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)!
Most people are familiar with the concept of a Catch 22 – even those who haven’t read the novel by Heller know that it’s a somewhat absurdist law, literally catching you out, forcing you to do something you don’t want to and/or refrain from doing something that you do want, no matter what.
Life can be a little like that; who hasn’t felt trapped in a job or a relationship because you didn’t see a way out? Regular readers know that I like the idea of achieving, of experiencing, of expanding and improving. Or maybe it’s the opposite that scares me; stagnation, resignation, wasting what little time we have. Either way, I often feel that I don’t do enough, and I think that many might feel the same. There is a bit of Catch 22 in this, too; you don’t do anything to pursue your dreams, because pursuing them risks exposing them for what you fear they are: dreams.
But: big dreams stay dreams because you don’t divide them up into manageable chunks. You want to circumnavigate the world, but you don’t because it’s too difficult a thing to plan and execute. You want to get rich, but you have no idea how, so you don’t even try. You want to sing like Adele and write songs like Ed Sheeran, but since you probably can’t you don’t even sit down at the piano.
However, break it down into smaller pieces, and suddenly it’s feasible. I have a colleague who is traveling the world one country at a time, and he makes it look easy; he went to Machu Picchu over a long weekend, he did Australia (the civilized corner) in a week. Granted, it’s costly to travel like that, but what I take away from it is that you can see a lot more if you do many little trips than if you sit around dreaming about going on an extended world-cruising, continent-hopping holiday that somehow never materializes. I don’t think I want to go to South America for three days (I fear the jet lag alone would turn it into a mescaline trip), but the principle is sound.
The same goes for anything, really. Take finances: I never really had a plan for money beyond avoiding going into red, but I’m slowly starting to change that. And it’s the same thing there: you can’t turn into a finance wiz overnight, but you can read up on, and invest in, a LOT of things that over time will (hopefully) net you substantially more money than if you just leave whatever is left at the end of the month in a savings account.
As for healthy living, again, no one can expect instant fitness – it takes more than one gym session to get ripped, alas, and more than one healthy meal to live forever, cruel and unjust as that is – but if you set a weekly goal of not eating anything unhealthy except on Sundays, say, and working out a little (20 minutes, the length of a sitcom) every day, then it doesn’t seem quite so impossible to attain.
It IS important to be accountable to someone tho, as this increases the likelihood you’ll go through with your ambitions. So, here are my goals and how to reach them in -22:
– I will do a minimum of one trip per month to places I’ve never been – city weekends, short hiking hols, bonsai road trips, what have you,
– I will try to double my savings over one year. I have a figure in mind, but even if I don’t reach that I will actively try to improve my knowledge in this field,
– I will get fit – defined as 80kg body weight or less, and/or fat percentage of 18, and use the above mentioned template as my starting point,
– I will read at least 20 non-fiction books, or a little less than one every two weeks, on top of the Blinkist ones I’m already reading, and report them to my fellow jolly readers,
– I will learn a new piece of piano music every month, for a total of twelve.
I have other ambitions too, like more paragliding, bee keeping, sauna building, gardening, chicken keeping, et cetera, but these are easily visualised, and easy to quantify and report back on, thus keeping me (hopefully) on the straight and narrow.
Here’s to seizing the day, and making 2022 a good catch!
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.”
At the outset of every year I pause and think about what I want to achieve. This year was different.
Or rather, I wanted to make sure that I would be more likely to achieve my goals, so I resolved to be smart and make ’em S.M.A.R.T.– Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound.
Did I succeed? Yes and no.
Chess: ✅ I played every day for a month and got the rating I had set my mind on. (Then promptly lost it.)
Reading: ✅ One non-fictional book per month. Done.
Piano: ❎ I did play, but didn’t learn as many pieces as I had hoped. The temptation is to stick with the ones you know…
French: ❎ I didn’t learn anywhere near as much as I had planned, mainly because I had to focus on Danish.
Travel: ✅ I went to Morocco, Egypt, the Seychelles, Norway, Italy (thrice), and Denmark (plus Sweden), which is less than usual, but still acceptable, especially since Egypt, Italy and Norway was with the kids.
Fitness: ✅ The year was marred with injuries – first recovering after the paragliding incident, then a wonky neck, a messed up Achilles’ tendon, a tennis elbow, and finally a slipped disk – so running and biking and swimming suffered. I did manage the Paris marathon, and a runstreak of 100 days, but I’m nowhere near the distance goals I set myself for runs and biking. Nor did I learn to crawl, but I’ve racked up some 100 gym sessions, including an ironstreak of 40 days or so, which has meant three or four extra kilos’ worth of muscles.
Challenges: ✅ Apart from the aforementioned run- and ironstreaks I’ve successfully given up coffee, tried intermittent fasting for a month, I’ve become vegetarian, and I’m currently on a no sugar diet, so that’s gone well. Less well went my attempt at keeping a diary – I kept it up until Denmark, but then fell out of habit, unfortunately.
Work: ✅ I added Danish to my language combination, and continued working in Communications. In addition to that I MC’d a couple of conferences using participatory leadership, which was fun, too.
Blog: ✅ I increased my readership quite spectacularly this year (from just shy of 3,000 readers to 5,500, and from 5,000 views to nearly 10,000), which is really gratifying.
So. What worked and what didn’t? Some goals turned out to be insufficiently specific, such as “learn a piece of music”; others were unattainable due to factors beyond my control (the fitness targets) or had to be downgraded in terms of priority (French, when I was paid to go learn Danish), but overall it’s a sound principle, and one I will continue to use in 2019.
Now all I have to do is decide what those goals should be…
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!
On Monday I was supposed to receive a medal. It’s one of those traditions the purpose of which I don’t understand: you get one after twenty years as a civil servant. But it isn’t merit based – everyone gets one. All you have to do is stick with it two decades. That made me think.
I never really made a considered career choice. I got very lucky in that my coming of age corresponded with Sweden’s joining the EC, as it was then. My training made me a good candidate for the job of interpreter, and my knack for languages ensured that I made it through a training programme many failed.
After that a job was guaranteed, and so I took it, because it was interesting and well paid, and my then-girlfriend-later-to-become-mother-of-my-children-and-ex-wife was also offered one, we moved in together, and the rest is history.
Only…
Twenty years on, interpreting isn’t interesting any more, as there are no new challenges, only variations on well-known ones. Happily, I’ve been able to do other things for the last couple of years – working as a journalist, writing speeches and scripts for commercials – but now that’s coming to an end.
And so the question arises: do I really want to be nothing else but an interpreter for another twenty years? The answer is obviously no, but then the real question is, what do I want to do instead?
Write. Be creative. Travel. Experience. How best to combine these things? Well, being a blogger is one good way of doing it, obviously, but it doesn’t pay – for me, at least. They say to have three hobbies: one to keep you in the money, one to keep you fit, and one to keep you creative, but I’d like to combine the three, if possible. The Japanese concept of Ikigai is a better model: the point where what you love, what you’re good at, what you can make money doing and what the world needs intersect, that’s where you should strive to be, because that’s your ikigai, literally your reason for being.
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.
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?
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!
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?
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!
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… 😄
It’s fair to say the year ended on a bum note. Things don’t always go as planned. But what of the rest of the year? Time to look back and reflect on what went according to plan, and what didn’t.
But for the butt injury, I might have had a sporting chance at reaching my distance goals for running and biking (averaging a marathon distance per week for each), but realistically that was too much. I did do that much on average when at home, but traveling got in the way, and that lowered total mileage significantly. Need to set more realistic goals, especially with next year’s runstreak requiring time every day.
I did my first ever triathlon – an Ironman 70.3, and the result was better than I had hoped. Still not sure whether a full-length one is worth the trouble, but maybe… saying I did half-something jars my soul!
I didn’t lift weights, swim or do yoga anywhere near as much as I had planned. I did some, but found it difficult to fit it all into my routine. Will have to find another balance to make it all work. And actually learn how to swim.
So much for fitness. I didn’t read as much non-fiction as I would have liked, but what I read was good. I’ve played a lot of chess and piano, and studied French, too, but I’m still not sure how to measure progress here. I know I am progressing, but how to tell? The system of dividing up the day into half hours to ensure that things get done works, at least, so I will continue doing that. And only watching Netflix when I’m on the stationary bike will kill two birds with one stone…!
Travels and challenges, then? I certainly travelled a lot, and two themes emerged: island hopping around Africa, covering Pemba, Mallorca, and Madeira (following on from Malta), and hiking in the alps in France, Bavaria and Sweden (ok, so we don’t have alps, but parts of Bergslagsleden were really hilly!). Add to that the two(!) trips to Andalusia – once to see Alhambra, and once to learn how to paraglide – and a nice long weekend in Paris, and you have what I would deem a pretty good year of wanders. More of that, please.
Lest I forget, the year has brought some wonderful new people into my life, as eclectic a bunch of characters as one can hope for: an Argentinian telenovela starlet in Tanzania, a Scottish philosopher in Spain, my own personal stalker, a Phillipina philanthropist, a Swedish ultrarunner in Amsterdam… in fact, if I were to write a book about them all it would probably seem outlandish, which brings me to my last point: this blog.
I’ve continued to write throughout the year, about everything and anything, from great tits to particle accelerators, and my readership is steadily increasing (visitors up 25% (to 2800+) and views up 50% (to 5500+) at the time of writing), something for which I’m immensely grateful! It’s humbling to foist your words on people and have them not only actually read them but also come back for more. So thank you, dear reader. I hope you have enjoyed the ride this far.
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!
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.
So far this year, I’ve been smashing personal bests (PBs) running. I am training hard, and it shows. One kilometre, five, ten, half marathon, all those distances have been crushed. But the Big One remained. The marathon. And so I signed up for Amsterdam marathon, knowing that it was flat and that I’d have a good chance of improving my PB of 3:46 from Barcelona.
42k is a long distance tho. Anything can happen that will throw a spanner in the works. And it seemed everything that could, would.
The railway decided this weekend would be a good time to do maintenance, meaning I wasn’t even sure I’d get to Amsterdam. In the end I managed to puzzle together a route that is best called scenic, as it took in most of the Low Lands, criss-crossing this corner of Europe the way Moses “led” his people through the desert – it shouldn’t be possible to take so long to cover such a short distance, but six hours later I finally stepped off a train in A’dam.
As for lodgings, the Airbnb host I had picked out cancelled with less than a week to go, leaving me homeless. I had a couple of panicky days – even considering online dating to find a place to stay – but in the end a colleague came through for me; he had a friend who lives in A’dam who was likely going to run the marathon as well, and if I were willing to sleep on a mattress I’d probably be more than welcome. Yay!
I wrote the guy, Tobias, and he offered to take me on. It turns out we have another friend in common, namely my sister’s running coach, the reigning 100k world champion runner. This made me pause, and after a little digging it turns out my host-to-be was fresh back from having run his third spartathlon (that’s 268k under the Greek sun), so he “wasn’t expecting to win the Amsterdam marathon this year either”. Yeah, you and me both, brother…!
So when we finally met up for dinner the night before, it was a great dollop of humble pie for me with a side dish of sushi, but he was just as pleasant as can be, and we got on fine, with me trying to (politely) pick his brain on how on earth he manages to do those races. Another mate of Tobias was visiting from Spain, and it turned out Johan and I had a more similar level of ambition; I figured anything between 3:30 and 3:45 is possible, and he wanted to beat his wife, who had done 3:37, so we decided to go together.
The race day starts out well enough: we bike through the deserted streets to the Olympic stadium, where the start and finish will be. A nice surprise is that Tobias works for TCS, the company sponsoring the marathon, so we get into the VIP tent in the middle of the stadium rather than having to stand in line for toilets and clothes storage with the hoi polloi. The weather is beautiful, too. Crisp autumnal air, not a cloud in sight, perfect temperature. 3:30 here I come! Or so I thought.
And so at 0930 we set off, with me leading through the outskirts of the city centre, sticking to between 04:50 and 05:05 per k – easy as anything. Right? Wrong. It worked well enough for the first 26 kilometres, running along the canals and then out along the Amstel river and back for a tour of the affluent countryside, with barges being used as floating DJ booths, and hoverboarders cheering us on from on high above the water. I even knocked a minute off my PB on the half marathon distance. But by then it’s getting warm, and the decision not to bring any water doesn’t seem so great any more.
Best made plans of mice, men and marathoners… Before long, calves and quads are protesting, and threatening to cramp up. By thirty k I can no longer keep my 5min/k speed up. Johan has long since disappeared. Around me, more and more people stop and grimace as muscles seize up. The only thing preventing me from suffering the same fate is the little baggie of salt my ultra marathon-running sister has taught me to bring along on longer runs. Dipping a finger tip in the bag and licking it off is all that’s required, and it works fine, but it’s not a miracle cure – it can’t do anything to prevent armpits and nipples and even more private parts from being rubbed raw against sodden, sweat-drenched clothes.
And so I trudge on. I try to do maths in my head, to see what it will take to get me to the finish in this or that time, but it’s no good. The kilometres take longer and longer, and it’s only bloody mindedness and sullen determination that enable me to continue. The crowds are good, quite supportive and enthusiastic, or at least I think they are; I hardly notice them beyond one point where the smell of ganja is particularly heavy in the air.
It’s funny, though. When the stadium finally comes into view. I straighten up and find untapped resources, enough to overtake quite a few runners and finish strong. That’s how long it lasts though. I hobble into the VIP tent and get a massage – the only thing standing between me and a full body cramp – or so it feels.
Tobias ran the marathon in 2:58 – two weeks after Spartathlon! – Johan fell prey to the heat (in spite of living in southern Spain!) and couldn’t beat his wife, and I, well, I didn’t get anywhere near 3:30, but I still improved upon my old PB with five minutes. It certainly felt good after the DNF at the X-trail! And of course, once reunited, we immediately said we’d do it all again next year. I’ll be Amsterdamned!
…and it’s time to summarise what’s happened this far 2017. As has been the case these last couple of years, I set myself certain tasks in January, to be completed over the next twelve months, and at the halfway mark it makes sense to take stock, to see what has gone according to plan, and what hasn’t.
Looking back, it’s quite a lot crammed into six months, so I’m pleased with that.
I’ve managed to work out quite a lot (unsurprisingly, what with the races) but not as much as I had set out to do in total – weeks of hiking and skiing and diving have prevented me from reaching the goal of a marathon run and biked every week, and I haven’t done much yoga either. But then there’s still six months left to remedy that.
Have I developed my French, my piano and chess playing, and done more non-fiction reading? I certainly got off to a good start, doing thirty minutes per day of each, but a good friend giving me a Netflix password threw a big spanner in that particular structure. I haven’t completely derailed, but there have been leafs on the tracks, shall we say.
As for taking on new tasks at work, I have, happily. And not least because of this very blog, in fact. Turns out people at work read it and thought I might do good in Internal Communications, so from now on I will spend one day per week as a roving reporter, highlighting goings-on in my work place. Very happy about that.
So what’s next? I will try to make up for lost time in those areas where I haven’t quite managed to reach my targets, obviously.
I’ve still got the mountain ultra X-trail coming up in the beginning of August, and ten days of hiking the Bavarian alps hot on the heels of that. After those ten days I don’t really have any plans for the rest of the year. An acquaintance has invited me to Bilbao, and another to Nepal, so those things might happen. Or not. Readers should feel free to make suggestions.
I still want to try and beat my marathon record before the end of the year – I’ve improved significantly on my personal best for shorter distances, but whether that will translate into a new marathon PB remains to be seen. Time to start looking for a fast race, in any event.
At work I have made a promise to attempt to add Danish to my official language combination, so that should keep me busy for quite some time (maybe there are Danish movies on Netflix?!), and the new job will hopefully continue to present new challenges, as well.
All in all I feel quietly confident that the second half of this journey will be as filled to the brim as the first half was. Come fly with me!
…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.
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.
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!
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(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.)
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?
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*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.
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.
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…! ?
It’s four o’clock in the morning, and I’m in a tent in a dark forest, hiding from the rain together with close to eight hundred other people, all of us preparing to go out and run Ultravasan, Sweden’s most prestigious ultra marathon and – more to the point – a trail ninety kilometres long. It’s more than double what I’ve ever done before.
The atmosphere is akin to what I expect it must be in an army right before battle commences – there are a lot of grim faces and thousand-mile stares, as people make last minute adjustments to their kit. Some try to sleep, others make surreptitious dashes into the wet darkness to empty their bowels, like birds of pray before taking flight.
There’s four in our group; myself, my sister Sofia, my brother-in-law Anders, plus Magnus, a friend whom I talked into signing up in early January, and who I suspect has regretted the decision several times over since. As we get closer to the starting time there are embraces and selfies and jokes, as the gravity of the situation is sinking in – we’re going into the unknown, and anything can happen. We line up in the start pen with ten minutes to go, the announcer’s incongruous natter finally replaced by stirring music, and the feeling of going forth is further reinforced when the soundtrack from the Hunger Games comes on, drones hanging in the air above us, filming for television. “We who are about to die”, I mutter, giving a half-hearted wave to one of them. Then suddenly it’s a matter of seconds, the Vasaloppet theme song comes on, and we’re off.
Up, up and away!
The first thing that happens as the crowd starts moving is you pass a signpost saying Mora 90, Smågan 9,2. The former is too huge a number to compute, so I focus on the latter, marking the length of the first section. Vasaloppet famously starts with almost eight kilometres of uphill logging roads, but people are too fired up to care, and shoot off like Superman. I force myself not to get drawn in, and have scores of people overtake me. Sofia and Anders quickly leave me behind, and Magnus disappears behind me. The rain hangs in the air like a particularly invasive mist, but it feels good.
There are plenty of places along the way offering drinks and refreshments, so I’ve elected to leave my Camelbak at home, which means all I’m carrying is a flip belt (essentially a double cummerbund with openings into which you can jam things) with some toilet paper (in case I have to Pope), paracetamol pills and three energy gels, plus my iPhone – not essential, but since I want to document the adventure I take it along both as a camera and a safety precaution. My secret weapon is inside the little bag that my sis bought at the expo yesterday, which is hanging on the outside of the flip belt in the small of my back – it’s supposed to be used for carrying litter, but I’ve stuffed it with chocolate protein balls.
Eight in all, these magical pills full of goodness will have me flying along – or that’s the idea, until five k into the race I realise that disaster has struck! Like the U.S. paratroopers invading Europe on D-day, I’ve been betrayed by untested equipment; they were issued canvas bags to store their weapons in only the day before their deployment, and the overstuffed bags mostly ripped clean off the soldiers and disappeared into the void, taking the weapons with them. In my case the bag was still there, but without me noticing, the balls had been bouncing out of the bag, leaving only one at the very bottom. Like Hansel and Gretel, I had been leaving a trail of sweets behind. Unlike them, however, I had no intention of turning around, so gritted my teeth and pressed on into the forest proper. I would have to make my own magic.
Run, Forest, run!
After Smågan we’ve reached the end of the road. The trail becomes exactly that, a single track trail leading deeper and deeper into the forest. Pine tree roots have you Fred Astairing your way forward, as they try to trip you up, and rocks are everywhere, meaning a fall would be most unforgiving. It’s beautiful though, the mist hanging low, and the rain lending every surface a fresh polish, making for a landscape where trolls seem less part of mythology, and more like a distinct possibility.
Then it’s on to the bogs, wetlands where only stunted trees grow in the acid waters, and you have to balance on boardwalks, slippery with rain and algae, laid out on top of the grassy knolls, as stepping off them would mean sinking to untold depths immediately – there’s no telling how solid the water-sick ground is; you might only sink foot-deep, but if you’re unlucky you’re instantly submerged – this is the kind of landscape our forefathers used to depose dead bodies and ritual sacrifices in, after all.
Another sign of clear and present danger is literally carved into the boardwalks themselves. They are made of sturdy two-by-fours, but every so often I come across places where furrows have been raked into the wood as if it’s nothing but warm butter. They’re territorial markings by the brown bears that roam these lands, and they leave precious little to the imagination. It’s a disquieting sight – the fact that bears apparently make use of the boardwalks to cross the bogs as well doesn’t inspire confidence in the construction so much as conjure up visions of what the consequences of a close encounter with a 700 lb version of Mr Cuddles would be.
Feed me, Seymour!
Thankfully no incidents occur, and the inhospitable terrain requires full focus, so the kilometres slip by almost unnoticed. I pass Mångsbodarna, the first of the depots serving food, and realise I’m ravenous. Breakfast was at 0200, and now, five hours and 23k later, my body is craving nourishment. Pancakes with jam, blueberry soup and chicken broth, anyone? I eat it all with gusto, and wash it down with coffee and water. In the cold and rain, the warmth of hot beverages is a godsend to be savoured.
I had worried that eating too much would affect my ability to run, but since my strategy is to keep a pace where I don’t get out of breath or my heart rate too high, it seems not to be a problem. The theory is that by keeping that kind of slow pace, your body never switches into aerobic mode, which means you can go on more or less indefinitely, as your organism doesn’t burn fuel the same way. I don’t know. I read it in a book. I thought seven minutes per kilometre would do it, but my feet seem to be saying 6,40/k, and who am I to argue? I’m only along for the ride, after all.
Fairy trails
And so on it goes. The trail stays lethal, an obstacle course made up of jagged rocks, but I am too distracted by the man in front of me wearing a sports bra to pay much attention. Turns out it’s a good way to prevent bleeding nipples, apparently. That still doesn’t explain the bright pink colour, of course…
The final destination is still much too far away to contemplate, but getting to the next station in Risberg is intimidating in itself, as the section prior to it is infamous. By this stage I’ve done 28k, and know the next five will be nothing but uphill. I walk parts of it, and try not to think about the fact that I still have two thirds of the way to go.
Risberg to Evertsberg, the approximate halfway mark, feels long, but thankfully the surroundings are mesmerisingly beautiful, even though the rain keeps falling. I pass little lakes in the woods, where moose would be grazing on less crowded days, old mills and cottages that look like they belong in Middle Earth, streams and burbling brooks. By the time there’s a signpost saying we’ve now gone past the finish line of a regular marathon I still don’t feel the least bit tired, and note with satisfaction that I’ve done it in about the same time it took me to do my first ever marathon, Berlin, which is famously flat and easy running – not something that can be levelled at this race.
The Halfway Inn
The kilometres keep rolling by, and before I know it I roll up at Evertsberg, which has loomed ahead as a Fata Morgana for quite some time. More pancakes, gherkins and blueberry soup, but more importantly, this is where the drop bags await, with whatever provisions you have seen fit to send in advance. Bench upon bench full of people taking stock of their situation. I strip off my wet t-shirt and socks and apply liberal amounts of Vaseline all over, in places I wouldn’t even point at in public under normal circumstances. No one gives a damn – they’re all busy doing much the same. New, dry clothes on. Two of my toes have gigantic blisters, but since they don’t hurt I decide against changing shoes. This is probably a wise decision, as doing so will prove Magnus’s downfall. He will go on to develop so many blisters that he essentially has to hobble the last twenty k’s.
After Evertsberg it’s gently downhill for six kilometres, and that, combined with dry(er) clothes, a stomach full of food, and asphalt, glorious asphalt to run on make these some of the easiest kilometres of all, whizzing by at breakneck speed – sub-six minutes, even. Joking aside, my strategy to not go out too hard is starting to pay off, as I now start overtaking other runners instead of vice versa. It’s not my prime objective – that was always just to finish the race – but it feels good, even so.
Wood sprites
Another thing that helps is the support you get from onlookers. By now I’ve been out for close to seven hours, the rain has finally stopped, the sun is out, and normal people are starting to wake up. Given that the race is run in the wilderness there aren’t many supporters, but what they lack in quantity, they more than make up for in quality.
Some groups and individuals clearly follow a particular runner’s progress and if you keep up with that person they show up several times along the way. A trio of bikers – a giant of a man who looks like a cross between a bear and a troll, plus his wife and mother, of similar stock – start recognising me after I urge them to do the wave as I pass, and soon they are looking out for me and doing their wave as soon as I show up. Others join in, making me feel like a superhero.
There’s a mother-and-son duo from Norway that show up more often than anyone else, always enthusiastic and shouting encouragement (at least I think they do – it’s in Norwegian), but my personal favourites are the two beautiful young women who suddenly appear around the 70k mark, offering candy to all runners.
At this point I’ve had my only low of the entire journey – I had been running together with a woman from the UK for awhile, and although Lucia was as pleasant as can be, her tales of having run a 30-hour race in the Lake District just two weeks previously, her plans to do another ultra in Switzerland in two weeks’ time, plus the fact that I couldn’t keep up with her, conspired to bring me down a little, and when I twisted my foot on top of that, I started to wonder if I was going to have to walk the rest of the way.
So I dropped behind, and walked for a bit, but when my foot didn’t get any worse I started running again, and then there was the silly Volvo video thing you can see at the end, which raised my spirits quite a bit, and then there they were, like two dryads with a huge bag of candy, and in spite of my parents having told me never to accept sweets from strangers, I happily deviated from that rule, and made sure to tell them just how glad they had made me with this selfless gesture. They, too, would pop out of the woodwork (as it were) several times more, to my unbridled delight.
The long game
The last twenty kilometres? Well, it’s weird. Twenty k is a long run by any standard, and yet it seemed easy. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I was still able to run, even trundling up inclines that I would previously have used as a welcome excuse to walk a few steps.
Sure it helped that it was mostly slightly downhill on relatively easy logging roads, and sure I wasn’t running fast by this stage, but I was running when most runners weren’t running at all. I passed most everyone I saw, with one notable exception – occasionally along the trail there would be the odd runner I would overtake, only to find them ahead of me again, over and over, and at the end there was Zebra Girl (you name people when you see them again and again, and she had striped tights. I’m not at my wittiest after ten hours’ running, what can I say?), whom I overtook around the 80k mark but who then kept pace with me, occasionally ahead, but mainly right behind.
Coming in to Mora, I passed a man on the outskirts of town who said we would probably make it in under eleven hours. He seemed a little doubtful though, and since my GPS-watch had long since given up the ghost, I had no choice: I found resources left in me to sprint the last six hundred metres, running hard, rejoicing in the feeling of seemingly endless strength.
The audience cheered and clapped, but I was particularly pleased to find my two Candy Angels waiting just across the finish line. If you look at the video you can actually see how I swerve as soon as I crossed it to give them both a huge hug and to tell them again how much they had meant to me. It was a delight to be able to share that moment with them, as they symbolised all the good people who had helped me along the way; volunteers, onlookers and well-wishers, all giving freely of their time to spur me on.
Karma goes both ways tho, because a minute later Zebra Girl taps on my shoulder to thank me for having been there for her – for the longest time, she said, she had only managed to keep running by literally following in my footsteps. We hugged as well, united by our struggle and our accomplishment, sharing goofy grins and the joyful realisation that we had done it!
This more than anything symbolises ultra running to me: regardless of how and when you finish, you are a victor. Sofia and Anders beat me by more than three quarters of an hour, but I ran what felt like a perfect race – I was never overexerted, never had a negative thought, and finished strong. I might have been able to do it half an hour faster, but at the prize of my enjoyment of the experience. As it was I loved every step of the way, I took in the beauty of the nature, the goodness of my fellow runners and all the other people involved, and even managed to spread a bit of happiness in the process. You can’t ask for a better result.
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 
At the outset of every year I pause and think about what I want to achieve. This year was different.
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.
On Monday I was supposed to receive a medal. It’s one of those traditions the purpose of which I don’t understand: you get one after twenty years as a civil servant. But it isn’t merit based – everyone gets one. All you have to do is stick with it two decades. That made me think.
I was thinking about what I want to try to achieve in 2018 when I came across 
It’s fair to say the year ended on 
I still haven’t run since
