The MySQL Runners Club meets whenever running MySQLers meet. Sun Microsystems GmbH here in Germany also has something similar — and a good week ago, a group of Sunnies teamed up for the 31. Münchner Stadtlauf half marathon. I decided to make myself an embedded reporter, combining Twitter, Flip Mino, YouTube and a bit of surplus electronics and Web 2.0 media.

What’s the result? 37 Tweets, an almost 10 minute YouTube video and, surprisingly, a new personal record (1:44:06).

You’ll see a bit more in the video. Sure, both voice and text are in German — but you’ll get most of it just looking and sensing the physical presence. I decided to increase the Web 2.0 ambition level from last year, when I just blogged the event.

So check out the results on YouTube and Twitter:

1. The film: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkR8ap7AoCw
2. The Tweets: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=&from=kajarno&since=2009-06-28&until=2009-06-28&rpp=50

The commentators on YouTube and Twitter seem to like the film. “The orange mass of people resemble the disorder and rush when bringing the cattle down from the mountain pastures”. I hope the film conveys some of the feeling of running a half marathon!

More comments in my German blog entry: Der rasende Reporter mit dem Mittendrin-Video vom Münchner Stadtlauf 28.6.2009.

And — proudly presenting — my certificate with the new PR 1:44:06:

If you send me an email during the rest of February, you are highly unlikely to get an answer. However, I promise not to spam you with an “Out of office” auto reply. I dislike receiving those messages, as they seemingly have little correlation with when the person actually will reply to the email.

My excuse for not responding is that I won’t be around my laptop and that connectivity is bad in rural Tanzania anyway. I will make an attempt at conquering Kilimanjaro, one of the Seven Summits, and to twitter while doing it — to the extent there is sufficient SMS coverage, blood sugar and my fingers aren’t numb.

I also hope to take some pics, which will illustrate a blog hopefully titled “Over 14% of the Seven Summits conquered“, rather than “Taking the Milk Train from Africa“.

Huh, Milk Train? Explanation: If you’re dishonourably released from the Reserve Officer School in Finland, you’re said to take the “dairy train” home (I took course 174 in 1984 and luckily returned with a non-dairy train). And while I’m not too worried about whether I’ve trained sufficiently, I am worried about how I’ll take the height (5895 m!), and how my knees take the long hikes.

BTW, there are MySQLers who have made the Kilimanjaro. Olivier Beutels (in Mktg in Finland) and Duleepa “Dups” Wijayawardhana (in, drumrolls, the Community Team in Canada) are the ones I know of. Quoting selected passages from Dups’s Kili blog from Summit Day:

And then off we went into the moonlit night. It is cold, brutally cold. Colder even than Edmonton in the dead of winter. 

After passing 5000m I start having breathing problems. I am not getting enough oxygen into my system. It is now painfully slow for all of us, three steps, three breaths. 

The horizon is getting lighter and the glacier wall is to our left. I have never seen the horizon that wide, that immense. It is a scene I will never forget.

Slowly I make it to the summit with the others. This is the moment I had waited for.

If Uhuru Peak was the summit of my emotion, the path down was the deepest well of despair. My blood sugar is extremely low, my water is frozen and I am feeling the effects of AMS more severely. At one point Victor is holding me and I black out and come back. Even more disturbing I’ve developed a fever. My temper is short and I immediately pass out on my return to Barafu Huts.

If you’re interested in the schedule, take a look at my blog entry “Attempting the Kilimanjaro“.

Salle (MySQL EMEA Support Leader) just told me over IRC: “One has to be crazy to do the job Kaj is doing :)”. While it may not be mandatory, it does help. It also helps me in my free time, where I just climbed Mt Blanc with my fourteen year old son.

Die-hard marathoners or mountaineers I recommend to scroll towards the bottom. There, I have an account of the exact times and heights of ascent, how to survive Refuge Gouter etc. But let’s start from the beginning, in the spirit of the http://xkcd.com/77/ web comic “bored with the Internet”.

It all starts with a leisurely walk up the Gran Paradiso, 4061 m.

The usual sight is the heels of my son.

A MySQL cap protects me against excessive Sun.

It also helps when it’s snowy.

Valley panorama.

Specifically this view, of my son’s heels, was next to mandatory as I was tied to him with a rope.

Taking off some gear near the summit of Gran Paradiso.

The final ascent to Gran Paradiso.

Waiting for crossing the tough spot.

View from Gran Paradiso (it’s in Italy).

Alexander made it, too.

Father and son, and the Madonna. Austrians and Germans do “Gipfelkreuz” (a cross), Italians do madonnas.

A happy Alexander at Gran Paradiso. It was his first 4000 m high mountain, and mine too.

One step forward, and I would fall hundreds of metres.

I miss my 8 mm fisheye.

Hooray!

As long as we’re on the glacier, we’re tied to each other.

The glacier isn’t exactly clean.

And it has plenty of cavities.

Next day! More exercises. This is close to Courmayeur.

Taking off the shoes afterwards is rewarding.

No, I didn’t Photoshop the ski pole onto the … toilet cleaning device.

The true adventure starts! We’re heading up the Mt Blanc. Now, we’re at Bellevue, waiting for the railway.

The train is driven by a cog wheel.

Alexander, in anticipation.

The first day (out of two) has 1500 height metres. And it was the more arduous one. Headache. Not fully acclimatised.

It’s getting higher.

We’re now on 3800 m height, in the Refuge Gouter. That’s the one from which the ascent starts tomorrow.

The writing on the wall says in essence “if you come too late, don’t expect to get a place to sleep — and if you do, expect it to be on the kitchen floor”.

First dinner serving 18:00, second 18:45. And first breakfast at 2:30 (for those going for the summit), second at 8:00 (for when weather doesn’t allow you to go to the summit, i.e. those going back to the valley).

Alexander in front of the Refuge Gouter.

And myself.

Thomas and Abi, two of our three excellent guides from the DAV Summit Club — the trip organising subsidiary of Deutscher Alpenverein.

Father-and-son bonding.

My son thinks either this picture …

… or this one reminds him of the ZDF Wetterstudio, i.e. German weather forecast pic.

Beds at the Refuge Gouter are spartan.

Fellow DAV climber Frank admires the ZDF Wetterstudio.

I slept fully dressed: Trousers, outdoor trousers, three layers on top.

More father-son bonding.

It’s now about 2:15 in the morning, in Refuge Gouter. We ate, took our gear, and made ourselves ready.

2:54 Alexander and Kaj leave from Pole Position, lead by our fearless Mountaineer Abi. About 40-50 groups right behind us, breathing in our necks.

3:50One group passes us.

4:00 — 5:00 — 6:00 One step after the other. Endurance. This is not the worst part; waiting yesterday was. That made it into the most demanding physical endurance test of my life. It combined the next-to-worst aspects of a marathon (not the last few km, but almost) with height related headache and nausea, as well as the next-to-worst aspects of hiking in the Finnish army: Limits in stopping to dress (because it’s cold), undress (because it’s hot), or cater for some other physiological needs (drinking, eating, or the mirrored processes thereof).

6:20 on Tue 2.9.2008 We’re at the top, Mt Blanc 4810 m, as the second team! Whether it made much sense to hurry, is another story entirely.

Kaj at the summit.

Sunrise.

Sunrise, put into larger perspective.

Sunrise was indeed impressive.

More of it.

And more!

And more!

Myself, admiring the sunrise.

8:30 we were back at the Refuge Gouter. We had some spaghetti, and left again at 9:30. And back at the cog-wheel railway, we were at 13:05.

Mt Blanc the following morning, from in front of our hotel.

Same thing, but closer.

Ahh, and a final note. We drove home to Munich with a navi. We meticulously followed its advice, only playing with the language, in which the navi bossed us around. And according to the navigator, this is the main road between Chamonix and Munich. (But we refused to “Do a U-turn, if possible!” on this road).Technology is great!

On Saturday, I spent a couple of hours running with Alexander Stubb. No, Alex is not our newest recruit to the MySQL Support Team, he’s the Foreign Minister of Finland (the guy in the yellow T-shirt below).

But let me rewind to the beginning. I have been increasing my running to over 1200 km a year, and when I heard that the Münchner Stadtlauf half-marathon doesn’t crash with Finnish midsummer (something never to be missed), I registered for it and finished it in 1:45:58. And I calculated I would have a chance at going below four hours at a full marathon, so I registered for the Helsinki City Marathon, which took place last Saturday on 16.8.2008 in my native Finland.

At a restaurant close to the Olympic Stadium just before start, I met with my long-time MySQL colleagues Patrik Backman and Giuseppe Maxia, as well as our fresh Sun colleague Peter Eisentraut, of PostgreSQL fame. When the time for the start (fairly late, three o’clock in the afternoon) approached, I went for the start area, and was pleasantly surprised to hear the race moderator interview our Foreign Minister.

To continue my pleasant surprise, Alex said he was not only going to be the starter of the marathon, but he was going to run himself. The interview was started in Finnish, and then went on to Swedish. “What’s your target time?” the interviewer asked. “Oh, I have one, but I haven’t published it” — he evidently had the same marathon goal communication policy as I. The interviewer swapped away from our two domestic languages to foreign ones, going over English and German to French. And Alex continued smoothly and fluently in his colloquial, youthful jargon in all of the five languages. He had a targeted and clearly unscripted message in all languages. In German, for instance, Alex shared how Frank-Walter Steinmeier (Germany’s Foreign Minister) the day before had found him to be slighly mad for going for a marathon, right after a week full of intense Georgia related negotiations.

The interview formed a very good pep talk for us runners, and an opportunity for me to no longer have to be ashamed of the linguistic disabilities of our Foreign Minister (as used to be the case when I grew up, leading to a whole genre of jokes). I share Alex’s view that one can show respect by speaking the language of the audience (and Helsinki City Marathon has a very international audience).

So off we went, and the start went well. The weather conditions were perfect: Drizzle. And 16-18 degrees. Not too cold, not too hot. A few km after the start, I saw Patrik, Giuseppe and Peter amongst the spectators, and they took some pictures of me.

The race passed by the Parliament Building, went out through familiar parts of Helsinki (Mejlans, Tölö, Munksnäs) to Esbo close to where MySQL’s first Finnish offices were, and continued via the Nokia House to the absolute centre of Helsinki. That was the most enjoyable part of the running experience. I kept to my pace, and I felt like being on a train. I just went with the flow and didn’t feel any effort. But after a while, my left knee started to remind me of its existence. Past the 21,1 km half way mark, it evened out as my right knee also begged for some attention. But basically, everything went fine until a while beyond 30 km, when the energy reserves of my body were depleted.

“So why didn’t I drink more of the Gatorade offered?”, the running reader will ask. Well, I had prepared a perfect excuse for the scenario in which I would have to stop: When in India for the MySQL Camp in Bangalore, I had caught salmonellosis. Salmonella bacteria are not a nice companion if you run, but also not total inhibitors for running. That said, I chose not to upset my stomach any further by consuming potent, unfamiliar drinks. And the effect was that I dropped from 1606th position at 30 km to 1970th position in the goal (out of 5436 participants).

So this meant that the last few km weren’t all that enjoyable. But I still didn’t get cramps like the 55 year old male athlete who was screaming “aijaijai” less than a km from the goal, at as many decibels as his lung capacity allowed. Humbling.

I finished at 3:55:22. That’s my best marathon ever, about 45 min faster than my previous personal record. I didn’t feel well in the goal, rolling back a few of my latest drinking transactions just after crossing the finish line (honest, it was just water).

After the run, I went for something very typically Finnish: A sauna. And there can hardly be a better timing for a nice, warm bath than right after getting into the goal of a cool (at least temperature-wise) marathon run. My body is often out of balance in many ways after a marathon, including but not limited to shivering out of cold. Ah, was it nice to relax and do some joint bragging together with fellow runners in the Olympic Swimming Stadium. And after the sauna, there were still plenty of runners coming to the goal area. I felt zero superiority over them, as I still vividly remember my own first marathon with a time of 5:41. A marathon for an amateur must strictly be about competing against yourself. And if you (like me) start lousy enough, you’ve got an easy target to beat.

And, what happened with Alex Stubb?

Well, he had shared with us that he had finished a previous Helsinki marathon in 3:59 and a Brussels marathon a bit below 3:40. I suspect he might have targeted 3:30, and like me, he lost positions towards the end of the race. At any rate, he finished 688th with a fabulous time of 3:31:25. Extremely impressive for anyone, especially for a Foreign Minister!

(Yes, Alex did wear something slightly more appropriate than a suit for the marathon).

I hadn’t run a race since 2003, but I have improved upon my amount of running and thought it would be good to see whether it would show in my race time. It did!

Thumbs up after a half marathon finished in record time

“From a fat bastard to a running dynamo” was what a fellow member of the MySQL Running Club SMSed me when I had proudly announced my personal record of 1:46:05 (as measured “on the safe side” by my own watch; the organisers timed me at 01:45:58) on the Münchner Stadtlauf half marathon in Munich today.

Full of energy before the race

While I may never have fully qualified for the attribute “fat”, I certainly was very bad at sports at school. My average speed on 21 km today (11,9 km/h; 5:03 minutes/km) was the same as my average speed on 2400 m at school, which was the distance that I did at school at the Cooper test (where the point is to run as far as you can for 12 minutes).

The route as plotted by my Garmin Forerunner 305

The Münchner Stadtlauf half marathon has a very scenic route, starting at the central square Marienplatz and going past the Theatinerkirche by the Hofgarten into the Englischer Garten, where most of the run takes place.

Waiting for the start at the Rathaus on the Marienplatz

The start was 8:00 in the morning. I located the sign saying “1:45-2:00″ and went just past it, as I was sure I wouldn’t make 1:45 but certainly aimed for less than 2:00.

The shoe chip

On my right shoe, I had a one-time chip for measuring my time, which we got from Sport Scheck, the organising sports store, along with the orange T-shirts. Good thing Germany doesn’t play Holland in the football finals today, as our attire would have been considered treason by most runners.

Plenty of runners

Despite standing at the right spot (”1:45-2:00″), I ended up passing lots and lots of slower racers during the first 20 km of the race. The paths for running are narrow, and doesn’t really carry the capacity for this amount of runners. It’s especially hard to run past groups of two or more runners next to each other. Oh well, running a race is meant to be fun, and it is fun, but still: Perhaps it would be a good idea to suggest some traffic rules like “slower runners to the right” and “no more than two fellow runners next to each other”.

At km 20 in the Hofgarten

Given how this went, I’m likely to want to run another race.

At the Theatinerkirche on the way back

Feeling more confident to reach the goal, now in the Weinstraße

Thumbs up

The next goal is the 35th Möviken runt in Nagu, Finland next Saturday 5.7.2008. Nagu IF started five years before the Münchner Stadtlauf, which had their 30th event today.

Sophia Arnö proudly (I hope) took pictures of her father

Running is fun!

Update 30.6.2008: Based on the statistics from Mika Timing, it turns out I was #1346 out of 5288 finishers (men). This means 25 % were faster than me and 75 % were slower than me. The median time was 1:55:04.

My hand-made statistics for men:

• Winner - 1:08:25
• 1 % - 1:24:53
• 5 % - 1:31:56
• 10 % - 1:37:04
• 20 % - 1:43:23
• 25 % - 1:45:43
• 30 % - 1:48:02
• 33,3 % - 1:49:12
• 40 % - 1:51:37
• 50 % - 1:55:04
• 60 % - 1:58:49
• 66,7 % - 2:01:34
• 70 % - 2:03:09
• 75 % - 2:05:46
• 80 % - 2:09:14
• 90 % - 2:18:00
• 95 % - 2:24:35
• 99 % - 2:39:39
• Last - 2:55:15

Links:

• Münchner Stadtlauf: http://www.ganz-muenchen.de/freizeitfitness/sport/laufen/muenchner_stadtlauf/sport_scheck/start.html
  
• Results for Münchner Stadtlauf half marathon from Mika Timing:  http://results.mikatiming.de/2008/muenchen_sportscheck/
• Möviken runt / Nagu IF: http://naguif.net/
• My running stats for 2007: http://blogs.mysql.com/kaj/2008/01/05/1259-km/

MySQLers share many hobbies. One of them is running. After the holiday season, I allowed myself to do some statistics on last year’s running, and add some personal reflections, only marginally related to work and MySQL.

Running is often a social event at MySQL, where a sizable portion of my 108 runs last year were with other MySQLers: Six times with Zack Urlocker (EVP Products), six times with Patrik Backman (Dir SW Eng), twice each with Larry Stefonic (SVP APAC) and Clint Smith (Legal Counsel), and once each with Kristofer Pettersson (SW Eng), Saskia Schweitzer (Training coordinator), Mikael Ronstršm (Principal Engineer/Senior MySQL Architect), and Nicolas Pujol (Sr Director, Alliances & Channels). Running can even be social time spent with non-runners (not just on the phone), as three of my runs were with MySQLers on bike: Once with Michael “Monty” Widenius (Co-founder), once with Lenz Grimmer (Community Team) and half a time with Matthew Montgomery (Support Eng) who suffered a flat tyre.

For me, statistics can be one of many good motivators for running.

I’m proud to note a new record of 1259 km for last year, which is a lot more than the earlier years (the time series for 2001 to 2006 goes 523 km, 477 km, 424 km, 501 km, 809 km, 673 km). Also the pace is faster. My average speed is up from around 9 km/h in the early years of the century to nearly 11 km/h last year.

In fact, I spent nearly 120 hours (4.9 days, to be exact) running during 2007:

    Month       km 	            Time  km/h	     min/km  Ct
 1  Januari     61 km     61 km	 6:04:05  10,1 km/h  5:55,6   6
 2  Februari    47 km    108 km	 4:32:11  10,3 km/h  5:49,3   4
 3  Mars        92 km    200 km	 8:55:22  10,3 km/h  5:48,0   8
 4  April      145 km    346 km	13:58:56  10,4 km/h  5:46,2  13
 5  Maj	       119 km    465 km	11:06:24  10,7 km/h  5:35,7  10
 6  Juni       154 km    619 km	14:03:05  10,9 km/h  5:29,1  13
 7  Juli        71 km    690 km	 6:35:17  10,8 km/h  5:31,8   7
 8  Augusti     82 km    772 km	 7:31:26  10,9 km/h  5:29,7   7
 9  September  128 km    901 km	11:42:47  11,0 km/h  5:28,4  11
10  Oktober    131 km  1 032 km	11:27:24  11,4 km/h  5:15,1  11
11  November   130 km  1 161 km	11:45:28  11,0 km/h  5:26,4  10
12  December	97 km  1 259 km	 8:59:28  10,8 km/h  5:33,2   8

2007	     1 259 km	1258,51	4,9 d     10,8 km/h  5:33,8 108

(If km/h and min/km tells you as little as miles/h and min/miles tell me, you may benefit from my computation in Neo Office that the slowest month of January had an average speed of 6,3 miles/hour and a pace of 9:32 minutes per mile, whereas the fastest month of October had an average speed of 7,1 miles/hour and a pace of 8:27 minutes per mile).

Some MySQLers of course grow tired of all these runners boasting their training, and would prefer us to all play poker instead. Personally, I’m glad to note that an ex couch potato like myself can make steady progress over the years. At school, I always belonged to the last quarter of boys being picked out for any team sports.

Benefits from running are many. Besides being social and healthy, it increases stamina. Stamina is good not just for work, but also for other sports activities: Running helped me climb the Großvenediger mountain (3674 m) in July without belonging to the most tired quarter of climbers in our group. And I enjoy winter sports (last year snowboarding in Wolkenstein in Italy) even more, when tiredness seldom if ever hits my legs.

Finally, running is a great way to follow the seasons in the most beautiful areas close to where you live or travel. I have a set of regular runs that I prefer over others, and where I do my seasonal observations. Of the 108 runs during 2007, 71 were 11,79 km runs around Isarwehr (in Munich), 20 were 11,6 km runs around Sellmo (near my country house in Nagu, Finland — an extended Mšviken Runt by Nagu IF), 3 were 12,99 km runs around Ikea (in Grankulla, Finland) and 14 elsewhere: Orlando, Rancho San Antonio, Palo Alto, Portland, Hamburg (Sports Day with Lenz), Heidelberg, and a few non-Isarwehr runs in Munich. BTW, thanks Garmin Forerunner for measuring the distances.

For 2008, I look out to run more and faster than 2007, and to be able to support more mountaineering, more snowboarding, and perhaps a “trans Alp” on a mountain bike. Whether I’ll go for my fifth marathon somewhere remains to be seen.

Our friendly Human Resources department started a new initiative this week: We have a Global Sports Day for all our >360 employees in >29 countries. That means that us MySQLers are to get off the keyboard, move our bodies, and document our activities for the rest of the company to see. We are reimbursed for expenses, and the most creative activity / picture / story will get an additional reward.

Lenz and I happened to have planned a Community meeting for today already quite a while ago, so we decided to combine this with the Sports Day. Our local version in Hamburg took us 5,43 km through Niendorfer Gehege in 0:31:35. For myself, this means that I have run a total of 161 km so far this year, for about 15 hours, at an average speed of 10,3 km (I’m sure you’re interested). For Lenz, this was the first time he moved himself this year out of “free” will on a bike.

Lenz getting ready on bike …	… and Kaj on foot.

Kaj running …

… and Lenz biking.

Getting dark in the Niendorfer Gehege.

Kaj and Lenz getting closer to the goal.

The reason I know the exact distance of 5,43 km is that I bought a Garmin Forerunner 305 earlier this year. I fear this gadget won’t be within the budget of the Sports Day reimbursement, but it’s great fun for a running geek. Hey, if it motivates me to run more, it’s worth it! Perhaps I should read up on the notes from MySQL Camp last November about how the Motion Based guys (a Garmin subsidiary) are using MySQL for spatial data.

To recover from drinking beer at the Oktoberfest, I had to increase my amount of running this week. Against an average 15 km, I did 47 km this week. Happily, I made a new record 1:07:09 on the standard 13 km “around Ikea” run. That’s an average speed of 11,6 km/h or a 8 min 20 sec mile (for those of my readers, should I have any, who are from the parts of the New World where medieval units are preferred).

Tom, between the jugs of beer at Oktoberfest, was asking me whether I feel a pressure to run. No I don’t. It’s strictly relaxation, and I have low ambitions:

• To keep reasonably fit
• To have fun
• To catch some fresh air
• To follow the changing seasons
• To chat with friends who join the run
• To chat with friends over the phone

If I want to win while running, it’s just a question of beating my own earlier times or distances. This means I do keep a log of my runs, so I know I’ve run 568 km so far this year, as opposed to 409 km at the same time last year.

So today, I was running over 20 km for the first time since 2002. It was a long run around Bredviken (Munksnäs-Fölisön-Drumsö-Kägeludden-Otnäs-Tarvo-Munksnäs) with long-time friend Ralf on inline skates. In the beginning he asked whether I tend to keep up my normal speed for all of 21 km. At the end, he noted it was hard to keep such a slow pace on his inline skates.

But I made the 21 km!

Me running my first marathon 2000