A week or so ago, a former student of mine, Chris, Facebooked me to ask if there were any 5k runs in the area on or around Thanksgiving. I sent off a list of a few, and mentioned that the Berlin Amish Country Half Marathon also had a 5k race the same day, and that I was running the half. Chris asked if I would mind if he joined me for the half, and I was very happy to say he’d be welcome to join me.

We drove down to Berlin early on Saturday. It was cold and windy, but was not snowing, so that was a plus. It had snowed a little, but the roads were clear, so the race footing would be fine. I found out on the way down to the race that not only had Chris never run a half-marathon before, he had never run a competitive race before. So, he had chosen a long distance (13.1 miles), on a hilly course, in cold and windy weather, as his first race. I was impressed.

We stayed inside the high school in Berlin until there was less than ten minutes to the start of the race, and then we kept on our outer layers until almost start time. I threw the sweatshirts over the fence next to the track where the race started, and was pleased they were still there when we got back over an hour and a half later.

The race went pretty well. Chris and I deliberately walked the five biggest (longest) hills. I am pretty used to running in the cold, but I think it got to Chris some – at one point around mile nine, Chris stopped to retie his shoe, and he had trouble getting his hands to work, even though he had been wearing gloves. I felt bad about that. The wind was okay for much of the race, but really hit us on the tops of hills. And, of course, the race finished on a long hill up to the high school.

I like this race. It is challenging, but very pretty. It is well run and fairly small (around three hundred runners), and the finish line has extravagant food (cookies and sandwiches and noodles), although both this year and last I bypassed the food line because I did not feel like eating after the race. The race does not have many spectators, but the spectators who do come out in the cold include the Amish, and they are very friendly. This year, a car full of cheering girls rode by a couple of times, and that was fun.

Chris did pretty well. The race pushed him pretty hard, but he managed the run correctly – he finished strong, but out of gas. That was quite the introduction to racing, and I when I asked him if he would do it again, he said he might need a day or two to think about it. Here is hoping he will.

We finished the race in 1:52:52 (8:37/mile), finishing 70th and 71st out of 310 finishers. Chris’s family and girlfriend had driven down to see him finish, and so Chris went home with them, while I drove home by myself.

In the evening, I decided I wanted to watch a couple of romantic Italian movies with Mer. She loves Italy and Italian, and so I rented (online) a couple of English-speakers-in-Italy movies, Avanti! and Stealing Beauty.

These movies had a different notion of “romantic” than I did. Avanti! was about a son going to Italy to bring back the body of his father, who he finds out was having a multi-year annual affair with a woman who also died in the car crash with the father. The woman’s daughter was there to bring back her mother’s body, and through much mayhem and Italian red tape, the two end up having their own affair together. I loved the scenery and liked the characters, but the morals of the movie were wanting.

I did find it interesting that body types have changed since the movie was made in the seventies. when Twiggy and the flat-and-emaciated look were apparently still the rage. The main woman of the film looked very normal to both me and Mer, and she was quite pretty in her summer dresses, but it was a major point of the film that she was fat and struggled with her weight. I don’t usually feel as if we have done well for women in the area of body types, but I feel we have come somewhere from the seventies, anyway.

As for the movie Stealing Beauty, it was also not romantic in my book. The movie centered on a young American going to Italy to find her father – she finds out she was the result of a one-night stand. While there, the young woman, who I think was supposed to be eighteen, decides she needs to lose her virginity, and tries to hook up with three different men. She succeeds with the last one, who is the sweet one, and I suppose that is why the movie is deemed romantic. At least it had really stunning scenery.