Racing in Europe Part 3: reboot

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After nine blissful hours of sleep, I woke up to sunshine and the anticipation of the next part of my journey. Kim, unfortunately, did not sleep well after her late-night 5000m race and had been subjected to listening to me sleep for most of the nine hours.

I met Lisa at my car, and we arranged our excessive luggage. And there was more to come. We drove through Hasselt, where the meet hotel for KBC Nacht was located, and added her training partner to our driving party, Canadian 800m runner Andrew Ellerton. More bag rearranging. Next stop: Kamen-Kaiserau, Germany.

According to google maps, the drive was supposed to be 2.75 hours from Leuven. I always beat google maps, except when I'm driving anywhere in New York, so I'm still not sure how we managed to drag it out to four. There was a burger stop and a major detour when I panicked because the gas light came on, but I thought my new PR of 164 k/hr on the autobahn would have made up any stops.

This was not actually a bad thing, though. Driving is one of the things I miss the most about leaving Colorado. Driving a clutch is one of the things I miss the most about being leaving the 20th century. I was excited to officially use the word "autobahn" and enlisted Andrew to take pictures of German signs and the odometer at its peak.

We arrived in the cornfields of smalltown, Germany and made our first rookie mistake. That mistake was me walking into the lobby with my driving party. The result of this mistake was an extra 75 Euros added to the cost of Lisa's booked hotel room.

The SportCentrum Kamen-Kaiserau is the preferred base camp of the mostly Canadian middle-distance group. Throughout the trip, I learned a lot about how everyone ends up in their seemingly random temporary residences. Sometimes it's with a training group, including a coach. Sometimes people are arranged by their agents. Others, like me, are nomads. This has certain benefits, such a freedom and flexibility, as well as the opportunity to get to spend time with lots of different people in many different places. My first week in Europe, though, I got to appreciate the benefits of not being alone.

The training center is half hotel, half dorms. There are three meals served each day in a cafeteria. There is a nice 6-lane track right out the back door, an indoor straight-away for when it inevitably rains, as well as cornfields and a wooded area to run through.

The four days I spent in Kamen-Kaiserau went something like this: wake-up, breakfast, run, lunch, run, dinner, some kind of entertainment (soccer World Cup, movies, losing at foosball). Repeat. It sounds boring, and I'm sure that several weeks of it would have been, but it was exactly what I needed to reset from the stress of the weeks leading into the trip.

We took a few detours into neighboring cities, starting with our attempt to see Harry Potter. Anyone who knows me and Lisa knows that the fact we have yet to see the Harry Potter finale is somewhat of an abomination. I found the nearest movie theater in nearby Unna. We thought for sure that even though we were in Germany, where they speak German, Harry Potter would definitely be in English. Surely a multi-billion dollar industry hadn't yet gotten around to dubbing a movie that has both a 2D and 3D version.

We were wrong. I attempted to convince everyone that the visuals would still be very worth it, but was overruled by the presence of ice cream across the street. The ice cream started small, and then turned into a waffle, which then turned into a waffle with ice cream. We committed a significant amount of time to getting a camera angle that would really capture the size of the indulgence. We committed enough time for the parking garage to close, locking our car behind a gate (we got it out, and it's not really a story worth telling).

I also had an afternoon in Kamen, which resulted in a parking ticket that I couldn't read and therefore never paid. Still hoping for the best on that one. Kamen also came with the discovery of Voltaren Gel for significantly cheaper than it is in the US (my first souvenir!).  I also had an afternoon in Dortmund, which is the 8th largest city in Germany.

On Tuesday I enjoyed the benefits of my adopted training group, tagging onto part of Lisa and a Canadian 800m runner, Lemlem Ogbasilassie's workout. After doing an 800m by myself at close to 1500m pace (2:19), I chased the speedsters to the fastest 300m I have run in probably ten years (46.85), followed by a struggling 200m and 100m at about the same pace. I didn't feel particularly good in the workout, but I knew that the beginning of my unwinding had at least begun.

On Thursday, Lisa and I drove back to Brussels, got rid of the rental car, spent the night in an Etap, a very small yet very clean hotel chain in Europe, and departed for Trafford, UK the next day, which is right outside of Manchester.

There are two low-budget airlines (that I know of) in Europe. Lisa and I were flying on the more expensive of the two, easyJet. The rest of her training group was traveling on RyanAir, which I am going to pretend to be disappointed to have missed out on. RyanAir flies in and out of "alternative" airports. For example, while there is a perfectly nice airport in Dusseldorf, Germany, RyanAir flies out of Dusseldorf-Weeze, which is a former military airbase about 45 minutes away. The seats are not designed for comfort, and apparently they have tried to charge people for using the bathroom.

EasyJet flew out of the real Brussels airport, but into Liverpool, which is slightly annoying only because there is actually an airport in Manchester. Lisa and I had a great travel plan: land and hope for the best. Hopefully there would be a train. If not, a bus. If not, a cab. If the cab was more than $50, then I'd rent a car and try not to kill us. As things tend to go, though, we got very lucky. We intersected with Tommy Schmitz and Ciarán Ó Lionáird on the way to the airport, and Tommy had taken the time to write out very specific directions all the way to the hotel. After a bus, a train, another train and a cab, we finally settled into our hotels.

One thing I discovered during this trip was my departure from the rules I give myself in the US. Very rarely would I consider it a good idea to travel to a race the night before. I'm not sure why it makes more sense in Europe. It's still hauling luggage to and from the airport, sitting on a plane and not seeing the track before the competition. And I can't affirmatively say that it didn't make a difference.

My race the next day, part of the British Miler's Club series, was pretty mediocre. I knew the rabbit was supposed to go out in 2:10. This made me think that the entire field was somehow suited for this pace, and my game plan was to go out in last and pick people off. That plan proved to be bad at about 100m, when the field was already starting to split, and I was stuck behind a bunch of 4:30+ 1500m runners. So, after a stupid move on the curve to close the gap on the first pack, I settled into focusing only on the back of the girl in front of me. My focus was not strong enough, however, to not notice every time the announcers called Nicole Bush "the Canadian." I think they really like Canadians in the UK, because when I checked in, they got excited that I was "almost Canadian." I'm not sure when the US became better known as the country that borders Canada, but I'm pretty sure I could take a guess.

My finishing time was a 4:24.08, thanks mostly to a very ugly last 100m, including a dusting on the homestretch by Nicole. There were three positive aspects I held onto from the race, though: first, it was the first race I had really tried in since indoors. I felt like I actually found a reason to fight the last 300m, which is something I have been struggling with the last few months. Second, it was technically an outdoor PR. I ran a little faster indoors this year, but I will claim any PR that comes to me these days. Third, it was faster than the 1500m that I ran before my steeple PR in 2008, so I knew that I at least was not too far off of that person I was when I first ran under 10 minutes.

After the race, we had a little fun in Manchester. We found the Gay district, in which you are apparently supposed to go out in costume. We were dressed as lightly-packed track athletes. The next morning, I did a nice recovery run with Nicole, complete with stopping to pose for pictures of each other pretending to jump in a river, and then headed back to Leuven with Lisa (on a shuttle that was both half the time and half the cost of the plan Tommy had devised for us on the way out).

Finally the race that actually mattered to me was on the horizon.

Part Four is live

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