries didn’t run as scheduled (and made the ride all that more interesting once on board, with coast guard helicopters suspended in the air above us).

The path, once we got on it at Place (the place is actually called Place, and I’ll leave it with you to imagine how bored a city planner has to be before naming a place Place), wounds its way along the coast, hugging that thin strip of land between the fields and the rocks below. The vegetation is surprisingly lush, with brambles, ferns, nettles, sloe and strangle weed forming a dense thicket on both sides, scrambling over each other and intertwining, sometimes closing over the path. Thorns snag you, nettles sting you and brambles trip you up, and you feel resentful towards the vegetation – the National Trust would be well advised to rename the path Sleeping Beauty’s Castle Gardens, I muttered – but then suddenly you come upon a clearing, and you realise that you’ve been walking next to a sheer drop of fifty metres or more, and that yon vegetation has been the only thing between you and becoming as one with nature. 27 kilometres of that today. More tomorrow.

Day 2

Set off from Portcoe into a sun-kissed and decidedly surreal landscape. Normal rules don’t apply: Gulls sailing on the thermals quite some distance beneath you, long abandoned mines right on the water’s edge (They mined for tin here, and the seams apparently often ran out underneath the seaboard. I can all too easily imagine the strange and above all short-lived moments when a gallery suddenly turned into a giant lobster tine.), and sometimes when you round a bend a whole stretch of the path will suddenly be gone, replaced by nothing but vertigo.

They say it’s due to flood damage and erosion, but sometimes the trail cuts so deep into the top soil as to create a virtual fault line (Nature gently reminding us it’s important to deviate from the norm on occasion, since if you just follow the beaten path and perish it will be your own fault…).
Add to that the soundtrack to my journey, as belted out by the Teutonic Titan trailing behind me (a medley of Sarah Bernardt and Meatloaf), and you will understand why I started to look for Alice in every rabbit hole we passed. Or maybe it’s just dehydration. Well, that’s nothing the publicans around here can’t rectify.

More ramblings anon.

Day 3

Someone pointed out to me that I was a tad harsh when describing the landscape yesterday. I still maintain that the downs are deceptive – it’s easy to think that those gently undulating hills are gentle, but all that means is that you are constantly ascending or descending. Add to that a never-ending supply of stiles (in a nearly endless variety of styles) and you have the mother of all obstacle courses.

But I’m happy to concede that the climate is heavenly. It is surely no coincidence that Project Eden is located in Cornwall – we missed it by a mere four kilometres today – but there is also the rather older endeavour of a similar ilk, which we passed yesterday, namely Caerhay, the 150-year old Williams family estate that harbours one of the greatest magnolia collections in the world (we missed the display by a mere four months).

You can understand why the Williamses got hooked. Magnolias – flowering trees so old they were around in the Jurassic – thrive here, and it’s easy to see why. When you descend into one of the hidden vales, wedged in between steep rocks, as I have just done, the air is thick with chlorophyll, dappled sun light makes the mist rise and palm trees and outsized bracken make it even more primeval, to the point where you might even believe that those rather large chicken are in fact velociraaaaAAARRGHH—–

Day 4

Ok, so I fibbed yesterday. I wasn’t devoured by dinosaurs, but I had a close encounter with a chicken Tikka Masala (ancient Hindi for Innards Wrenching) that Spielberg wouldn’t have managed a PG-13 rating on. Interestingly though, apart from that most British of institutions, the Indian curry, there is very little sense of Cornwall feeling British. The Cornish are a proud old people who had their own kings long before the Normans and the Saxons came along, and the Cornish flag (silver cross on a black field, since you ask) is prominently displayed most everywhere. The Union Jack is conspicuous only by its absence.
The Cornish have their own culture, as evidenced by their cooking – we live on Cornish pasties (not a derogatory term for sunbathers but a kind of meat pie) and Cornish ice cream – and their own language, which makes place names utterly incomprehensible, and which is spoken by the locals. “I speak it well enough when I’m drunk and mad” as one meaty fellow put it.
Against this background you’d be excused if you suspected the authorities of being a tad nervous. In fact, from Henry VIII’s buttered fortresses to the contemporary artillery firing range which we will pass through in a day or so, the subtle message may well be, look, we’re good guys, protecting you from the Roman Catholics/Romanian plumbers, but these cannons pivot, see, we can turn them around too, nifty, eh?
So far it seems to have worked, but if the Scottish secede, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Cornish were hot on their heels.

Day 5

Today we were going to hike through the Cornwall Army Range, Propelled Artillery and Rocketry, Cornwall. Those who have been following my slog log will understand that this held no fears for me; at least British officers and gentlemen will signal before trying to blow you away so as not to inconvenience you unduly.

The same cannot be said for the weather, which is notoriously fickle. I have an uncanny ability to get it wrong, too. Once I suggested we sit down and enjoy the sun only to have to make a mad dash through the brambles to seek cover from a thunderstorm under a rocky outcrop (which we then promptly discovered had been split asunder by lightning at some point), another time I hadn’t finished the sentence “I think it’s going to rain all afteno—” before it was sunny again. But I digress.

The reason I was keen to see the C.A.R.P.A.R.C. was that oftentimes no man’s lands of this kind become a haven for wildlife, and I was looking forward to seeing an abundant – if slightly shell-shocked – fauna. Imagine my disappointment when it turned out to look remarkably like the many golf courses we have passed on the way. (“Look, links!” I would cry each time, to which my German companion would reply “…und Rechts!” Oh, how we laughed. Entertainment is scant on the trail.)

It is to be hoped the armed forces perform better than the golfers we have seen, though. A thousand years from now marine archaeologists trying to piece together clues from our long-lost civilisation will gather that these golf courses were cult places where Nimby, the god of denial, and Exxon, the vengeful god of greenhouse gasses were appeased with gifts of small, white spherical objects placed in sand pits in their hundreds.

Day 6

We arrived in Plymouth last night, and after the idyllic scenery of the last five days it’s vast urban sprawl was a shock to the system (although the gin helped), so we couldn’t wait to get out of there. Even so, it took us the whole morning to traverse the harbours and docks – the best thing to be said for it is that it’s easier on the feet than on the eyes.

Plymouth is otherwise best known for another group of people keen to leave it; the Pilgrims set off from Plymouth on the Mayflower over 350 years ago. Their importance is vastly overrated – in fact they only became known to the general public through the publication of a poem that got most of the facts wrong – but whatever else they were, they were comically inept. They didn’t pack a single plough but several tea cosies, and between them they had neither a doctor nor a carpenter. (The one important – but oft overlooked – thing the Founding Fathers did right was to bring along Founding Mothers… At least they realised women would be necessary to found a colony!) They would have been well advised to take a leaf from the book of Francis Drake, who was not only a privateer and swashbuckler extraordinaire, but also mayor of Plymouth. It was from here he set out to vanquish the Spanish Armada, but when he got knighted for services to the crown (the aforementioned armada and – allegedly – buckling the royal swash) he got out double-quick, headed for balmy Devon. And so do we.

Day 7

Two features of the coastal landscape strike me as almost magical; rivers around here are all tidal, meaning that twice a day they simply disappear, leaving a natural causeway that extends for kilometres inland. If you arrive at one, as we did today, you have only to wait, watching the water drain away as if someone had pulled the plug on the world’s greatest (and grimiest) bath tub before you can ford it. Or you plough through the stream long before it’s safe (why yes, we ARE quite gung-ho, thank you for noticing!).

Islands on the other hand are easy to imagine as little paradisiacal microcosms, untouched by the rest of the world. Of course estuary islands are sometimes reachable by foot at low tide, such as Burgh island at the end of today’s hike, which is also a.k.a. Agatha Christie’s inspiration for the setting of And Then There Were None (formerly Ten Little Niggers), her best murder mystery.

Mewstone island, just off the coast of Devon, which we passed yesterday, is much more inaccessible, in spite of being just off the coast. In 1744, a peasant convicted of a petty crime was sentenced to deportation to the island for seven years(!). One imagines the local magistrates may have favoured another bestseller, namely Daniel Defoe, whose eponymic hero’s exploits had been published in 1719 to huge popular acclaim.
So much for islands being idyllic!

Outro

And so my journey’s at an end. Instead of lacing op my boots and setting out on the trail, I find myself on a train bound for London.

Having never tried sustained hiking before, I didn’t know what to expect, but I’m glad to say that it has been a great and very meditative experience. In total we did 200 km this week, and climbed up 8,800 m and down again, or the equivalent of 25 Empire State Buildings. Now, the South West Coast path is 1,050 km altogether, so I haven’t done more than a fraction of it, but – to paraphrase the ebullient Bill Bryson – I hiked it in rain and sun, I hiked it on the beaches and on the cliffs, I hiked it laughing, I hiked it crying, I HIKED the SWC.

The lasting impression of the coastal path is one of great natural beauty, and it’s surprising to me that there were so few hikers on it. (Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy we were alone most of the time, as the experience wouldn’t have been the same otherwise!)

The one person I couldn’t have done it without, whose adventure this really is, who was on the trail two weeks before I arrived and still will be for two more after I’ve gone, is my staunch hiking companion Florian. You set me on the path and pointed me in the right direction and for that I owe you. Happy trails!