Paris, or at least the Eiffel Tower

I promised way back when that I would write about my trip to France. Of course it has taken me close to a month to sit down and write about my trip. This was definitely a business trip as I had very little time for sightseeing. I didn’t have a car or a window of time larger than an hour at a time to get out. I was in Paris for a training conference to join my company’s Environmental, Health, and Safety Internal Audit Team. I have mentioned before that I started to work for a French owned company in the middle of last year. Their corporate offices are in Paris, just blocks from the Eiffel Tower. My hotel was located about halfway between the tower and our offices. You can see the relative locations on this map. The red line is a rough course of my daily runs. I would do 2-3 laps around the gardens each day I was there.
I arrived on Monday and had about 4 hours to roam before dinner with the group. Had I known how much I would be able to visit the Eiffel Tower the rest of the week I would have been better served to try and get to the Louvre, Notre Dame, or the Arc de Triumph that afternoon. But no, I went to the Tower and walked the grounds all the way around, roamed a little into the city to the west, and came back along the river. This is probably the best of the pictures I took that day.
I was in class each day from 8:30 am to 6:00 pm and then would meet the group for dinner at 7:00. I squeezed my daily runs in that 6:00-7:00 pm window before dinner. Luckily it was actually meet at 7:00 in the hotel lobby for drinks, leave for the restaurant at 7:30. Since I wasn’t drinking, it was a good excuse to avoid the awkwardness of that social time to say I had to get a run in.

Although I didn’t see many sights, I did experience France in other ways. The food was excellent to say the least! I took a picture of my lunch one day because I got such a kick out of what they considered "Fast Food". Our lunch was brought in each day on these trays with food superior to 95% of American Restaurants. For dinner during the week I tried several different meals including: escargot, duck, "flat fish", and beef sirloin. Each of those was top notch. You add the yogurt, fruit desserts, excellent cheeses and breads, chocolate mouse, and other pastries to the mix, and I was in heaven. All the running in the world didn’t stop me from gaining several pounds while I was over there. Oh well, when will I get the chance to do that again?

As for some of the other pictures I have: of course the tower at night and a picture of me, at sunset, with the tower in the background taken from a deck at our corporate offices. I really didn’t get to see that much else. I saw the tunnel and monument where Princess Diana died so tragically. I saw the Arc from my taxi but wasn’t fast enough to get a picture of it. Same thing for the mini-Statue of Liberty they have commemorating the building of the real one given to the US. I did find it odd that the French don’t have a single TV channel with English programming like they did in both Spain and Hungary when I visited those countries.

All in all it was a great experience but one that left me wanting more. This is yet another place that I will return some day with my wife to share that experience with her. And for all the time I spent in and around the Tower, I never went up, because that is an experience I want to have with her.

Return to Racing

Well, I had to get back in the game and force myself to start running races again so I will resume my regular running routine. So I signed up for a local 10k, the Jog for a Cause. The race had many benefits, close to my house, supporting a cause (cancer) that has been more important to me lately due to my brother, it was a 10k instead of the more common 5k races offered, and it was not too far out in the future which got me off the couch and running back in mid-February. The race had some unforeseen downsides however that made it quite memorable. It ended up being the Saturday morning after I returned from France (blog with pictures to come soon) on Friday, so jet-lag had me quite messed up. Jamie’s grandmother passed away on that same Friday so we hastily planned a quick trip to Indiana the following Monday. And lastly, it was SNOWING and 22° F when the race started.

All of these challenges added to the experience and perhaps to the disappointment of the result. It’s not that I did terrible, it’s that for the first time I ran a race and didn’t meet the goal I set for myself. My hope was to run sub 50 minutes. The only other 10k I had run was a trail race last fall which I ran in the 54 minute and change range and I figured I could cut the required amount based on this being a road course and relatively flat. Of course, when I ran the trail race last fall I was in the height of my Half-Marathon training and this time around I have only been back running sporadically for roughly a month… Anyway, suffice it to say, I didn’t run sub 50, I came in at 51:43 which is a 8:20/mile pace. Not bad and a personal record for the distance, but not my goal.

The course is a 5k loop around a shopping center and subdivision that you run twice if you are completing the 10k race. I had run the course for a 5k once before with not the best of memories (remember the pinched butt episode?). But the hardest part of the run this time around was the weather. Not only was it snowing and cold but we had 30 mile an hour wind gusts and I swear I was running into the wind all the way around that loop!!! The final mile to the finish line was into a stiff wind that felt like it was blowing me back each time I took a stride. I had to squint my eyes to keep the blowing snow from getting in them. What a memory…

Anyway, it was good to get back in the saddle. I’m aiming for a race a month leading up to a Marathon towards the end of the year. I’m sure I’ll miss a few months here and there but that is my goal. As for my overall results in this race. As I said before, 51:43 was my time. That was good enough for 62nd out of 270 for the overall results and 9th out of 25 for the 35-39 year old men. I should have stopped at the 5k point as my 5k split time would have given me 4th in my age group… If you want to see me running you can go here and search for bib number 249… The pictures are copywritten so I can’t copy and past it into my blog... Happy running to all of you.