Auswanderer Quatsch

Nürnberg being a “relatively small” city, I can start running directly from home ; and in a matter of few steps (ok big ones, like 3-4km) I’m in the countryside. But the problem is that it’s mostly flat. Real flat I should say. It’s actually so flat that I had to search for a spot to do some hill repeats and the only one I found is the Imperial Castle’s hill, right in the middle of the old city…

Today, with -10°C outside and a gorgeous blue-sky day and nothing to do, I decided to take the car and drive for a while and search for some more challenging terrain to play on. 35 min later, I was on my 10 toes, deep in the snow, already smiling.

The place I went to is actually the same as in this post. A small lake tuck between three small hills, 200m altitude difference. Perfect place to go rollercoasting.

I started by following a small road going slowly up on the same hill I went to with MmeV. After a while, I caught up a trail going in the trees but it soon started going down again so I decided to go vertical and hiked the hill straight, zooming by fox and / or rabbit holes, only to reach the top panting, feeling my heart in my ears. When I finally reached the top I took a small break to get the portrait above (couldn’t have been so hard to leave me smiling like that now could it?) and enjoy the view. There I followed a path for a while, the exact same we took with MmeV. last time but decided to cut short and avoid the trouble we had already back then when there was no snow of finding the trail in the woods.

So I took a sharp 270° turn and started heading down on the other side of the hill, letting gravity do its work and only try to control the descent as little as I could ; arms spread out, almost shouting as I ran. When you see the patch of ice on the left picture below, or the small ravine on the right you can imagine how fun it was (I really mean it) – I was smiling the whole way down.

When I reached the town, I spotted this sort of stony stuff reaching out of the trees (picture left) on the opposite hill ; and naturally set it as my next target before charging the hill straight again.

This time I kind of followed a trail, or at least something that looked like it. It was steep and forced me into hiking it half of the time, but it was definitely gorgeous.

After some point, the trail and its markers were clearly going right but I knew I had to go left. So I followed somebody’s footsteps going in the right direction. And I finally reached the right place…

… and its very nice view. Just to locate things a little, on the picture below right, my car would be something like 1.5 km further behind the hill, following the road going right. The hill I charged first was the one you can see on those two pictures. On the left picture you can see the way down I followed earlier (the patch of trees that seem to get inside the village a little) and the village I crossed.

From there on, it was mostly rolling down, enjoying the last 6km, trying to find my rhythm after power-hiking that hill and just enjoying the rest of the trip. With the sun setting, shadows getting longer, snow slowly becoming yellow, it was just a very nice portion of the run.

I reached my car after an 1:30 hour, ~12km and 250 m altitude up & down (you can see the map, profile and stuff on Runkeeper). I guess that if Nürnberg and Erlangen’s surroundings are going to be good enough for my evening runs, next weekend, if the weather is ok, I’ll drive somewhere to get my feet on the trails again…

One year, 365 pictures and a whole baggage of experiences added on my back later, I’m back, proud to have finally closed this important project that flew me across that strange year 2011. The year was incredible for a lot of personal reasons, top of which stands of course MlleV. becoming MrsV. All in all, I’m happy to have this year summarized in 365 pictures.

This project was really interesting. I started out bluntly, still a bit dozed from the new-years-eve party, maybe not fully realizing what I was putting myself into. But retrospectively, what I really wanted to do with this 365 was to try and get rid of the “opportunist-photographer” in me, the one that takes pretty landscape pictures and frame nice monuments and instead start improvising with less funky subjects, start being creative.

Somebody once told me something like An amateur photographer can take marvelous pictures, sometimes way better than a professional but mostly out of sheer luck. A professional will know how to create such an image and his pictures will be at least constantly good. This is exactly what – I think – the 365 is doing to its photographer: put him in a state of mind where he doesn’t know anymore what he should or could take ; where every object around him has been taken once and he doesn’t see his next move anymore. Then he will start considering new angles, make new things out of old and start being creative, not just opportunist.

The first wording I used for my intro was “… this important project I decided to inflict on myself”. While this sentence was too harsh – and that’s why I removed it - I wanted to use “inflict” because it was not fun everyday. Some days I had ideas, some days I went to bed to suddenly get up again realizing in a flash that I did not have my picture yet. And sometimes I went to bed to realize it’s past-midnight already ; so I posted a picture taken a couple days before or one I took the next day.

On the other hand, at many occasions I reached this state of mind I was looking for, a real lust to look around through those photographer eyes and see the world as a succession of potential pictures. When this happened, I surfed on this wave for as long as I could and gathered as many images as possible. But more often than not, it was the multiple reminders I set for myself that were the ones to push this state of mind on me. I wish I had created a little permanent studio in our flat to be able to play with light on a subject I have always at hand (myself) like a lot of 365-ers do.

This 365 made me realize some things about my cameras as well. I barely took the reflex out “just not convenient enough”. I used the Lx3 quite a lot, but not as much as my iPhone. This is really something that stuck me hard: mobile photography has helped me express myself throughout the whole day, take pictures of irrelevant day-to-day-things and try to make something out of it. On the other hand, I used a lot of filters from Camera+, not always for the best (huhu what did I have in mind taking such a pic?). I guess the camera will be a very important part of the decision-making process for my next phone after all (for the french readers, lense.fr published a very nice article going in this direction called “Photophonie, les 5 lecons à en tirer“).

Well, that wraps it up for 2011 ; you can have a look at all the pictures on flickr. Obviously I didn’t start a 365 for 2012, but I’ll be sure to plan a PADC with Ghusse this year. Thanks for watching, thanks for commenting, thanks for reading and happy photo-crafting in 2012!

The color leaves can take is simply magical. This weekend, we went for a walk/hike in the Frankische Schweiz (actually it might be already the Oberpfalz… but that does not really matter) to admire the splendid colors of the countryside in this season. As you can see we were not successful at all :]

About 40 min driving from home, we finally parked in the middle of nowhere, in search for the beginning of the trail. After successfully not finding it, we decided to head straight into the tree line and head for another section of the trail that should be higher up and easier to find. After crossing some fields and electrified fences, we finally reached the woods where the early sun peaking through the trees  made a plain magical atmosphere…

The leaves cracking under our shoes, the silence of winter, no car passing by, no other hiker (there is a lake nearby so all the people tend to gather there and avoid the surrounding hills). Just plain nature. What a blast.

The hike was maybe 2 hour long ; barely more ; but going up and down, over gravel roads and pathways, wood trails and fields… a variety of landscapes bathed in red tones.

This weekend marked also the first signs of frost and this morning we woke up to a nice and cozy -5°C. During the hike, all the shadowy places still hidden from the sun were still frosty and the zones warming up were displaying a very light fog that created some sort of surrealistic ambiance.

The last part of the hike, we decided to head directly into the woods and avoid a part of the trail that would be following a road. In this last wonderful part of the hike, we crossed ways with 5 deers… probably also enjoying a Sunday hike.

Some seasonal details…

I’m looking forward to next weekend :]

First of all, and because I realized how unspectacular the sand hill picture montage looked like… and because Mr.T (a colleague of mine) provided me with this wonderful “other side of the hill” picture! Here’s how it looked like from… the other side of the hill (warning: this post is sponsored by “Whining&Co” and “SelfCentric AG”). This hill came right after the second muddy-pond, which came right after the aid-station.

This now said, you can understand how I looked like when I finally set foot on some finally-flat ground after climbing the above-described hill… and how I looked like jogging down from it! At those times, the only thing I thought of was my running form, stance and the way I landed my feet on the gravely road in order to clear my head of the negative-thoughts.

Another place where MrT. got a shot at me was at the aid station in the middle of the 5km loop. Looking at the clown face picture and the one where I’m busy thinking “fuck this shit, what am I doing here” you can imagine those were taken at 2.5 and 7.5km… but no. In fact those were taken at a few moments interval… and the clown face is obviously the fake one!!!

After that, it was just running, thinking only about the next obstacle and my running stance. But just for the scenery of it, here’s my arrival at the end of the race, climbing up the very last hill toward the finish line… too absorbed by making-just-another-step too realize that it’s almost over :]

All in all, did I say the race was great? And it made me break the 10km limit for the first time since almost 3 years (but that’s another story to come). I’ll be there next year… if not earlier ;]

This weekend marks a milestone in my “running career”. After a tad more than a thousand days off, I finally took part in an official race again (the last one was the Winter Waldlauf in Erlangen on the 1st of April 2008): the Wolfsman Run in Zirndorf… and it was gooood :]

Let’s put this straight: this-is-no-normal-race. Following the example of the so called Warrior Dash or Tough Mudder or Strongman Run, the Wolfsman run is an a new obstacle race that happened for the first time this weekend in Zirndorf, near Nürnberg. The race is simple: 56 obstacles (28 per loop) going from sand hills to mud ponds, beton tubes to crawl inside, haystacks to climb, tires stacks to stumble into, rivers to cross, metal containers to climb up and down, jumps over all kind of obstacles and of course constant ups and down hills (part of the race took place on a motocross loop) etc. all this spread over a 10 kilometer race that you should run as fast as you can.

The start was done in two phases: the alpha wolves start (solo race) first and the pack start (people racing in groups of 5 and helping each other) 20 min later. The race was built of two 2.5 km loops that crossed at the starting point and that you had to run twice. That means that you had to do each obstacle twice… but also that the race was at most a few hunderd meters away from the starting point and that you had almost always people cheering on the side of the track.

The race started nicely… for the first 200m. After stepping onto some tree logs, we went down 10 m to climb them back-up almost instantly (this actually became a constant: whenever the track could go down, they made us storm down, turn 180° and climb back up right away). A few mud ponds later, we reached the the first artificial hills: 5m drop of sand followed by some beton tubes to crawl into (outch my knees) and a 10 m sand hill to climb back up (there was a rope on the side to pull yourself up, and thus preserve some of the energy you might still need for later – but still some people did not want to wait a bit for a free spot on the rope and crawled their way up in the sand… some of which paid that dearly afterwards). Then came the river (100 m running in 20 cm water), the tractor-tires-stacks and the first pond (breast deep with about knee deep light mud at the bottom to prevent you from walking correctly in there). After climbing on some containers, crawling under an army truck, climbing two cars and crawling under a laid-flat fence we finally reached the first aid-station… which means the first 2.5km were over.

This is me coming out of the aid station… surprisingly alone… nobody to see either in front of me and in my back. I even wondered if I took a wrong turn somewhere.

At the end of this downhill path came another pond. This one was nicer, way less mud, way easier to walk into. Following the pond came another sand hill. No rope this time. I could have stormed it up, but I prefered to get down on all fours and climb it slowly while trying not to burn too much energy. After that, the track got nicer for about a kilometer ; some grass and then 1/2 a kilometer on a street. That’s when I noticed that my shoes (5fingers) were full of sand.

Speaking of shoes, it was also the first official race with my 5fingers ; and the longest run with them was well. Everything went fine and I’m very happy I ran with them instead of some running shoes. There were quite a few other VFFs in the race. I noticed a small dozen. I think the VFFs must have felt lighter after being soaked in water, mud and sand. But on the other hand, some paths were really stony and I had to constantly pay attention where I step, bend my knees and be ready to drop in case I landed on a bad stone.

The rest of the loop was not so fun. A few mud slopes that forced me to walk up. Tractor tires to crawl through and were really “edgy” for the knees. Another knee deep pond to rush through. An uphill crawl that was not fun at all (specially during the second loop when the earth was now completely wet) and a hay stack that almost broke my leg (my foot landed between the hay and the rope holding it while I was climbing down – thankfully I was being cautious and I did not thrown my self forward too hard… so I could twist my leg when I realized I was being blocked). Other than that I came back safely to the start and at the second aid station, ready to start it all over again. That was 5km.

The second loop was a bit calmer ; at least I was not disturbed by anyone on the obstacles, I could take my time on some of them (when you have to climb up a ladder and try not to trip on something before jumping 2m down in a sand bucket for instance ; somehow, this goes very well when you’re fresh, but becomes a bit harder when you cannot think straight anymore). I used the short running pieces to concentrate on my running form, try to get my pulse back to a reasonable pace and try to feel my body to see if – closing on the 7km – my feet problems would come back.

The second part of the second loop was the hardest, but I had some reserves. I think I would have had enough for a third loop – endurance wise – but the explosive part of me wasn’t there anymore. Over the last kilometers, I was rejoined by two runners, which finished a few seconds before me. You cannot see it, but on the left picture here under but you had to climb up a 10m steep hill to reach the finish line… that killed my finishing sprint… but not my smile :]

All in all, the race was really fun. Lots of nice persons running and helping on the side. Nice people at the aid stations. Very nice track ; I mean not nice for the heart, but very well designed so that each could get his own tempo and that almost nowhere I had to come to a halt before an obstacle. I also had a top notch supportive team consisting of MrsV, her brother, her father and a colleague of mine (two of the above will be partaking next year I can tell you – they already regretted not participating this year)!

About the results, I took part in the alpha race and finished 41/204 with a very honest 67 min. I did not have any feet issues and was very happy to run in 5fingers! That was the good choice. Here’s a mug-shot of me right after the finish: muddy, wet, smelly but happy and with already a beer in the hand :]

Rendez-vous next year Wolfsman, we might even have a pack of colleagues by then!