The GPST strikes back

In an earlier post, I introduced y’all to my flatmate, the German Poo Shelf Toilet. Like all roomie relationships, it took us a little while to learn each other’s quirks. But over time, we grew used to each other, and settled into a harmonious living arrangement. Or so I thought.

It all started when my washing machine stopped working. Having been away from home every weekend for four weeks straight, I’d gotten a bit behind on laundry, and realising I had about two clean shirts left, I put a load into the machine, got the run started, and went back to making dinner. A few minutes later, I realised that the machine had stalled. There was no water coming into the drum at all.

I called my landlord, who was out of town for the next week or so. Could I possibly hang tight for now and go to a friend’s house or use a laundromat, he asked? I agreed, and hung up.

The next morning, the plot thickened. I went to bid the GPST a good morning, only to find him stone cold and unresponsive. Flushy no worky. Now, I can do without a washing machine for two weeks, but living without a functioning throne is another matter. Clearly, the situation needed to be re-triaged.

Strangely enough, the rest of my waterworks were fully operational. The shower was fine, and my kitchen and bathroom taps flowed per normal. It was only the washing machine and the toilet that had given up the ghost. I called my landlord to let him know that he should send someone around tout suite, but he wasn’t picking up his phone. I didn’t hear from him the rest of the day.

A colleague suggested I call my building’s hausmeister (house master). Most German apartment blocks pay a dude to manage the upkeep of the building, make general repairs and so on. That seemed like a good idea, so I called the hausmeister’s number that was pinned to the noticeboard in my building. The following conversation ensued:

HM: Hello?

Me: Hi, I live in <my address>, are you the hausmeister?

HM: No. Not at the moment.

Me: Oh! I’m so sorry. Can you tell me who I should call, then? I saw your number on the ground in my building. My toilet is not functioning, I need...

HM: No, you called the right person. But I’m not working at the moment, please call again tomorrow.

Me: But… but… my toilet…

HM: Okthxbye. *busy signal*

I might have done better had I been able to speak in English. But I’m not very good at begging and pleading in Deutsch.

Oh, Germany, how thou givest with one hand and takest away with the other! You give me six weeks of vacation and normal working hours, but you give them to my hausmeister as well, thus rendering me helpless to use my dunny.

Suddenly, I wondered whether it had been such a good idea to eat dinner. There had to be a manual workaround, I thought. For the first time in my life, I was compelled to take the lid off my cistern and peer into the cavernous depths of a loo. It was less cavernous, less complicated and less smelly than I feared. For the first time, I understood exactly how a flush mechanism works, and thus figured out “manual flush mode”. Immediate post-dinner crisis averted.

At 2 in the morning, I was awoken by an SMS from my landlord. “Hi Urmila, Got your message,” it read, “Have someone who can repair it tomorrow, need to know when you will be home.” I messaged back to say I would work from home the next day. My landlord fixed up for the plumber to come at 2 in the afternoon.

When my bell rang at 2pm, I buzzed open the front door, and soon heard the familiar crescendo of footsteps and gasps that always accompanies my visitors’ ascent up the five storeys to my apartment. As the footsteps reached my landing, I opened the door to rather an unexpected-looking person.

The man standing at my door was wearing a business shirt, dress pants and shiny black shoes. He also wasn’t carrying any tools. I was confused. This guy was not a plumber, clearly: men in that line of work are not exactly known for their formal professional attire. There’s a reason it’s called a plumber’s crack.

But he seemed to know my name, and mentioned that Michael had sent him, so I bemusedly let him in. Since he was still wheezing like an asthmatic from the climb, I offered him some water. He declined and cut straight to the chase, asking what it was he needed to fix.

At this early stage, it became painfully clear that there was a language barrier. Philip is the only German I have ever met whose English is actually worse than my Deutsch. And obviously, my German vocabulary does not stretch to plumbing. Combining extremely broken and convoluted German with my l33t charades $k1llZ and use of props, I managed to convey the particulars of my current situation.

Philip then spent a quarter of an hour doing all the things I did – peering into dark corners, familiarising himself with the tangle of pipes in the bathroom, turning taps on and off in a variety of combinations. I guess I was being a little harsh, but since he clearly wasn’t dressed for the part of plumber, I had already written him off. “Who is this guy,” I was thinking, “For all I know he’s another software developer. I did all of this already!”

But Philip had more up his sleeve than his dapper appearance would suggest. Clearly he had gathered much more from his fifteen minutes of investigation than I had. He started to struggle with the various valves and faucets in the kitchen, and at one point detached some hollow cylindrical part from the rest of the plumbing, put it to his mouth and exhaled until a bunch of white stuff flew out into the sink. Then he turned the kitchen tap on, and the water ran milky white for several seconds before turning clear again. I was rather impressed. “Kalk,” he said, and just like that, I learned the German word for chalk.

He tried the washing machine again, but to no avail. He struggled valiantly with the Aqua-Stop on the end of the tap connected to the machine, but after presumably decades of being there, it wouldn’t budge. “Do you have any tools?” he asked. I held up the one tool my landlord had in the house, a tiny pair of pliers. He looked amused. “Werkzeug, kein Spielzeug,” he chuckled. “I asked for tools, not for a toy.”

Changing tack, he started to fiddle with the dishwasher. “Oh, no,” I said, assuming my bad German had led him astray, “That’s working just fine, I think. Well, actually, I don’t use it at all, so I’m not really sure.” He tested it by turning it on for a few seconds, and then looked excited. “Did you just say you don’t use the dishwasher?” I nodded. With a triumphant gleam in his eye, he strode back to the wall, unscrewed the dishwasher pipe and the washing machine pipe from their respective taps, and switched them. “Voila!” It was the ultimate dirty hack. The guy just has to be in software, I thought.

Next, he proceeded to the GPST. He took off the cistern cover and poked around in there for a few seconds. He turned the shower and washbasin tap on and off, and fiddled with the taps and pipes that lined the lower part of my bathroom wall. He tut-tutted at how old all the pipes were. It didn’t take him very long to give up. “You really need tools to fix this one,” he said reproachfully, as if I was the one turning up at people’s houses to fix their plumbing without a toolbox. I held up the dinky toy pliers again, and he smiled wryly. “I can come back later with some tools,” he said, “But right now I need to go back to work.”

I knew it! The guy was so not a plumber!

We agreed to meet again in the evening at 7. When he came back, he had tools. The stairs had beaten the crap out of him again. “I could never live here,” he rasped, out of breath but good-natured. He was still wearing the incongruous business attire, but as he held up a wrench in one hand and a new flush mechanism in the other, I suddenly had a little more confidence that he knew what he was doing.

Now properly equipped, my “plumber” came into his element. Philip and the GPST fought a valiant battle. There was lots of creaking (from the pipes) and grunting (from Philip), and I was absolutely glued. Seeing the parts of my toilet come apart and be put back together was quite fascinating.

I never thought I’d compare my job to a plumber’s job, but I was musing as I watched that fixing a toilet is kind of like getting an overloaded online service working properly. The throughput isn’t what you’d like, so you take the system apart, examine each piece in isolation and identify the bottleneck. I guess the other thing that we have in common is that we tend to go to work dressed like bums in comparison to other similarly paid professions (with the exception of Philip, and my university friend Divya, who used to turn up to lectures in business casual).

In the end, my “plumber” chalked up (ha!) a hard-fought but slim victory for the human race. The water was starting to come back into the cistern in a slow, insipid trickle. He looked restrainedly triumphant, but apologetic. “It’s working,” he said, “But your cistern’s going to take an hour to fill up every time.” Better than manual flush mode, I assured him. I thanked him and he took his leave. Soon afterwards I went to the station to catch my train for my weekend trip to Hungary.

Philip had fixed my toilet better than he gave himself credit for. It didn’t take an hour for the cistern to refill – only about ten minutes. In fact, the GPST had gotten such a second wind about refilling its cistern, that when I got back from Budapest early this morning, the cistern water filled half my bathroom floor. Oh brother.

So the besuited plumber and I have another appointment tomorrow night. Let’s see what’s in store after his next visit!

Gobbles in Turkey

This trip report wouldn’t be complete without you having the same song in your head that I did while I was walking around Istanbul. So here you go.

Try to get it out of your head now. I challenge you.

As the boys from the band pointed out, Istanbul was Constantinople. And with the city having racked up such a vast amount of history, it would be relatively easy to just wander around the old parts of Istanbul today, duly gobsmacked at its abundant cultural patrimony, and forget the fact that it’s actually a modern-day metropolis of almost 13 million people – the fifth-largest city in the world.

Wandering the  newer streets of Istanbul, I could have been in any big European city. Even deep in the historical centre, it felt much less Middle Eastern than Marrakesh, even though it’s a lot closer to the Middle East. (Morocco is the only other Muslim country I have to compare.) The vast majority of women dress just like European women do, and all the usual chain store suspects abound (Starbucks, Maccas, Gap, Burger King) – I guess that’s par for the course almost anywhere in the world these days. Men and women mix relatively freely and you can order a beer without a second thought.

On Saturday night, the crowds packing the streets of Taksim, in the new town, were large and boisterous. Every narrow alley coming off the main pedestrian drag of Istiklal Caddesi was crammed with tables of diners enjoying the mild evening air.

And my new friend Sedef and I chatted in a coffee shop where the chairs were printed with band names like The Killers, Deftones, Chemical Brothers, Arctic Monkeys. It’s a small world after all.

I really had some great meals in Istanbul. Sedef took me out one morning to have breakfast by the Bosphorus on the cobbled pier of Ortaköy. It must be an Istanbul weekend tradition of sorts, because there were a lot of locals around and not so many touristy-looking types.We feasted on bread daubed with fresh honeycomb and tahin-pekmez (tahini mixed with grape syrup), olives, eggs, sucuk (a garlicky Turkish sausage), and various types of cold cuts and cheese, all insanely fresh and delicious. Turkish breakfast, where have you been all my life?

The sheer variety reminded me of going to stay at my school friend Sarah’s house when she visited her grandparents in Sydney over the school holidays. Every morning, her grandma, who migrated to Australia from Egypt decades ago, would put out this amazing spread of fresh pita bread, homemade falafel, all sorts of vegetables and pickled olives. It was like a daily slice of heaven.

I had another memorable meal in Gülhane Park, which used to be the private garden of the Ottoman palace, but is now a leafy public park perched on a hill overlooking the Golden Horn and the Bosphorus. The food was forgettable but the view and ambience wasn’t. And any food tastes good once you wash it down with some ayran.

Any culinary account of Istanbul would not be complete without mentioning the baklava. Oh Jiminy Christmas. I am something of a baklava tragic, and my high watermark has always been the baklava my family used to buy from the big Lebanese sweet shops in the western suburbs of Sydney. But even they were put to shame by the baklava I had in Istanbul. That stuff was so pillowy, so airy and flaky and soft, that I could have laid down on the baking tray and had a nice snooze. And the taste – it would be an insult to try and describe it. Suffice to say I may have lost control of all bodily functions for the first few moments. Thereafter it took tremendous self-control not to duck into every single sweet shop I saw and clean them out of baklava.

I somehow managed to keep my baklava consumption under control, but there was also the little matter of five billion different kinds of Turkish delight staring me in the face as well. Flavours I never knew existed like pomegranate, kiwi, lemon, cinnamon, mint lined the shelves of the sweet shops and stalls in the spice bazaar. In one shop, I picked one new flavour (pomegranate) and one old favourite (rose), and that kept me going for the rest of the weekend. Learning: real Turkish delight doesn’t come covered in chocolate with magenta and gold wrapping that says “Fry’s”. It comes in a big long rope that just keeps on giving. Oh baby.

There are plenty of guys hawking sweets in Istanbul’s spice bazaar, but guess what? I ended up picking the one who spoke Hindi. It was awesome, and so unexpected. He told me that he had taught himself Hindi from watching movies with Turkish subtitles – he was an avid Bollywood fan. “Rani Mukherjee – bahut achchi,” he said, nodding approvingly. The poor man was really excited to meet someone he naturally assumed to be a real proper Indian. Unfortunately I had to disabuse him of this notion by informing him that my Hindi actually only extends to kindergarten textbook sentences like “maidan mein gai hai” (“in the field there is a cow”). Happily, this didn’t at all dampen his enthusiasm about meeting me.

I went home with so many memories of this whirlwind of a city. But the two things that will forever pop up first in my mind when I think of Istanbul are these:

Waking up each morning to the low of giant tankers tooting on the Bosphorus, mingling with the call to prayer to form a cacophonic symphony.

Walking on the Galata Bridge at dusk, watching the setting sun turning the curves of every mosque into a shimmering silhouette. On the bridge are dozens of anglers from all walks of life. An old codger who looks like he’s been fishing from this bridge since the Ottomans were around. A guy in full business attire with his fishing rod in one hand and holding a cell phone to his ear in the other. A girl in a headscarf gazing contentedly into the distance. And two teenagers with backwards Yankees caps just shootin’ the breeze.

I have to come back here someday.

Turkish history cheat sheet

When I was growing up in Australia, I think I was pretty sure Sydney was the centre of the world. I was relieved of that notion pretty quickly after moving away, coming to the conclusion that there was  no such thing as the centre of the world. Turns out I might’ve been wrong about that too, though. There is an axis around which human history has turned over the last millennium, and its name is Istanbul.

It’s pretty much a cliché that this city is the meeting point of east and west. Walking the streets of Istanbul, you  really can feel the amalgam of cultures here, that great civilisations have risen and crashed on these hilly strips of land straddling the Bosphorus.

But before Istanbul was ever Istanbul, it was Byzantion, a humble trading city named after its founder, the Greek colonist Byzas. At first, Byzantion only occupied the European side of the Bosphorus – there was already another city named Chalcedon on the Asian side. The Greeks quickly realised the potential advantages of controlling the entirety of the crucial narrow crossing between Europe and Asia, the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Byzantion invaded Chalcedon and formed the unified, continent-straddling city we know today.

All was well for the Greeks until Byzantion was besieged and captured by Roman armies in the 2nd century AD. It was just a colonial outpost for about a hundred years, until Constantine, the first Christian emperor, decided that he wanted to move the capital of the Roman Empire east, closer to the centre of the east-west trade route that the empire, now at its territorial peak, controlled. Constantine was a modest kind of bloke, so, having consecrated the city and expanded it to proportions befitting an imperial capital, he renamed it Constantinople.

Over the next couple of hundred years, the heirs to the emperor’s throne fought bloodily among themselves, and the empire had gotten too big to govern from one spot. Eventually Emperor Theodosius split the empire into two: the Western empire, still governed from Rome, and the Eastern or Byzantine empire, with its capital in Constantinople.

Around this point, the Western Roman empire started to decline, its territory slowly chewed away at the edges by Gauls, Goths, Vandals, and other such characters found in Asterix comics. Meanwhile, Constantinople was on the rise. For eleven hundred years, it was the biggest, richest and most influential city on the Mediterranean. Countless artworks and inventions of the European Renaissance can trace their origins to Constantinople.

The jewel of Byzantine Christendom, the Haghia Sofia church, was built during this golden age, and it was the first monument I went to visit in Istanbul. It’s hard not to be awed by the soaring arches, the massive, gilded dome and the glimmering Byzantine mosaics.

But there were chinks in the city’s armour. After the Great Schism between the Catholic and Orthodox Church in the 11th century, crusaders from Western Europe sacked Constantinople, and the Byzantine empire splintered into smaller, weaker pieces. Military forays by neighbouring states slowly but surely ate away at the remaining territory. By the 15th century, the empire that had once encompassed Italy, Greece, Anatolia, the Levant, North Africa and southern Spain now controlled little more the area immediately around the city.

Enter the Ottomans, the Central Asian upstarts whose military might had wrested control of all the areas surrounding Constantinople – the Balkans, Bulgaria and Anatolia. Having done all that, you’d think they’d be only too pleased to put their feet up. (HA! One of the best perks of writing about Istanbul has got to be making Ottoman jokes!) Rather, they lay siege to the beleaguered Constantinople, and before long, it was nobody’s business but the Turks’.

The victorious Ottoman sultan, Mehmet the Conqueror, renamed his prize Istanbul, which means merely “The City” (if you needed any more proof that this place was the centre of the universe), and moved his capital here. Thereafter followed almost half a millennium where Istanbul was the epicentre of yet another world-conquering empire, this time a Muslim one. The Ottoman empire expanded into North Africa, Mesopotamia and Persia. At one point, they even made it to the gates of Vienna.

Once again, the city of Istanbul was flush with cash. The emperors built grand mosques all over the city, with each creation trying to outdo the last in splendour and size.  I visited a mosque for the very first time in my life when I was in Istanbul – Sultanahmet Camii, more famous in the western world as the Blue Mosque. It was simply wonderful. Exquisite hand-painted tiles adorned every square centimetre of the walls – you could look in any direction around you and get lost in the intricate details. As a whole the building had a airy, naturally lit ambience that I’ve rarely felt in a church. And I think there’s something visceral about walking in bare feet that makes you more spiritually receptive to a place. I’ve felt it in temples, too.

Another Ottoman-era landmark you can visit in Istanbul is Topkapı Palace, the official residence of the sultans. Apart from the hundreds of intricately decorated rooms you can wander through, you can also gawk at all kinds of old artifacts, like clothes that used to be worn by the royal family. Going by the size of the kaftans on display, it appears that the average Ottoman sultan was about the size and weight of a Daimler Smart Car.

I guess that explains why towards the end of the 19th century, the empire was battling skyrocketing foreign debt. Clearly, the sultans were importing way too much Krispy Kreme. There was also the pesky problem of frequent insurrections by a Christian minority demanding better rights. Slowly but surely, like the Byzantine empire before it, the Ottoman empire started to fray at the edges. Picking the wrong side in World War 1 was the final nail in the coffin.

After the war, Allied forces occupied Constantinople and made plans to carve up the empire between them. The Ottoman sultan was manouevred into signing a treaty that would divvy up the remains of the empire between the Greeks, the French and the Italians, and create autonomous Armenian and Kurdish territories in eastern Anatolia.

In response to this imminent partitioning of the Anatolian heartland, a Turkish liberation movement was formed by breakaway members of the top Ottoman military brass, among them a general named Mustafa Kemal. Ten thousand men died fighting a war of independence, and finally the republic of Turkey as we know it today came into existence on October 29th, 1923.

Kemal became the first president of the republic, and gave himself the epithet Atatürk (“father of the Turks”). He brought in many sweeping reforms, such as making Turkey a secular republic, replacing Sharia law with the Swiss Code, introducing the Latin alphabet, and granting women legal equality. These founding tenets of the republic are a fiercely defended part of Turkish identity to this day.

Atatürk also moved the capital of the new republic to Ankara, leaving Istanbul to play second fiddle after thousands of years in the limelight. The City doesn’t seem to have held that against him, though. As throughout the rest of the country, there are more Atatürk monuments here than you can shake a scimitar at.

I particularly liked this one, the Republic Monument in Taksim Square, because I could recognise Ismet Inönü, Atatürk’s second-in-command, from the Turkish history book I read before I got here. And that warmed the cockles of my nerdy little heart.

I promise less history and more action in my next…

Light reading :]

• Turkey Unveiled: A History of Modern Turkey, by Hugh Pope and Nicole Pope
• Istanbul: Memories and the City, by Orhan Pamuk
• Wikipedia:
  • Names of Istanbul
  • Byzantium
  • Constantinople
  • History of the Eastern Roman Empire
  • Decline of the Roman Empire
  • The Fourth Crusade
  • The Fall of Constantinople
  • Ottoman Empire

The day of reckoning

The twenty-four hours before the marathon are all about carbo loading. If your body hasn’t stored enough carbs before the race, it starts to do nasty things to itself in order to keep running. So most marathon events have an associated pasta party, where all the runners turn up and eat offensive amounts of spag bog.

We passed on the official festivities and instead headed to Colleen’s, where we were treated to our own private pasta party of homemade chicken parm ‘n’ noodles. Deeee-lumptious.

And just in case we weren’t quite carbed up enough, she and the girls had also baked a batch of marathon-themed red velvet cupcakes – each one topped with a little mile marker flag. I had to expend substantial amounts of willpower to prevent myself from eating five of them.

After such a glorious meal, my body was ready to collapse into a food coma. Happily, my hotel bed was so delightfully cushy that I felt like I was sleeping on fairy floss (a little less sticky, though).

Waking up on the flip, it was time for a good carby breakfast, giving ourselves at least two hours to digest before the race. That’s how Sean and I found ourselves at Denny’s at 4am on a Sunday morning. It was quite a scene.

The tables around us were colonised by all manner of glammed-up clubbing folk, some still singing along gamely to the early 90’s piped music, others staring groggily into their Grand Slam breakfasts wishing they’d headed home four drinks earlier. There are some situations where you can’t help but feel out of place, and ordering whole wheat pancakes and fruit at Denny’s dressed head to toe in running gear at 4am on a Sunday is definitely one of them.

At around 7, we headed to the marathon start line, near BC Place in downtown Vancouver. By the time the starting gun went off at 7:30, the place was buzzing with excitement. Sean and I had decided to run the first five miles together so we could get some action shots of each other. Here’s Sean looking calm as a pro, as usual:

As you can see, the man has legs like redwood tree trunks – so there’s only so long a vertically challenged person like myself can keep up. He set a cracking pace for the first couple of miles – my second mile was under 8:50. I can keep that up for ten or so miles, but definitely not for twenty-six! So about twenty minutes in, I shooed him off ahead to go kick some ass, and fell back to a more sustainable pace.

I distinctly remember that around this time, it occurred to me that there wasn’t any actually guarantee that I was going to finish this thing. I was going to have to run 30% further today than I’d ever run before – that’s not an insignificant jump. Six more miles is a big deal when your body’s already dealt with twenty. But I tried not to think about it and concentrate on the mile in front of me.

Around the three mile mark, the crowd lining the street started to get particularly vociferous. Then the runners several metres in front of me started to whoop and clap and go crazy. As I followed everyone’s gazes to the other side of the street, five skinny African dudes flew past us faster than you can say “Nairobi, Kenya”. Wow. I was in awe.

The frontrunners weren’t the only ones getting love from the crowd, though. I was amazed how many spectators were out on the course, even on such a rainy, chilly day. They stood valiantly on the sidelines with their cowbells and signs, dispelling the gloom of the grey skies by cheering on each and every person running past. Normally, I’m used to being ignored by race spectators – they read my name on my bib and realise there’s no way they’re going to figure out how to pronounce it in the short time that I’m running past them. But at least four unknown people yelled my name out during the course of the race, which has got to be an all-time record.

There were several signs that made me chuckle along the way. Special mentions go to:

1. The one that said “In my mind, you’re all Kenyans!” In smaller writing underneath was the clarification: “Some people are just more Kenyan than others.”
2. The one at mile 22 that read “26.2 is your bitch.” Given how I felt at that point, I can’t believe I actually had the energy to chuckle.

Somehow I remember very clearly the innocuous incident that became the most fateful moment of the marathon for me. Around mile 10, turning up onto Burrard Street, my left foot landed in a puddle. The part of my brain that hadn’t gone into meditation mode thought, “Hmmm. I wonder if there’s anything bad about having a wet foot for the rest of this race?” I was soon about to find out.

When your foot is wet, it slides around more inside your shoe. And having your shoe rubbing continuously against your foot for over four hours is bad news.

About half an hour later, I was at the halfway mark, enjoying the peaceful greenery of Stanley Park. I was keeping up comfortably with the 4:15 pace bunny, and trying to avert my eyes from the male runners taking time-saving leaks right by the side of the path. (Bloody men and their god-given gift of convenience…)

It was here that I started to realise what stepping in that puddle meant. I was beginning to feel the unmistakable burn of a blister forming on the sole of my left foot. I pushed on, regardless. I’ve run with blisters before, I’m not completely soft.

The pain got progressively harder to ignore, but I knew I’d regret it later if I stopped or walked. So I grit my teeth and kept going. Mile 14, 15, 16 went by, and I still managed to keep up a decent pace. But by mile 19, the blister was starting to feel so full and painful that I thought it was going to burst inside my shoe. I slowed down to a jog and said goodbye to my dream of 4:15. Letting the pace bunny peel away from me was very, very, very demoralising.

Just then, I heard a familiar voice yelling my name from the sidelines. I looked up to see Colleen, Drew and the kids just ahead of me cheering like there was no tomorrow. They couldn’t have chosen a better spot. Seeing them there with their hand-painted signs and excited faces neutralised all my negative thoughts and simply made me happy. It’s hard not to smile when there are two little munchkins dancing around with your name painted across their cheeks.

A couple of minutes after that, I got another morale boost – I bumped into Sean. He was coming back the other way, and by all appearances was still going gangbusters. We high-fived, and then I was on my own again.

The last hour felt like about three. I was still running, but had slowed to almost a shuffle – my feet refused to get more than an inch or two off the ground. My left foot was in so much hot pain I felt like it was going to burst into flames. But. I. Wasn’t. Going. To. Stop. I was terrified that if I stopped for first aid, I wouldn’t be able to bring myself to start running again. And coming this far and walking would be a waste of all the time and effort I’d put in to get to this point.

In the previous day’s Globe and Mail, I’d read an inspiring article about the Tour d’Afrique, a three-month, 200km-a-day bike expedition from Cairo to Cape Town. For the last hour I was grimly muttering over and over to myself the catchphrase of the riders in the Tour d’Afrique: “Every fucking inch. Every fucking inch.” I was tired and in pain, and only sheer stubbornness was keeping me going. There was a photographer around mile 23, and I look like a serial killer in all photos taken of me around this point.

At mile 24, I found myself running alongside a sexagenarian who was wheezing and grunting and groaning and panting so loudly and continuously, he sounded like a badly-maintained printing press. Obviously, the guy deserved bucketloads of respect – he was almost three times my age and still keeping pace with me 24 miles in. But I was too close to the end of my tether to have this guy groaning and  grunting in my ear for another half hour – I would have ended up turning around and strangling him, or pushing him into English Bay. So somehow, I managed to speed up just enough to shake him off. There’s been reams written on how much the human body has in reserve when driven by extreme love, anger or determination, but the motivating power of sheer irritation is highly underrated.

Mile 25 went uphill. Twisted, twisted fucking sadists, whoever designed this course.

And then, as I re-crossed the Burrard Bridge, I saw the sign saying “2km to go”. I could visualise the path to the finish line from where I was – I’d walked on this street before. Only ten or fifteen minutes of pain left, if I picked up the pace. I asked my body for every bit of juice it had left in it, and started to sprint. I didn’t really care anymore if the blister burst right in my shoe, because I knew there was a first aid tent right over the finish line, and I was going to be there really soon.

I have no idea where the energy came from, but my final mile was my fastest split since mile three. I overtook a whole lot of people along the way who looked like they were about to drop dead. I’d felt the same only a few minutes ago, but now I was going on pure adrenaline.  As I came into the finishing chute in 4:20, I heard my name over the loudspeaker: “And Urmila from Seattle is flying in for a strong finish…”

And then – finally, hallelujah, praise the lord – my chip beeped and I was over the line. It was done. I could hardly believe it. I was so relieved, so happy, so exhausted, that I lost my grip and began to laugh uncontrollably. It was a very weird feeling – I physically couldn’t stop myself from laughing for a full three or four minutes. I was laughing while one volunteer gave me my finisher’s medal, still laughing as another one wrapped a blanket around my shoulders, and still laughing as I hobbled out of the chute into the food area.

By the food tent I found Sean, who’d blitzed the race in 3:46. I was so proud.

After some easily digested carbs, it was time to go to the First Aid tent to survey the damage. I gingerly peeled off my shoe to find my poor left foot in a total mess – the blister took up a third of surface area of my sole, and it was full to bursting with blood. To boot, I had painful mini-blisters on every toe as well. No wonder my foot had felt like it was going to explode for the last two hours. The whole thing was really quite horrendous-looking. (But look, Amma, I’m growing up! I didn’t post a picture of it on my blog!)

The doctor in the first aid tent packed up my foot in some gauze and told me to stay off it as much as possible for the next few days. (She didn’t have to tell me twice.) Then we hobbled back to the hotel. You know that stuff you read in biology class about adrenaline masking pain? It’s true. As the euphoria of the race started to fade, our bodies started reminding us what we’d just made them do.

Once we could bring ourselves to get up off our fairy floss beds and act in a civilised manner again, we walked to a nearby brewpub for our celebratory meal. I ordered a burger. With bacon. AND cheese. AND fries. AND beer. Oh, happy day…

It’s not every day you get to tick one of your life aims off your checklist. Eighteen months ago, I couldn’t even run seven miles without wanting to collapse. This year, I ran a flippin’ marathon. Boo-effing-YAH.

The road to Vancouver

I know this blog’s meant to be about my life in Europe and all, but the record would be incomplete if I didn’t write about my marathon in Vancouver. After all, if 99% of completing a marathon comes down to preparation, then you might say I really ran this race in Europe.

Like any classic sports movie worth its salt – Million Dollar Baby, Ladybugs (hey – Jonathan Brandis was way cool back in ‘96), my eighteen weeks of marathon training were full of ups and downs. Happily, it was mostly ups. There were countless mornings when I’d get to work after a run with so many beta-endorphins coursing through my body that my manager would take one look at me and say “Did you go running?”, in around the same wary tone as you would say “Have you been drinking?” On one occasion, I had to go jog up and down the fire stairs for a while, so the jumping beans would settle and I wouldn’t drive my colleagues mad. Runner’s high is not a myth, people.

Each weekend centred on a long run. As my training program peaked to distances that previously seemed unthinkable – 14 miles, then 15, 17, 18 – simply making it to my planned finishing point was a new PB.

I would plan my routes to take me through parts of Munich I’d never seen before, and discover new things to love about the city. (Like the building in the university district with a giant giraffe painted on the side. Omigawrsh.) Some days I’d end my long runs at a beer garden or pub. I don’t think there’s any way a glass of weissbier could taste better!

When spring finally came, it was a dream come true, a cherished reward for enduring months of dark, frozen mornings. I’d run through the English Garden or Olympiapark, with the crisp morning air tempered by the warmth of the rising sun. With each passing week there’d be more green buds on the trees and new patches of bright yellow spring blooms, with a backing soundtrack of birds swapping yarns about their winter getaways. There was a primal joy in training in shorts and t-shirts after months of alternately sweating and shivering inside warm layers.

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There were also the mornings when it was 15 below zero and snowing sideways, and giving up the warmth of my bed and running 8 miles in the wind and the dark was the absolute last thing I felt like doing.

The worst day of training was the day I attempted my first twenty-miler, and I ran out of water early. By mile 17, I was on a snow-covered road in the middle of nowhere, exhausted, sore and dehydrated. When the road started to slope uphill, mentally I was toast. I sat down at the edge of the road and cried for a full five minutes. I finally peeled myself off the ground and kept running, but at mile 18, I started to get really painful leg cramps, and had to hobble and limp to mile 20, swearing and biting back tears all the way. There was a railway station at mile 19, but I had too much pride to stop.

When all’s said and done, it’s actually hard to say what I’m prouder of – finishing the 26.2 on race day, or pushing myself to train week after week regardless of the mood Mother Nature and/or I were in.

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I learnt a hell of a lot about along the way about things like pacing, equipment and taking care of my body. You can get away with a lot up to a certain distance, even a half marathon. During the early weeks of training, I would regularly run ten or twelve miles without drinking a single drop of water along the way. (The lack of public drinking water in Europe annoys me in the extreme – don’t get me started!) But at some point, the distances start to be long enough for little things to begin mattering a whole lot.

After the debacle of the first twenty-miler, five weeks out from the race, I knew I had to treat my body with more care. I ended up getting a camelback – one of those really lightweight, close-fitting backpacks specially designed for athletes to carry water. The water bladder has a tube that hangs down along the shoulder strap of the backpack, so you can drink on the go. I started wearing this for longer runs, and it really did help. Not to mention that it made me feel 200x more hardcore and 100x more like Ann Trason. (P.S. I have no idea if Ann Trason wears a camelback while running. She is probably hardcore enough to just make water out of air, or something.)

I also started paying much more attention to what I was eating before my long runs. In the beginning, my nutrition was focused around getting down to my race weight, so I probably wasn’t eating as much as I should have. I got scolded by my colleague, a running veteran, who taught me that the stuff-your-face-with-pasta-the-night-before tradition exists for a reason. I tried to eat more of a “runner’s diet” from then on, and immediately felt a difference in my staying power.

But the best friend I made during these otherwise very solitary eighteen weeks was my trusty GPS watch. Sean (remotely training for the marathon with me in Seattle) had convinced me to buy one, but I was pretty sceptical of the concept at first. The idea of wearing a heart rate monitor and harnessing satellites to measure my distance and pace down to the second seemed like overkill to me – just another useless gadget, I thought.

But this gadget ended up winning me over – you can only improve what you can measure, after all. Having real-time feedback on my speed kept my intensity up on weekdays, and the prospect of hearing the next mile-marking beep kept me hungry and focused during two and three hour-long runs. And there’s virtually no end to the statistical fun a nerd can have with the data once it’s all aggregated onto a computer.

When it came time to run my second twenty-miler, my last and longest run before race day, I ran the hell out of it. I even had the legs to sprint the last mile, a far cry from the hobble to the finish last time around. I’d prepared as best I could, and it was time to taper and let my body rest before the big day. But that’s a story for another post!