I’m not doing very well on the moderation in running bit. But so far, it’s okay, no injuries. I’m going to continue to pretend to be a running blogger and do a “Race Report.”
April 28, 20km de Lausanne – Race start time: 6:19 pm – Weather: Overcast, humid, 26 degrees (Celsius).
It’s spring, and that means one thing: running. The weather starts to warm up. The sun stays over the horizon past 5 pm. The sap in the ol’ legs starts flowing again. I think it’s appropriate that I’m living in Switzerland, because I think deep down, I’m really a marmot. Winter ends, and I feel the need to get moving again. I need to get out on my rock and squawk, run around on an Alp somewhere.
The races start to approach: the 20 km of Lausanne in late April. A 10-miler in Bern in May that’s advertised as the “ten most beautiful miles in the world.” Then, June 24th, the Aletsch half-marathon, touted as “Europe’s greatest half-marathon.”
(I know. It’s all uphill. That’s why I want to do it so badly! Just look at that picture! Don’t you want to do it, too? How can you suffer with that as a backdrop?)
Then, the pièce de résistance… the 31-km Sierre-Zinal on August 12th. Another run I want to add to my life list, despite the wicked horrible downhill finish. It doesn’t claim to be the greatest anything, but the “no high heels” image on the website speaks volumes. This is my kind of thing.
Once a year Lausanne hosts a big natural/holistic medicine fair called “Mednat.” I went a couple of years ago and picked up some essential oils that smelled like the pine forests back in New Mexico. This year, the headline promised an “Agrobiorama Expo” which, to me, sounded like organic farm type stuff. (“Bio” is French for organic.)
Maybe the woman with heavy green eye shadow and ivy growing in her hair on the expo’s homepage should have clued me in …
Thanks to my friend Matt, who gave me a copy of “Eating Animals” by Jonathan Safran Foer, I can no longer eat factory farmed meat (even in Switzerland, where rules and regulations are at least 300% stricter than in the US). So, thinking I would find some sources of organic produce, chickens, eggs and beef, I paid the 17-franc entry fee.
I’m making friends with my microbiome.
Seems the prudent thing to do. I don’t want it to decide that this body is badly managed and thus a waste of time, and chuck it for a healthier version. No, not just yet. I have some stuff to write still. So I’m treating my gut flora to a microbial playdate. I want the symbiotic ecosystem that is my body to function optimally.
Not long ago in one of my internet ramblings I stumbled upon kefir, a fermented milk product originating long, long ago in the Caucasus. The word kefir (pronounced keh-fear) is related to the Turkish word keif, which means “feel good.” Kefir is a drinkable probiotic made with either water or milk using a gelatinous matrix of yeast and bacteria that are curiously called “grains.” (They have no relation whatsover to real grains like wheat or oats.)
Today’s headline:
Jacqueline de Quattro demande aux chasseurs de l’aider à débusquer le lynx.
One of the canton’s elected officials (like a state senator in the US) is asking the canton’s hunters to help her thrush out a lynx. I read on, my pulse rising. I find the Swiss attitude towards wildlife very disturbing. This doesn’t look good for my blood pressure.
There are reportedly two female lynx in the “Prealps” region of the canton. Since April 2011, cantonal officials have been trying to trap one of them, in order to give it to Austria, who wants to reintroduce it to help control their deer-like game animal population (chevreuils and chamois).
“As of April 1, Vaud can still capture the lynx, but it will be competing with the cantons of Fribourg and Bern.”
So let’s get this straight. This lynx has evaded capture by cantonal authorities for almost a year. If Vaud doesn’t manage to nab her by April 1, the stakes of the hunt will go up a notch, because the other two neighboring cantons can join the fray. Huh? Is there some kind of bounty on her head? Is Austria paying for the lynx? What’s with the competition? The article doesn’t say.
On Saturday, the state councilor addressed a crowd of more than 300 hunters at the annual meeting of “Diana Vaud” – the canton’s hunting association. She asked them to step in and help find the lynx.
Little things have been bugging me lately.
This post is pretty snarky, so please bear with me and try to read it all the way to the end.
I went to see a movie last weekend. Before the previews start, there’s an ad featuring a close-up image of the torso of a reclined woman wearing a dark brown bikini. She has one arm raised over her head, revealing her armpit, and the other hand is holding an ice cream bar. On her left breast there’s a light brown smudge that looks like spilled chocolate ice cream, until you look closer and realize it’s a palm tree. This ad has preceded every single movie I’ve watched in Switzerland, the whole time we’ve lived here. I can’t believe it. You’d think that by now they would have changed the ad, particularly since it’s so awful.
Last week, when I was writing about the kilogram and got sidetracked into calendars, I realized two things:
One. Gydle is a year old now! The first post was on March 2, 2011.
Two. We’ve been living in Switzerland for 7.5 years, 8.5 if you count the sabbatical year in 2002-2003.
Time flies, huh? There’s way too much in these two momentous events for a single post, so today, I’m just going to bask in the glow of Gydle’s one-year birthday. I’ll write about number two tomorrow (maybe).
A couple of years ago, a co-founder of an EPFL start-up came to me for help. Their html5 video player had just gotten fantastic reviews on gizmodo, and they wanted to make sure the English on their website was good. I suggested a few corrections, he asked me how much they owed me, and I said it was on the house. I thought their product was great, their enthusiasm was palpable, and I knew they probably didn’t have much money. He was very appreciative.
A few weeks ago, I translated an EPFL press release about another start-up. I visited the company’s website to check some details, and noticed that it had some serious problems. I wrote the two young co-founders an e-mail, telling them that I would be willing to help them polish the English on their website. I didn’t mention money explicitly, but I hinted that I was prepared to spend a couple of hours working for free, like I had with Jilion.
No response. Not even a No, thank you.
Continue reading
This is a photo from the UN flickr site, showing the lake this past weekend near Geneva. It has been bitter cold and windy, and that makes the ice do weird things as it sprays up onto the shore.
More images of frozen cars, trees and benches like this one can be seen at 9gag, just type “Lake Geneva” in the search window.
I’ll take this opportunity to pass along a few more links:
No, this isn’t a religious post. It’s not about converting tablespoons of butter into grams, or pounds into kilograms. It’s not even about the conversions between dollars and Swiss francs I made (somewhat gleefully) in my head as I turned my credit card over time and again during our trip to Santa Fe over the Christmas holidays.
No, this is about skiing.
Last Sunday I did my first back-country ski outing of the year. Correction: my first back-country ski outing since winter 2005, when Marc’s parents were here for two months and we could do whatever we wanted on the weekends without worrying about being bad parents.
We were going to go back-country skiing last year, except it didn’t snow. The year before that, we rented an apartment in a ski area for the season, and went there on the weekends instead. The year before that, well, I don’t remember. It can’t have been that memorable. Now the babies definitely don’t need sitting anymore. What’s more, they have strong opinions on how they want to spend their weekend mornings (such as sleeping), and these plans usually don’t involve us. We’re once more free to head to the mountains.
Maybe I’m getting grumpy in my old age, but I find that ski lifts, crowds, music blaring from loudspeakers on ski parks, decks of sunbathers drinking alcohol at 3,000 meters, and – did I mention it? — crowds – just make me grumpier. Any time school’s out in Switzerland, the entire country goes skiing. The slopes are packed with people moving at high speeds. The red-and-white helicopters are busy buzzing back and forth transporting accident victims to hospitals in the valleys below. The autoroutes get backed up for miles. Thanks, but no thanks. The only kind of skiing I’m interested in doing now involves strapping skins on my skis, shouldering a backpack containing a bar of chocolate, a thermos of hot tea and warm mittens, and heading for a mountain.
You just don’t get this kind of solitude and awesomeness in a ski area.
It’s pretty stupid to go traipsing around in the “back country” on skis, though, unless you know what you’re doing. Every weekend, people who go off-piste in the Alps end up buried in avalanches — even people who are accompanied by mountain guides. Not only am I not quite ready to die yet (the novel isn’t done), but I also don’t want some poor hiker to come across my rotting corpse in June when the snow starts melting. (It does happen).
So, since Marc and I definitely don’t know what we’re doing, we did the only sensible thing and turned to the pros. We joined the local chapter of the Swiss Alpine Club. We took an avalanche course. We learned to “read” the layers of snow, we dug endless avalanche beacons out of snowdrifts, we practiced shoveling at high speed with little metal shovels, and we learned to climb up mountains on our skis and ski down through all manner of different kinds of snow. We also toured a cheese-making place. I bet you don’t get that in US avalanche courses.
To climb up a mountain on skis, you have to do switchbacks. You cut along the slope for a while, then you turn and go the other direction, in a complicated ballet-like maneuver called a “kick-turn,” or, in French, a conversion.
Several years ago, I had mastered the conversion. You turn the uphill foot about 130 degrees (think 4th position in ballet), then lean forward into the slope and lift the back ski up, kicking the tip in around the ankle of the planted foot and sliding the ski alongside its mate. Here’s a picture of someone doing one:
In this photo the person hasn’t yet swung the right ski up alongside the left ski, which is planted. Depending on the steepness of the hill and the snow conditions, this exercise can be seriously nervewracking.
Sunday’s Alpine Club outing was rated F for Facile (easy), so the hill wasn’t steep. The snow was nice and deep and powdery. No problem getting a good foot plant in it. I was enthusiastic, third in the line of 9 people climbing up the slope.
Wow! This feels good!
Did I mention that the critical thing about the conversion is that you need to lean into the hill?
Everything went fine until I forgot that.
I swung my uphill ski 130 degrees around, up the zigzag. Then I put my weight on it and lifted the back ski off the ground.
Two seconds later, I lost my balance and promptly fell backwards down the hill. Everyone was watching me. Now when your head is down the hill and your skis are up on the slope above you, you’ve got to do some maneuvering to get things sorted out. I had to wait for all of them to climb past me to get myself upright again.
Merde! I cursed, humiliated in the extreme. My face was hot and I felt the suspicious prick of tears behind my eyes. I avoided looking at anyone as they skied past. I just knew they were all laughing at me.
All of them, that is, except one very nice guy called Alex, who very gently and calmly said he was going to show me how to do a conversion. Which he did, emphasizing the leaning into the hill part. I practiced a couple of times and felt a little less like I wanted the earth to open up and swallow me up.
It was a good idea to practice. It’s one thing to mess up your conversion on a gentle slope in cushy powder. It’s another to mess up on a steep slope with a pile of rocks down below. A little humble pie is preferable to brains splattered on rocks, any day.
We kept climbing. The higher we got, the harder the wind blew. It started spitting snow. Genevieve, a 70-year-old energy bomb of a woman just in front of me, was struggling and had to stop and breathe hard several times. At the top, the wind was whipping the snow up into our faces and we could hardly see a thing. Nevertheless, we engaged in the Swiss kissing ritual. Kiss, kiss, kiss, – it must have been at least -10 C with the wind chill, and as each person arrived, he or she had to make the rounds. I admit I air-kissed a few. My fingers turned numb as I took the skins off my skis and tried (not very successfully) to attach them to their paper backing. Oh, so this is why you’re supposed to use the plastic backing and not the paper one, I realized. Man, I really am out of practice.
Alex seemed totally unfazed by the weather and went around offering everyone a dried fig.
Our leader wisely counseled us to keep each other in view during the descent. This is why you go with the Alpine Club, I thought, as we blindly followed him down the slope. They know what they’re doing. For all I knew, he could have been leading us off a cliff. On the positive side, I only fell once and I don’t think anyone saw it.
At one point we had all stopped together and there were two skiers still above us. Everybody watch Rita, said the leader. Rita, a little round gnome-like person in a purple parka and a pink knitted hat with a pom-pom on top, didn’t really look like an athlete. Once she turned her skis down the hill, though, all that changed. She just kind of floated effortlessly back and forth down the slope. It truly was a thing of beauty. The rest of us were more or less making our way down the mountain – Rita, she skied.
Once we were out of the worst of the wind, the leader found a spot under a tree to eat our lunch. No kidding. Apparently, part of the definition of an outing is that you have to stop for lunch. I think it’s part of the Alpine Club charter. I took advantage of the opportunity to try and get technique tips from Rita.
Genevieve was too exhausted to eat anything. Maybe she shouldn’t have skied the entire previous day and then come on the outing as well. Getting old is the pits, she informed me.
An hour or so later, we were heading back to Lausanne, after a stop in a bistro for hot chocolate and mulled wine on the way (that’s also part of the definition of an outing). Nobody mentioned my humiliation. When they asked what I did, I told them I was a writer. Writing a novel.
Wow, I thought to myself as the words came out. If I’m saying it out loud, I guess it must really be true.
Yet another kind of conversion. 2012 is starting out very auspiciously!
Photos: CAS Morges