Berlin Marathon 2014

wow!
Two days after the race and still thrilled from the weekend. Fantastic event!

Getting there & getting settled ...
We arrived a little late on Friday evening in our hostel. The hostel we stayed -Jugengästehaus Hauptbahnhof -  is really close to Berlin Hauptbahnhof and hence to the Start- and Finish area of the Berlin Marathon. Turned out to be a perfect selection. Kids had fun and the hostel is run by nice and friendly people. Extensive breakfast buffet. Perfect.

BIB pickup
I left the family in the hostel to quickly get to Tempelhofer Flughafen in order to pick up my BIB. A little stressful to get there in time, but the aim was to have the whole Saturday for a relaxed Berlin sightseeing event. The whole train station was full of runners with the same destination. I got in touch with a couple from Nürnberg, Germany so we could head together towards the Berlin Vital Messe - located in the Tempelhofer airport.

We had some nice chat on the way, and actually I got a question answered which I had in my head for a long time. Usually the BIB pickup is surrounded by opportunities to buy new gear - including running shoes. Usually I'm in a hurry and quite focused on the race, so buying a new pair of running shoes would be the last thing, I could actually think of in this kind of situation. So would be buying a pair of running shoes at the day of/before the race? Well, the guy from Nürnburg as he had left his shoes at home;)

Tempelhofer Fluhafen is such is a great location. I was amazed of the scale of the running exhibition - I couldn't come up with any brand not being there with it own presence. Fantastic. Given the fact that I arrived 30 min before close of play, I didn't spent to much time there, but it was a fantastic, relaxed and well organized atmosphere. I think I spent less than 5 minutes to pick up my BIB.

Saturday - Berlin as a tourist
On Saturday,  I spent a relaxed day with my family. We walked to the start/finish area to see where we would to go on the race day. Already quite some runners around - scouting and having a loosening-your legs run. I missed this in favor of spending more time with my family - something which I might want to differently in future. During the day, my legs felt more and more stiff - a sign of what going to happen on the race day - more of this later.
We spent some time to visit the typical tourist locations like, Brandenburger Tor, Alexander Platz, Hackescher Markt, ...

Overall a nice trip, which we partly explored per pedes and partly with public transport.

For the first time I visited the east side gallery, which left a deep impression with me and the entire family. It was a perfect location to provide our boy with an insight, how cruel the separation of family&friends actually is and how cruel this has been enforced. I'm sad to see this momentum to fade away in favor of making money buy removing it to build new houses.

East Side Gallery - Each year is represented together with the individuals being killed a the wall per yer (represented as red flower shapes)

East Side Gallery - People floating through a gap in the wall - I watched this live on TV

Where money is to be earned, it will be earned. So monument is fading away in favor of new buildings

We finished the day early with some race preparation and final Italian lunch. Aim was to get to bed early - a challenge on its own ...

The race day
After a night of interrupted sleep (mostly my own nervousness - so no need to blame the family ;)) , I silently picked up my prepared running gear, dressed up an arrived at the breakfast buffet at 6:10.

Quite some marathon runners already have been there. For me, breakfast as such is an unusual thing and requires - specifically that early in the morning - quite some push. I started hydration/eating according plan - everything smooth. Around 7, I returned my key card and slowly walked toward the start area. Starting from the HBF I was part of a huge stream of runners heading to the race. Hydration kept going.

The weather forecast has promised a beautiful day and - hold true. This means it was pretty cold, so arriving at the start area, I located the bag deposit, but kept my stuff with me. Kept hydrating and finish food intake with on final banana. I guess around 8am the first sun rays hit the ground and it was getting warmer. So I changed cloth and deposited my bag in order to head to the starting block. All easy and without any queuing or ambiguity about where to head. Nice.

Listening to my body was less nice - still the legs felt quite stiff. Not good at the race day.
Arriving in the start block there was a nice spectacle to observe. Block E was next to the TV station podium, where they already prepared for moderation of the start. The camera was already mounted and guess what - almost all runners in the relatively empty block gathered in the area which could be covered by the camera ;)

I spent my time with some warm up and some visits to the toilets. Thinks got a little bit worse - actually I had a first, little muscle cramp before the start in one of the toilets - not what I have hoped for at race day. So I decided to carefully monitor it. I decided to stick with my plan: Aim for a 3:10 finish time, which would require a 4:30 pace in a homogenous race pace. Quite an ask, given that this was almost 10 minutes faster than my current personal best, but this is a race - not a kindergarten right ;).

The block - I was located in Block E (3:15-3:30) time filled up continuously and I was surprised how close I actually have been to the elite runners. This looked promising. On the speaker the racers have been welcomed in all possible language -including Bavarian ;). The last minutes and the start itself have been quite emotional. The large crowd, the view of the Siegessäule behind the start gate, the huge number of balloons being started on the race shot and the large crowd added to it. Unforgettable Experience.

Interestingly the start was quite fluently and there was no traffic issue. So I could take up my planned pace without any external hassle. Only my right leg was sending some low-level warning signals. Like said - to be monitored during the race. The first past 10km passed by relatively relaxed. System worked, HR and perceived stress value where quite OK. According to my watch I was even a little bit faster than planned - not quite true, but more on this later. So all good.

Well, some other signals came up more present. Hydration is good, but you need to balance this - like everything in life. So a toilet would be nice - just nice at this moment not - yet - mandatory. Half a year back, I had a bad experience with this kind of challenge. Back at the Vivawest Half Marathon, the start time has been delayed by around 40 minutes. Eventually as the gun went off, I only had one single thought in my mind - where is a toilet?! I think I hold it until like km 7 - lost quite some time on the toilet break and more importantly, lost the focus and motivation. I finished the race - actually in quite a good time, but it could have been way better if I only would have kept the focus.
Back to the current race in Berlin it was less of a problem - just before km 15, I spotted somebody leaving a toilet like 100m before I arrived. I kept my eye on it and it was still free as I arrived. So it was mine. After leaving the toilet, I run a little fast and only lost like 30s on the km. That was fine - all good.

What is amazing in the Berlin Marathon - and that might have burned my future marathon experiences - is the crowd of supporters. There are not single 100m where your are not cheered by the crowd. Awesome. Music all over the place. All different flavors - including private parties on balconies. Marvelous.

At half marathon, I had my first reality check. I already recognized that my lap alert - 1km laps - has been de-synchronized significantly from the actual km marks on the track. My math capabilities where already a little weak, but the half-marathon time displayed, didn't looked like it would totally back-up, the data provided by my watch. But still I trusted the the lap alerts of my watch.

So I kept pushing with mixed emotions. Still I felt good overall only my right leg worried me more and more. As you can digest from the diagrams below, everything went fine until around km 27. Already before the legs got more and more tight, but around there, I definitely had an issue.

From the heart rate graph above, you can see the little toilet at around km 15 quite nicely. You a also can see that the hear rate increased relatively slow over time, which corresponds with my perceived relatively low overall stress level. Everything get's a little bit more spiky after km 27. Potentially more easily to digest from the pace diagram below.

The graphs also show, that my watch had measured more distance than I actually have been running - or should have been running. This lead to the slightly better than reality paces being reported.

But back to the amazing race itself. On positive aspect of the race is the huge amount of runners. You never run alone. Though I didn't run in a fixed group - maybe I should have been running with the 3:15 group - there where always people around you, who run in a similar pace. Quite good for the moral. One minor observation on this one. I used to be able to recognize my own "Piep" while crossing the time measurement stations. Overall sound like "Piep - Piep, Piep - - Piep" in other races - at least at later stages. In Berlin it was "Piiiiiieeeeeeep" all over the place.

Another nice encounter was a paper sign hold up by some of the spectators, announcing "New World Record 2:02:57" - quite some extra push for us hobby runners as well.

The rest of the race was mainly fighting with myself, enjoying the atmosphere and not looking at my time. Around km 40/41 I spotted a collapsed guy, who already got medical support. A gently reminder not to over pace, I think. While I remember this and it obviously touched me, this was gone soon later, as made the last turn, providing me with the first view on the Brandenburger Tor. I was super happy and pushed my arms into the sky - Almost there. Body reacted immediately, at both legs the hamstring contracted. Autsch - so back in old running form and don't overdo it.

The feeling to actually pass the Brandenburger Tor and then do the final meters toward the finish line are quite hard to describe. Actually while you can not spot it on the video being taken, I got quite emotional and finally reached the finish line, totally exhausted, super happy, proud of my new PB.

The after race support was fantastic as well. I got everything I needed, the medal, food and drinks without any queuing. I spent some time on the loan in front of the Reichstag with the other runners, before I stepped out of the closed area to meet my family.

Meeting point of the family was well organized as well and it was super relaxed atmosphere. I learned from my family that they got a good spot to watch just next to the Brandenburger Tor and even saw me finishing. As a nice topping I met a former colleague of mine, who I haven't met for ages. All fine.

My take aways:

1. I must come back to the race - it was fantastic
2. I need to figure out how to proper loosening my legs in situation like this
3. Hydration: I guess I need to stop earlier
4. GPS Watch: Trust level with my current Fenix 2 is still broken. So either I need to replace it or - maybe better in any case - prepare better to be able to conclude my progress just based on the time spent.

Pre-race blues

Only 3 days left. 10 months ago the mission started as I received and email saying:

 "Take two!
Dear Stefan Christoph,

After getting an unlucky draw during the first round, we are delighted to inform you that you are one of the fortunate "second chance" winners among the 73,707 applicants and thus now have the opportunity to participate in the 41st BMW BERLIN MARATHON 2014 ? Congratulations! "

Loads of things happened in between - not just running related.
On the running side of things, Strava reports 2302 km in 159 runs. Time elapsed for this is 208h and 5 minutes. This are almost 9 entire days - spent running.
I finished a number of races during this time - including the Düsseldorf Marathon earlier this year. I could have used a boat for this. It was wet - really wet. Luckily I forgot the blisters - many, big and at nasty locations - which I took away from it - Did I forget?
And now? Feeling tired from an intense working week, Deutsche Bahn expanding my daily commute times beyond anything acceptable. Back home family is coughing, noses are dripping. I have a little scratchy throat, tired legs and some little pain here and there. Not feeling well. Will I be fit on Sunday? Will it work? Can I reach the target time I set myself? All this questions are circulating in my head ...

Luckily I did not forget that this is the pre race blues. I had this before every - OK just 3 by now and hence not statistically relevant - marathon I run. So I do know I will be good :D

So off we go and sneak in a lunch break  run - #160. Hopefully with one of my buddies, who provide such a great deal of motivation. Everything will be fine ...

Vacation in Erzgebirge - Tellerhäuser/Oberwiesenthal

Over the turn of the year, we spent lovely days in the Erzgebirge area. We lived in a tiny village called Tellerhäuser which is close to Oberwiesenthal. Though we did not had much snow, we spent some high quality days, including our first experiences with cross country skiing. 

Coming from downhill skiing and snowboarding, the expectation was that this should be rather easy and boring. It isn't. First of all it is technically difficult and you need a lot of energy to keep it going. Nice alternative training. 

Due to the fact we only had a quite limited amount of snow, we couldn't really experience the touring aspect of it, where you spent the whole day exploring the nature, I can really imagine that this is good fun. I explored some of the trails during my running exercises and the area has clearly great potential. 

As a picture says more than thousand words, I add some impressions from those days:

beautiful, isn't it?

Our home for the days

Our daughter being pulled by a dear friend

Early sundowner

Typical Erzgebirge creation

Artificial Snow blown to the trees during night

As you can see: While we don't had to much snow, we had quite some nice sun shine :)

Five Fingers - a two weeks review

Why would you possible wear such strange looking shoes?

Those Vibram Five Finger shoes have caught my attention every now and then during the last years, but up to now I couldn't really get myself to give them a try. Due to my upcoming beach holidays and my recent interest in natural running, I finally got myself equipped with a pair of those. Due to the fact that it is hard to find a local store, which has a good coverage of the various Five Finger models - yep I was surprised as well, there are like 15 different flavors of those - I decided to order from their German online shop.

I selected to different models from the website: KMD Sport , KMD Sport LS and KSO. I hoped to use the shoes as leisure/beach shoe and for some - yet to be determined - extend also for running exercises.

Unboxing experience

At the day the parcel arrived, I first tried the KSO. Took me quite some time to get my feet - specifically my toes - into the shoes, but have been rewarded by a superb barefoot walking experience. Actually the KSO is almost not recognizable on the feet.

While it was a hazel to get myself into the KSO, it was close to impossible to get into the KMD models - at least the first time I tried. On the second try it took me still like 10 minutes the maneuver all my toes in the appropriate boxes.  Compared to the KSO, the KMD models are more recognizable on the feet. In direct comparison to the KSO, they feel almost heavy, but in comparison to normal shoes like nothing.

Which model to keep?

I spent like 3 days in which I spent my spare time in the flat with alternating between the different models and than finally decided to keep the KMD Sport LS model. While my initial love is with the KSO model - fantastic barefoot experience - I decided to go with a KMD model. Reasoning here is that I would think that this shoe would cover a broader spectrum of possible use. Specifically it should be more suited for running. I decided for the LS model with comes with laces as those gave me a better fit of the shoes.

Does it work?

Yes - During my 2 weeks of vacation a Usedom - German island in the Ostsee - I used to Five Fingers as my standard shoes. I drove the 600+ km car journey to the island still in my vans and didn't touched those for the entire two weeks of vacation. Beside the 5F, I only used running shoes for my running exercises.

The 5F are perfectly fine to walk to/on the beach (yes, you will have sand in the shoes just like in regular shoes) and standard walking activities in town, beach promenade and alike. I also have been wearing them for our casual family bike tours - no issues here. I would still prefer my click shoes for real biking.

I did quite some running exercises with the 5F on the beach and on asphalt. This works fine as well. I tried to hold down on speed and extend of those exercises, to provide my feet and legs some time to easily get used to the new shoes, but running on the beach in the sun was so much of good fun that I ended up with 14km run, which is probably not what you want to do during the first 2 weeks. Refer to "Natural Running" book from Danny Abshire.

Definitely even only walking in the shoes does put some stress on your feet and lower legs as they need to get used to this kind of shoes. In my case this got a little bit pushed in the background due the overall training stress I put to my body as I ramped up my training for the upcoming marathon.

During the two weeks I had issues with blisters, but those only appeared while I was either running in my standard running shoes or purely barefoot. I guess those are unrelated to the five fingers.

Not sure if this actually is a good idea, but I also wear the 5F on the car ride back at the end of vacation - nice direct control through the pedals ;).

What is the *AF?

Most importantly is obviously the WAF - specifically the opinion of my wife. She kind of concluded that those shoes are looking very strange but kind of fit to the overall way I dress/appear. I took this one as a GO.

The general acceptance of this kind of shoes is actually quite mixed. Although I only have been wearing those shoes in holiday/leisure situation, people do recognize those shoes. But to be honest, you can easily mitigate this by wearing an action cam mounted to your head :-).

I still need to figure out the BAF - Business acceptance factor. At the time of writing this, I'm on my way to the 1st office day, actually not wearing my five fingers. Mainly because they need to be cleaned, but to my feet, the plain old business vans feel awkward already ... I'm considering to possible buy an additional pair of black KSOs - as they provide just a pure feeling and are less exposed in the design. Still undecided.

What is next?

I'm looking forward to wear the 5F as much as possible as my standard shoes as they really provide a good walking experience. Furthermore I plan to have regular short& light training sessions with the 5F for the time being. As I prepare right now for the next marathon, I'm not able & willing to transit to a natural running style. This should be the aim after the marathon. In the meantime I'm still seeking for some good natural running shoes. I would aim for a pair of Newtons, but it seems to be pretty hard to get hold of them in Germany - and not really at the cheap end of the spectrum as well..

I'm looking to test the BAF tomorrow in the office - I'll keep you posted...

How do services like Runtastic refine elevation of my GPS tracks?

How Does elevation refinement work?

Recently I recorded a load of GPS tracks during my running workouts. Those tracks a recorded with a GPS watch and I tend to upload those tracks to a fitness service - specifically to runtastic.com - in order to review my runs, obtain statistics and share runs with my friends. Similar to other web services runtastic.com offers the functionality to refine the elevation of the track recorded. This makes sense as most of the times the track shows peaks and lows which cumulate to unrealistic altitude difference. So far so good - but how does this work?

My initial assumption - maybe driven by the fact that you can trigger  the elevation refinement next to the map plotting your run in runstatic.com - was,  that they would use the elevation information coming from the map provider to correct the elevation. So basically for each track point they would need to obtain the elevation information and correct the track. Quite some effort and since elevation API provider like Google enforce limits to the number of API calls you could make or charge for them, this might be too much effort.
Alternatively they could use some kind of filter (e.g. like outlined in http://blog.ridewithgps.com/blog/2012/04/19/April-2012-Ellevation-Data/). This would allow them to smoothen the elevation information without dependency to external knowledge.

So what is the truth? Hard to say as I couldn't find any information on this topic on runtastic.com. What now? Experiments - what else? If we could have GPS tracks which are not made on the ground (e.g. during walking/running on the ground), but above the ground, we should be able to figure out which approach has been taken. If it is map information based, those tracks should be refined to the ground, while a pure filter approach should just smoothen the elevation curve, but not map it to the ground.

Experiment #1: GPS track on the plane

So first idea is simple. If I can not run on the sky, I need to board a plane. Luckily I had the opportunity to track the launch of a flight from London Heathrow to Dusseldorf. Unfortunately the watch lost GPS signal after 150km, but this should be good enough for our purpose.

The screenshot below illustrates, how the track looks like without any elevation refinement being made.

As you can see, the track shows a quite smooth elevation curve, which actually shows to periods in time where the plane gained steadily height and finally a small adjusting to travel height, which is slightly above 5000m. So far so good. What happens if we ask runtastic.com to adjust the elevation? See screenshot below.

Whoa - I wouldn't have wanted to be in this flight. Two reasons: a) the former nice and smoothly curve is now showing a quite rough ride and b) the whole flight is shown to be below 150m.  So - without checking the geographic conditions - I would assume that the track has been mapped to ground height.

Let's do one more experiment...

Experiment #2: GPS track on a - presumably unknown - landmark

What else can we do? One of my favoured local running tracks goes up to a landmark called Tetraeder (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraeder_(Bottrop), sorry only German). 

The landmark is placed on a mine heap, which is about 90m higher than the surrounding are. The Tetraeder itself can be climbed up to an height of roughly 40m. What happens if we track a "run" on this one? First lets see the pure data (image below).

Elevation shows a more or less steady peak which consists on the way up to the mine heap and then climbing the stairs afterwards. So far so good - what happens if the refine elevation?

Ah ok - we lost the cap of the peak in the elevation chart. Looks like that runtastic.com uses some elevation data provide which is not aware of the landmark, which results in removing the height being gained on the stairs up to the landmark - and I can assure you that is was quite some effort to get up  there ... ;-).

Conclusion

Looks like that the initial assumption that runtastic.com is using some elevation data secondary to the GPS track being uploaded is correct. This would mean that you would struggle, if you are trying to use this service for e.g. managing your ultra aviation tracks, but this is no use case for me anyway. Wonder if I should upload this to http://uselessfacts.net/ ;-) Thanks for your patience...

Update:

I just found https://strava.zendesk.com/entries/20965883-Elevation-for-Your-Activity which explains how strava - another runtastic competitor  is dealing with elevation data. They consult elevation databases.

Another Update:

I just found another service - http://runalyze.de/ which looks promising. I didn't tested it yet, but you can use the online hosted version or run your own. Seems to be around for quite some time, not sure why I never came across it. I will give it a try. On the topic of elevation correction, they provide some insight in a blog post - http://runalyze.de/tutorials/hoehenmeter-korrektur-und-berechnungen/ (German only).

Official Google Blog: Supercharging Android: Google to Acquire Motorola Mobility

Official Google Blog: Supercharging Android: Google to Acquire Motorola Mobility

All about Dynamic Views for Authors - Blogger Help

Just played with the new Dynamic Views feature on Blogger (All about Dynamic Views for Authors - Blogger Help). I really like the timeline view. Cool shit. BTW this is my first post utilizing the Blogger extension for chrome - so less a content -heavy post but more a test ;-)