-Or- How to survive on 20 different variations of ham and cheese.

We were in France 15 days (including travel days). That gives a decent amount of opportunities to see what the fuss is about French foods.

The quick and dirty: bakeries, really good; restaurants, okay.

French evening meals (and I think this is true for much of Europe) in restaurants are based on menus. I know this sounds “no, duh,” but the menu is a one-price for three (or more) courses. The menus are fairly limited in what they offer. The carte (what we would call a menu) is a la carte. Any way you look at it, French restaurants were fairly expensive: typically 8-20 euros, which is currently 12-30 dollars per person. You do NOT want to order a drink at a French restaurant – sodas cost 3-6 euros, and these were always just a normal can or bottle of Coke. $5-9 for a bottle of Coke? Ouch!

Back to the food: Most restaurants would have omelettes available – these were good and cheap. Many restaurants also had very thin crust pizza (most European pizza is about cardboard-thick or less). In some restaurants, you could get frites (french fries or “chips”). I almost always could fall back on these when I did not want fancy sauces and meats I don’t think of (and the occational  offering of snail). So, most French restaurants allowed me to have nice simple fare, but I never did eat any “real” French food as the main evening meal. I did eat and enjoy dessert crepes (chocolate crepes are nice).

We also found a Chinese restaurant toward the end of the trip, which was very welcome. It appears that the French do very little with chicken in their restaurants. The chicken and rice I had were very very good. We also ate at two Italian restaurants. The meal we had near Notre Dame in Paris was exceptional Italian.

The French excel in their bakeries and baked goods. The breads at every meal (including breakfast) were excellent. We rarely ate lunch, but when we did, we always got it at a bakery; most bakeries offered sandwiches on baguettes, or made of flaky pastry crust. it was half a game to see how many different ways I could eat ham and cheese (at least six different ways – maybe more).

French breakfasts were simple – breads and croissants with spreads, and sometimes cheese. But where the French displayed their cultural superiority was the fact that at EVERY breakfast, and in most restaurants, I could get hot chocolate. It was considered as normal as coffee and tea. Many times, the hot chocolate was so dark they served it with sugar on the side. It was always made of warm whole milk. Ahhhhh.

French pastries were exceptional as well. Mer and I had dark chocolate tarts several times, and these were drool-worthy. The French also decided it was worthwhile to fill their éclairs with chocolate filling. They were right to do so.

So, all in all, we ate well in France. If the supper choices were a tad limited for my fussy palate, this was more than made up for by a country where pastry shops easily outnumber gas stations. Well done, France!

Mer and I are getting ready to move into our new home near CVCA – we hope to be fully moved in within the next 10 days or so. It is a little small, but I’m pretty sure I can squeeze my brother Sonotmu into the basement when he comes to visit.

I saw many cool and wonderful things in France, including French KITTIES!

The first kitty I encountered was pacing itself for a busy day, in Honfleur.

Then, this kitty felt at ease in the protection of the walled city of Carcassonne.

The best kitty-fest was in Orches, where our B and B had a momma kitty and two adorable kittens. The used a small pipe in the wall of the house as a kitty door. It was so cute!

The last kitty we saw on the trip was from the very German-looking town of Eguisheim, which had more flowers per square foot (meter?) than any town I had ever seen, PLUS one kitty!

It will be sad to see Sonotmu and Jolene move to France, but where else can Jo live?

I have found the Wii to be as entertaining as I had hoped it would be. Mer and I have had several friends over to play two-on-two tennis, and Mer and I have played a lot of tennis against each other, usually splitting games.

For solo play, the best game in my opinion is baseball. And there is the source of my frustration. The Wii has arbitrarily assigned a point value of 1000 to be “pro” level. I made my way up through the “minors” easily, reaching 993 points with no losses and only one tie (once I figured the game out). Then, at 993 I faced my first pro team. Suddenly, the batters would not swing at the garbage pitches I threw. If I put it across the plate, they hit the ball. The pitchers suddenly threw lots of splitters, which it turns out I can’t hit.

So, after four games against pros or near-pros, I have lost four straight games. I think I have only scored two runs in those four games. Today, I scored one run on three hits, and gave up five runs. It was not even close. To make matters even more fun, the computer randomly assigns errors to teams, either fielding or pitching. My team had four errors to my opponent’s none. Sheesh. My score has dropped below 900, and I’m looking forward to facing a non-pro team again. Soon.

We closed on our new house today. It is odd – all the legal and financial stuff happens in the weeks before closing. On the actual closing day, the deed gets “filed” (I assume not in the circular file). So, on a day when you spend thousands of dollars and commit to up to 30 years of payments, you get a phone call congratulating you on your file going through. Strangely anti-climatic.

We’ll probably move in the first week in July or so. It will be nice to walk to work.

The city of Cuyahoga Falls and a local chapter of the Hibernians throw a ***FREE*** Irish Festival every year, with three days of music and food and dance. I’ll blog more about that later, after I’ve been to a few more acts (we went last night for about an hour and a half).

BUT, starting this year, they also added a 5k race. I kept looking at the weather forecast (which was looking cool and dry), and I kept thinking about the 3 seconds I needed to break 20:00 in a 5k. I asked Mer to let me run this race, since I was still in shape for a 5k, and after some pleading on my part agreed to let me enter (we need to be careful about money, and the race cost $20).

So, the race was today. The day was indeed cool (probably about 60 degrees at race time), and was low humidity. I had also gone out and bought new shoes before I knew about the race (my old shoes were about 14 months old and were getting pretty worn to run in), so I had that in the plus column. There were about 100 racers at the start line, but I got near the front, and after a cute “Good luck, Sweetie!” from Mer and a command to “Go!”, the race started. I ducked around a few runners and found myself in the front pack. We had a slight bottleneck through a road barrier that was still up from the festival, but that did not mess with my pace or stride. I was still passing people, and found to my surprise that after about 5 minutes I was firmly in the lead pack. I felt good. The sun was out, but most of the course was shaded. There was a small uphill at the start, and there was a brisk breeze in my face, but I felt good, and since it was an out-and-back race, I knew the wind and the small hill were going to be in my favor for the last half of the race.

I was still surprised that as we neared the turn-around area, I could still see the lead police car. I was starting to feel a little tired, but the race was half done, and I was about to get the wind at my back, and my pace was holding up. There was a small but slightly painful hill near the two-mile marker, but I talked myself through that (my running mind is always about getting to certain minutes – “just get to 15 minutes” and such). There was a fairly long straightaway that led to the home stretch, and that required some mental games as well. I was really starting to feel tired once I got to 15 minutes. The “just get to 16 (or 17 or 18) minute mark” alternated with a fairly steady “Please, God, help me!” While my legs and breathing were okay, my body was tired. I don’t how much God gets invested in my running, but I managed to keep going. I turned onto the final road, and was still struggling, but knew I would be okay if I just kept my pace steady. I managed to do that, and with yells of encouragement from my supportive and loving wife, I finished.

Official time: 19:35
8th place out of 109 finishers.

See the results here.

Yes! First sub-20 in more than 15 years.

Many thanks to Mer for her support of an obsession she does not understand, and thanks to God for making the human body so that it can do some pretty cool things.

I can now relax for a few weeks, and then switch my attention back to distance training for an October half-marathon.

An interesting note on the age classes this time. I was in the 30-39 group, and guys from this group finished 1,2, and 4, so no top-three finish for me in my age group this time (I came in 4th out of 21), but that is fine since I got my personal goal.

With the impending two house mortgages, Mer and I have relegated all of our social activities to the free kind or to ones where we already have paid. This last weekend was the latter category. We have season tickets to Actors’ Summit Theater, and so this last weekend was an official goin’ out on the town date night!

As an added bonus, we are in the middle of graduation parties, and we eat very well at them. We had a fun party on Saturday afternoon, where we got to visit with some of Mer’s students and I got to chat with Ombudsman and his family for about 30 minutes. All this, AND food!

After the party, we went home and puttered. We ate a modest supper while watching Angel on DVD. We then headed north to Hudson to the theater to see Musical of Musicals, the Musical! This is a very funny…um…musical where the same story is told five times in five different musical styles. Here is the plot:

– You MUST pay the rent!
– I CAN’T pay the rent!
– You MUST pay the rent!
– I CAN’T pay the rent!
– I’LL pay the rent!

All done in the style of Rogers and Hammerstein, Sondheim, Webber, and more. If you know basic musical theater, the show is a riot. The musical styles are right on, and the parody of Oklahoma, Carousel, The Phantom of the Opera, Evita, Hello, Dolly!, and others is funny all the way through. The set was minimalist, but that worked just fine – the show was in the acting and the songs. The actors did a bang-up job, having fun on stage. The show was about an hour and a half long, and it went by much faster than that.

Ohio readers should rush out and see this play here.
Chicago readers should see it here.
NOW! Why are you still reading? Go get tickets!

The results have been posted for the race. My official stats are:

Time: 20:02
43rd place out of 309 finishers (top 15%)
2nd out of 16 finishers for my age group (ages 35-39), discounting the fact that a 36-year-old came in 3rd overall. For some reason, the top three finishers do not count in the age brackets. Odd.

The funny thing is the next age groups (40-44, where I would have been 5th out of 19,and ages 45-49, where I would have been 7th out of 32) were much faster than my age group. Maybe we get faster as we get older. I’ll keep telling myself that.

I love my wife. She is great. For years now she has supported my running habit, going to races to cheer me on, often having to spend hours hanging around to cheer me for a few seconds as I ran by. She did it again today – she got up early (around 6:15 a.m.) and rode with me for about 30 minutes, hung out while I picked up my bib number and t-shirt, walked the half-mile to the starting line, waited for about 20 minutes for my race to start, and then waited about 20 minutes to scream like a madwoman at me for 30 seconds as I finished the race, then waited about 10 minutes for me to cool off enough to be able to drive home (although not long enough for me to stop smelling sweaty), and rode with me the 30 minutes back home. All in all, she got up at 6:15 a.m. and spent two hours in transit and in waiting time in order to scream at me for 30 seconds. She is wonderful. What a woman.

So, five months of training while focusing on speed all came down to today. My goal all along was to get so I could run a 5k in less than 20 minutes. 8:00 this morning, at the 14th annual Tallmadge Memorial Day 5k, was Show Time.

There was a very good-sized crowd at the starting line, and I managed to get near the front, about the third row. The race director was asking people to line themselves up with their pace in mind, and I was near the front, which was supposed to be the 5- and 6-minute/mile group. That was a bit of a stretch (I was aiming for 6:20/mile), but I wanted to get off of the line quickly. There was no “chip time” in this race, where timing is handled by a chip on your shoe; the official time would be whatever the clock said it was, with no correction on how long it took to get to the starting line. In my case, I think it resulted in about a one-second delay, which was no big deal. I got off quickly, and managed to dodge a few runners who were starting more slowly, and got into what I felt was a fast but doable pace.

I passed a fair number of people for the first three-quarters of a mile. That was encouraging. What was less exciting was that I was not feeling very good. I could not put my finger on it – every individual thing felt good – legs felt fine, lungs were okay, breathing seemed steady, but I just did not feel right. It got so bad around the one-mile marker that I thought I was going to have to walk some. I managed to gut through that section, and after we turned around on that leg of the course, I saw that I had been going up a hill for a good bit, and that was probably what was making me feel tired. Since I trained on a flat treadmill with only speed in mind, hills get to me pretty quickly. I had come down a fairly big hill on the front part of the race, so this did not bode well for the return trip.

According to my watch, I got to the mile marker around 6:25 or so, so I was doing okay. The return trip down the small hill was fine, and I got some of my legs back, so the second mile was uneventful, coming in at a low 13-something (I don’t remember now what it was exactly). That brought me to the base of the big hill on the course, where the course abruptly veered right into a residential neighborhood. This concerned me as well. There were only two possibilities: the added distance was flat and would bring me back to the base of the hill after running more distance, or the added section would have the elevation in it, probably as a longer section. It was the second possibility. The hill was in the last part of the residential area, and was more gradual than what we had gone down, but as such was longer. I almost had to stop and walk again, but I managed to keep the legs going, although I had to slow down a little in the middle of the hill.

From the top of the hill, you could start to hear the crowd and the PA speakers after just a short distance. I got to where I could see the finish line, and I tried to run in hard. In this case, that consisted of maintaining my pace – I was very tired, and I had nothing left to run faster. I looked at my watch and saw that I was in the low 19s. This was going to be very close. I got near the finish line and heard Meredith screaming her heart out. Even in my run-induced fog, that made me quite happy. She was going berserk. I ran into the finish line, and as I crossed the line I looked up at the clock board. 20:01.

I’m still hoping that the official time will be 19:59, since I did not look up immediately, but I think that is wishful thinking. I’m also pretty sure my watch still said 19:50-something, but I was so wiped out I forgot to stop the timer, so I have no firm record on my watch. It turns out that the 1 second or so that it took me to get to the starting line was important.

So, I did not achieve my goal, but I’m still fairly happy. I managed to run through a race that had some hills in it, and that was hotter than I would have liked (by 10-15 degrees), and I managed to keep myself running despite wanting to stop twice. Also, it is my fastest 5k time in at least 15 years, by a good 30 seconds or more, and more than three minutes faster than my Fourth of July race from last year. And, my wife is proud of me. How can that be a bad race?