People in Different Countries Don't Think Highly of Each Other

Yesterday I bought myself new running shoes at a store around the corner from sis-in-law's house which she had recommended to me. Very nice, very snazzy with a little running machine (treadmill, my kids remind me it's called) in the corner with a video camera mounted in front of it to capture your stride and all that.

I got nice shoes, I'm very pleased with them. But why I'm writing is that the helpful salesman was very scornful of my shoe inserts (very expensive, made specially for me after a whole foot-measuring thing in Bloomington). They're hard plastic and stop just below the ball of my foot - they're to help with the bunions, left one had been particularly painful in the couple of months before we left Bloomington.

So he said scornfully, next time you get inserts, don't get them in the States! We have such nice soft ones here, and they don't stop at the ball of your foot, and they're orthopedic (I'm thinking, what does he think mine are?).

And here's the part I was laughing to myself about: the podiatrist in Bloomington, when he heard I was off to Berlin and therefore he could not just drill into my feet then and there (thank you!), made a point of telling me a story about a guy who came to him after coming back from Germany where, according to my podiatrist, he had his pinky toe amputated! So Bloomington podiatrist said: whatever you do, don't go see a foot doctor in Berlin!

What's a girl with feet going to do? 

(For the record, my bunions have been fab and totally non-hurt since I've been wearing the fancy unwieldy unyieldy hard plastic inserts. Thank you, Bloomington doc. [There is a recurring pain on the left foot, just opposite the dormant bunion and a little further toward my ankle, top of the foot on the far left, that seems to be there as an echo to the memory of bunion pain.])

Oh, and p.s., of course hubby has had all kinds of tooth trouble, like a crown falling off, and the dentist here was shocked (shocked!) at the root canal work that had been done underneath it in the States and is redoing the whole thing. But as far as I recall in the past, hubby's U.S. dentists had completely dismissed everything that had happened in his mouth elsewhere before (Iran, I think, but also Germany). So you see what I'm saying.

The run was great, I'm so glad I did it!

So I did the 10K run yesterday. Felix went with me on Friday to sign up, and he was wondering why I should pay money to go run with a bunch of people, and I thought hmmm, maybe he's right.

But in fact, it was so great, and so very different from going out the front door and running by myself.

First of all, on the way there, there were, as I got closer and closer, more and more people carrying the plastic bags with "asics GRAND 10 Berlin" and "12. Oct. 08". In fact, when I first got into the train and looked for a spot to sit, I found one opposite a friendly-looking older man with just such a bag. So we talked about the race - I felt a little nervous because it was cloudy, overcast, threatening to be chilly, but I hadn't brought a jacket or sweatshirt because I was nervous about messing with checking clothes there, and also I didn't know how it would work to start with a warm-up jacket and take it off later and then where would I put my big running number (6622) with the microchip in it, on the warm-up jacket or the shirt or what?

So this guy was much more warmly dressed than I, and it turns out he runs in lots of such races (I'm going to guess he was about 65 though it's hard to say, maybe he was 70?), and he's from Postdam which is next to Berlin and told me about some races there, and I mentioned that in Bloomington they all seem to be more like 5K and he said yes, he's way too slow for that distance.

So as we got closer, and switched trains (I followed him - I had been planning to switch to a bus per what I found online ahead of time but was glad to be advised otherwise since a. buses are harder to find and b. in retrospect they were surely not running there since the streets were blocked off for us!), more small and large groups of people - pairs of 30ish women, older guys, younger guys, apparently quite a few women my age, some women with little kids - were accumulating in the various train cars, and when we spilled out at the last stop and walked the final 15 minutes to the starting place, we plastic-bag-carrying runners-to-be were all there was.

At the huge plaza in front of the Charlottenburg castle I said goodbye to my Potsdam friend and went and stood in a 25-minute line to go to the bathroom. Then I stood amount thousands of other people and did fun kicky stretches to loud music from the stage, and worried a little about where I was supposed to stand/start/be. But I asked around, and I was in the slowest section, so that was OK.

We started off, and the people behind me were pushing ahead, which was fine, and I was just trying to keep my own stride, my own usual pace, in mind, and not get swept into something too fast (in Bloomington in the one 10K race I was in, I started out a lot too fast for me and was in trouble later), and very soon I found a woman in a light-green shirt that said "Frauenlauf" (women's run) something-or-other, and she had a wonderful pace, and super even, and I decided to stick with her.

Also, while standing in the eternal line for the porta-potties, I had finally realized/figured out that 10K is not 7.2 or so miles, as I had been thinking, but actually more like 6.25 miles. So it wasn't going to take me quite as long as I thought. But I still thought it might take me at least 80 minutes or so (about a 13-minute mile).

So there I am, jogging along, and thinking OK, don't look at the pedometer yet, don't look at the time yet, when you see the first 1K mark then check. Well, there was a big sign with a "2" on it before I saw anything else, and I thought, it can't possibly be 2K yet, there was never 1K and besides we haven't been going that long! But I checked the pedometer, it said I'd been going about 14 minutes, so that was a 7-minute kilometer, which sounded fantastic, and we'd already done 2K! 

We went past the Siegessäule (I guess it's maybe called the Victory Monument in English, something like that?), and into the huge park around the zoo, and then in through the zoo as well. There were people lining the roads most of the way, clapping, or doing little dances or drum things for us, or using noisemakers, or just watching and waving. Along the Road of July 17th on the way to the Siegessäule there was a guy sitting in the open back of his parked station wagon, with his big light-yellow lab sitting next to him, and they were watching us go by. He had his hand on the lab's head - I wasn't sure if the lab was antsy to get up and join us and go after us, and he was reassuring and restraining him, or if they were just being companionable while watching. 

Anyway, the kilometer marks flew by. This is a huge advantage of kilometers over miles, I must by. They go by an awful lot quicker. And my light-green lady with the glasses and the short brown hair and the wonderfully steady, unhurried, unpanicky pace just kept going, and I kept going with her - when she would pull a little ahead I tried to pull ahead too (I was afraid she was just going to take off at some point); sometimes I pulled a little ahead but she pulled up soon too. We exchanged one smile early on when something happened (oh, there was a loud announcement behind us that the white Mercedes van that was trying to cross across the blocked-off road where we were all running should please desist - there was something comical about it, and we looked at each other and smiled) but never said anything until maybe kilometer 5, when we were already in the zoo - it got a little narrow there, and I said something to her to that effect.

The zoo had been touted as a big attraction, and when I signed up at Mercedes World there was an overhead screen showing scenes of going through the zoo with the animals on either side - but in fact, all I saw was ducks while we were in the zoo. But there were little kids watching us as another attraction (rhinos! ducks! thousands of sweaty grownups running by!), and one very short small wooden bridge with 3 people in bright yellow vests posted there to warn us the bridge might be slippery. And on the way out of the zoo a grandmotherly woman on a bench who greeted and was greeted by my light-green lady warmly, as though they might know each other.

We went past the Gedächtniskirche, the double memorial church (old bombed-out but left-up one, new fancy modern one) on the Ku'damm, old fancy street now left behind in the city's eastward gravity shift. Around kilometer 6 they gave us plastic cups with water, and I took one and drank a little and tossed it in the recycling. Light green lady actually stopped to drink hers and I thought oh no, I'm on my own now, but I ran ahead, trying to keep the even pace, and she soon caught up with me and I looked at her and said "Ah!" happily (second utterance between us so far). Then shortly after sister-in-law J showed up and surprised me, even though her foot pain was still bothering me she went a couple of blocks with me which was a very nice thing. I told her I couldn't lose my light green lady which of course light green lady could hear me say, so it was now explicitly acknowledged that I was keeping along with her.

All this time I was checking my time at the kilometer marks I could see (never saw 1 or 7 but I think I saw all the rest) - pretty much a teeny bit over 7-minute kilometers all the way through, something like that. 

At mile 8 my light-green lady stopped to walk! I thought oh no, here we go again. But I'm forging ahead. But she must not have walked long because soon she caught up to me again.

At mile 9 I started making my legs go faster (btw, light green lady had a very different stride from me, much shorter more frequent steps - I couldn't match her stride so we never had that kind of synch, but we stayed alongside each other in spite of the different strides) - and then all of a sudden light green lady took off much faster. So I followed her (at this point we're going up the fancy, impressive, double-sided avenue leading back up to the castle) and suddenly I saw my two boys' faces peeking out right at the finish gate - which was thrilling! I actually knew they were planning to come but somehow I wasn't sure they were going to make it, and I was surprised by how very happy it made me to see them there.

So I went zooming through the gate, stopped to talk to the boys, remembered I wasn't supposed to linger and told them I'd come around, went and found my light-green lady and high-fived with her and said how great it had been (I'm not actually sure she ever said anything at all to me, but I know she can talk because she exchanged a few words with the grandmotherly lady at the zoo, and she was certainly friendly). I probably should have exchanged names and numbers with her because she would be PERFECT to go jogging with, but I blew it. (I think I might even know her name because she came in right before me and the lists of people are online; but not sure how to take it from there.)

Anyway, I never even realized for several kiilometers of the race that she was wearing glasses, because I was a little behind her. But once I did, that endeared her to me even more, because I was wearing mine and fussing about it a little (ever since they fell off my face while I was jogging with my spouse and he wasn't able to stop in time to not step on them, they have been a little wobbly and I was working hard to make sure they didn't fall off face again). I was wearing my bright purple shirt with the bright blue glasses - I'm guessing that for light-green lady I was also a point of reference.

So here are the final numbers:

3721 people finished the race (I was #3586, so not the last or even next-to-last, though obviously definitely out there with the slow people).

1390 women finished and I was #1301; 218 women between 45 and 49 finished and I was #205 of them. 

And my time was 1 hour, 11 minutes, and 21 seconds. So 71 minutes.  (So for 6.25 miles, those are 11.4-minute miles, approximately.)

Which is great! I'm quite sure I don't go that fast when I'm by myself, but it was in fact perfectly comfortable. I think I'd like to go that fast more often; and I'd like to do more such 10K and longer races. 

(Also, yesterday, by the time I went to bed, the pedometer registered over 31,000 steps - the most ever so far surely. We went for a long walk with friends in the afternoon, and there were also 4 15-minute walks getting to and from the race - one 15-minute walk each from home to the first train, from the second train to the race, and then of course back again each.)

baby blogs?

not as in blogs about babies, but as in babies of blogs. Like offspring. Like offshoots. I was thinking I'd like to go into really, super excruciating detail about, say, what I eat, why I eat it, when I eat it, what its points are, how the whole weight thing connects up.

And I'd like to go into really excruciating detail likewise about my jogs, though there's not quite as much there to report.

But anyway, I thought this would be a huge bore to anybody out there reading this. Maybe. So first I thought I could do a thing where, say, Tuesdays I do the food and weight watcher blog; Wednesdays I do the jog blog; Fridays I do a poetry blog (a poem that pulls together all the many long masses of words in the previous week's blogging); maybe Saturdays a family blog and then Mondays a what's-ahead-for-the-week blog? Concentrating on writing plans but also everything else?

But the alternative that I think maybe I like more (or maybe it isn't even an alternative, maybe it's just something I can do in addition) is to add blogs, which appears to be easy as pie here on google even if they do occasionally threaten to shut me down, and even if it is hard-to-impossible for most of my friends and family to comment here (sorry about this! I promise to look into what's involved!). 

Anyway, so I could have one whole blog where I just write about what I'm eating and the points and why and how and when and where and all the relevant stuff. Might not be of interest to anyone in the universe except me, but it would be of interest to me and others could peek in. 

And another blog with the jogging.

And another blog with the planning, including writing planning. (I have even thought, on and off over the last few days, about working on my novel as a blog - how unbelievably transparent would that be!? - but I don't think I quite dare.)

Etcetera. 

So that's the thinking for today. I could still do a resume in this blog once a week of each. But especially the food one I'm thinking could be very good for me indeed.

So that's the thought for today. I want to write to some old friends today in various places and mention the blog to them - Nadine, Catherine, Adam and Nina, Kim, for starters. (That's south of France, Bloomington, New York, Hamburg.) So hi to youse guys (and Boo, I'm going to send you your own link today too). And Ruthy in Austin and Cynthia in Berkeley, if you're still reading, love to you both too.

Love to all my people. Emotions are raw and up and down. Yesterday a big (what? explosion? breakdown? not sure what to call it) anyway, lots of tears. Dear hubby was patient and helpful and was able to name what I think I was coming to but not so precisely, namely that I haven't been accomplishing anything, haven't been having successes, and that is not very satisfying! 

When I write this blog it makes me happy, even though I am also embarrassed by some of the stuff I write and have written. When I write other stuff I'm happy too. So I am going to work on the writing.

Signing off now!

finding my stride? the jog blog

oh I'm not having a very good day. It's 4:30ish p.m. in Berlin on Friday afternoon as I start writing this, a holiday here because it is the day of German Unity, and my children have united themselves in getting on a bus to Hamburg to visit their grandparents (my mother-in-law is much better, thank you), and their father has united himself with his bicycle (I am still almost completely divided from mine, though the built-in lock whose key was lost, thereby grounding the bicycle for a month, has now been sawed off - but that's another story) to go check out the Holocaust Memorial and, in the former East Berlin which is of course now part of the great glorious united capital, the German Museum.

That all sounds fine of course, but we started off on the wrong foot this morning and it has taken me all day to try to get back. I want to call sister-in-law #2 who had hip replacement surgery day before yesterday; I want to read more things online and start more books; I want to write e-mail to various dear friends, and call Cynthia, and think more about my novel and how planning the novel is and is not like planning a trip for my family (really!) - but I thought maybe a jog log blog would be the right thing for me right now, sort of emotionally neutral and yet finally very positive, so here goes.

Since the jog I last wrote about there have been several short jogs. And then there was yesterday's. But patience! In order:

last Saturday, 54 minutes, glorious weather, first half hour or so with hubby and then a little farther on my own

Tuesday, 50 minutes, 7400 steps (a little slow, should have been 7500 or more), cold, really quite cold, the first half hour or so. My fingers were very cold. The main interesting part was that I was jogging back along Berkaer Straße (which leads past a post office, which I had vaguely noticed, and several sort of shopping areas, and two big supermarkets, and some administrative centers) - anyway, I had jogged out along Berkaer and was jogging slowly back home and passed a woman who sort of said to me as I jogged past her, are you going to go past the post office? I wasn't actually exactly sure, I had a vague memory of having passed a large yellow building or rather a large building with bright yellow boxes and signs (generally the giveaway in this country), but I wasn't sure, so I said yes, but then I said where is it? She said up there, and pointed. So I said yes. She said nothing. So I said, did you have something you'd like me to mail for you? (I actually said "should I "reinschmeißen" something for you", i.e. should I throw something in for you.) She said yes, please, that would be fantastic. I took the postcard she held out, said happy to do it, and off I went. Then she called something after me, and I had to turn around to hear: You see, she said, I'm going to the school (I guess I was supposed to know where the school was and how that would prevent her, but it didn't matter to me, I was happy to jog the thing forwards). 

So I took the postcard along, I decidedly and assiduously refrained from looking at it because that would have been rude and robbing her of her privacy, and I tossed it into the mailbox (I did look to see whether it needed to go in the "Berlin zip codes" slot or the other one, and to tell you the truth I don't now remember which it was), and I jogged happily home having struck one for humanity and connectedness - in truth I did nothing of the sort, she made the gesture but I was tickled to be part of it!

That was Tuesday. I was warm by the time I got home. Also after that I went to Weight Watchers, and all was fine, and I will post about that as soon as I can.

Then came Thursday, which is yesterday, and here is what I am very pleased about: I jogged for 120 minutes. 2 hours, hooray. 17728 steps, again a little slow, should hve been 18000 (or put another way, that distance should only have taken me 118 minutes - but again, if I put it that way, wasn't all THAT slow - for me).

And Diane, no butterfly lanes for me this time, or red pine paths, or cicada ways. I did finish up with a trot out and back along the Path of Everlasting Woods, but before that I went jogging through city streets, very decidedly urban. 

First I jogged Felix to school (he was on his bike, as usual; he went an hour later than usual because they were going on an outing and not to class), then up and along Hubertusallee and curving around a couple streets and hitting Bismarckallee above Johannaplatz, very pleased that I knew where I was and headed out along it thinking to go towards town, and finally finding myself back at the crossing where Felix always hits the button to get a green light to cross - I'd gone the wrong way, towards home and not towards town.

Got myself turned around, went urbanly jogging, through Rathenauplatz where the huge sculpture in the middle of the 6- or 8-way juncture is 2 large sixties-style cars embedded in concrete (one nose down, one pointing out), across the S-Bahn (Schnellbahn, = fast train - it's the other intraurban train system here besides the underground U-Bahn) tracks, and then along those same tracks for a long way along Seesener Straße (just somebody's name I think) and then curling back, just before hitting Hohenzollerndamm (Causeway of the House of Hohenzollern), crossing over Westphalian Street and Brandenburg Street at some point, and crossing the Ku'damm, the Kurfürstendamm (Causeway of the Electors!), Berlin's once-beloved and touristy and now rather rundown but still touristy artery leading to the Memorial Church and the zoo - anyway, I crossed the Ku'Damm a couple of times and I won't go into all the streets I went down and up because there were a lot of the time, but I thought as I jogged, I do have to reassure Diane it wasn't all butterflies, red pines, and cicadas this time. 

I was pumped. I was psyched. I was actually kind of tired by the end but not so tired I couldn't have gone another half hour or hour, I'm pretty sure, if there had been somebody to cheer me on. So I came home and googled runs in Berlin, and there's a 10K a week from Sunday, and a 9K through the woods in November, and another 9K through the woods on New Year's Eve and a 4K through the Brandenburg gate on New Year's Day - and Jenny might fly in from Bloomington to join me in the spring for the half-marathon in April or the 25K in May!

One at a time. I asked sister-in-law #1 about doing the 10K with me next weekend; she joined a friend for the last 8K of the Berlin marathon last weekend (jumping in as an unregistered runner is called "schwarz laufen" - "running black" - a takeoff on "schwarz fahren" I'm pretty sure, which is riding the bus or subway without a ticket) (fyi I'm quite sure this is not a racist expression but referring rather to going under the radar, i.e. unseen, i.e. in the dark . . .?) - ANYway, I asked dear s-i-l #1 and she was a little dube, also because she might be traveling down to visit s-i-l #2 at that very time, who will still be in the hospital recovering from her hip replacement surgery. So we shall see. 

Thank you so much for listening. I'm pleased about yesterday's jog. And Susan, inspirer of my pedometer, I can tell you that the total on the pedometer yesterday was 28981. I think I might have done more one day in Berkeley in the summer - it was Max and Kate's last night before going back to Bloomington, and after jogging and walking I guess during the day we went out for sushi at night. Felix was on his crutches still, and the first place we went was closed to kids as of 8 p.m, so we were going to go much further, so some went home for the car to drive him and get the wheelchair I think, while others of us just walked and walked up to the gourmet ghetto. That night I also walked around the block with Max for a little while before going in for the night, to have a little one-on-one chat and PUSH THE NUMBERS UP FURTHER. And yet, and yet - I gained weight that day in Berkeley.

Yesterday, post-jog, which all by itself of course pushed the pedometer numbers pretty high, I also walked to the grocery store and back with my weight vest on, and walked up and down the stairs a bunch of times, and walked over to the main building of this institute and back for a fancy dinner for the fellows and their families. And I didn't gain weight. but I might be today.

Feeling so much better now. Time to call my little sis-in-law.

lost in so many ways

For my sister, something hopeful.

For my father, some numbers.

For my mother, something to amuse, entertain, engage, I hope? and maybe some more numbers.

For my friends in Berkeley, a shoutout; for my friends in Bloomington, another shoutout, and a wistful plea.

For my husband, a little gratitude.

For my sons, a wish.

For my family and old and new friends in Berlin and the rest of Germany, some yearning and some German.

For myself, some English, some hopes, some reminders.

Some of the streets I ran along yesterday:

Koenigsallee (where I live)

Alte Allee

Falterweg

Rottannenweg

Zikadenweg

and my favorite:

Dauerwaldweg

aka

King's Boulevard

Old Avenue

Butterfly / Moth Path (literally Folder Path - fabulous image, I love it, of the wings folding closed)

Red Pine Path

Cicada Path

and the fabulous Eternal Woods Path, or Lasting Woods Way

And all the ways I am lost:

• unable to participate in the rich life I left behind in Bloomington, missing my daily wonderful routines and my daily wonderful friends

• unable to be my full round(ed) self in this German language I am so proud of mastering but so clearly not the complete mistress of

• not in synch with dear sister-in-law, mother of adorable niece, hard to connect timewise

• so far out in the woods we are (see above street names), all of glorious Berlin tantalizingly just too far to just pop out and about. Everybody suffering from this to varying degrees

• what am I doing? till at least last week: gaining weight, floundering in my household, unable to focus on anything really, fighting with spouse, floundering floundering floundering

And all the ways I am found:

• wonderful to read poetry with Felix this morning, home sick from school but glad to hear excerpts from Hunting of the Snark and Edward Lear's Jumblies and The Spider and the Fly; also told him sick elephant jokes

• looking forward to breakfast with Anja and Alexander next week

• husband and I had a very hopeful meeting today; sometimes he surprises me with his forward looking abilities

• found my right Weight Watcher meeting on Tuesday; sticking to daily points so far (OK, Tuesday not; Wednesday and Thursday yes, totally; today so far I'm 2 points over but I might still be able to work on that exercisewise)

• jogging, hooray! Here are a few of the promised numbers: 94 minutes yesterday, I think it was 7 or 7 1/2 miles, 14220 steps (I figure 150 steps/minute is my good (slow!) jogging pace, and that would have been 14100 so I'm over). This is a great jog for me. Hubby couldn't come along this time. I worked on the novel in my head (see next item).

• novel: it's taking shape in my head! So far I've only talked to Felix about it, and I wrote to Ellen M. about maybe writing to her about it. I don't think I want to blog about it because I will lose privacy but I'm very happy because I think things are happening there. 

Dear hearts, I meant to keep this first post short. Ellen has already read some of this. The pounds and kilos will come later (believe me, there are lots of them). (OK, OK, here they are:

mornings nights

(these are kilos: multiply by 2.2 for pounds)

F 19 82.3 ?

S 20 ? 84.9!

S 21 83.4 85.1!

M 22 83.6 85.0

T 23 83.7 85.3 (went to Weight Watchers)

W 24 ? 84.5 (it's already working!)

Th 25 83.1 83.3 (and more so!)

F 26 82.3 not there yet

Mommy o'mine, the amusing things will have to come later. Was that everything? Here are some things I might should write about:

Felix's school's parents' info night

going places on the bus

the way I shop (I'm quite a sight)

things I wish:

I was walking or jogging in Berkeley with you, Lyn and Diane

I was walking in Bloomington with you, Susan, and you, Beth and Alex and Sue and Jenny and Ellen

(and with you, Cynthia, either where!)

I was drinking tea with you, expectant Sarah

I could be a picture of calm in all dealings with my husband

I could presto change-o make our dwelling be somewhere more in the middle of Berlin, closer to the bakeries and cafes and Turkish produce shops and subways and LIFE

Reminders to myself:

stay calm

a writer writes; to be a writer, write

I have to put my own oxygen mask on first

I can count my points till the cows come home; if I don't stop eating when they run out, it won't help much 

There. I didn't try to make this make sense, just jumped in. Wish me luck, wish me CALM, wish me productivity and domestic bliss. Wish my mother-in-law recovery from illness.