Half Marathon - Hannover

Before we start here, let me just apologise for the lame cell phone pictures and British spellings.  The former is due to me being alone on my trip.  I wasn't positive if I could get a late checkout, and I didn't want my DSLR in a plastic baggy in a giant room full of everyone else's plastic baggies.  The latter is due to my computer's current identity crisis and its strange need to write things like colour and favourite.

Hannover was pretty fun!  I didn't see many of the cities cultural offerings, but I would say I explored a pretty decent chunk.  I didn't take any maps with me on my wanderings, so I let myself get lost a few times.  On my first attempt at finding the race expo, I actually found my hotel again.

On Saturday, I woke up, went for a 2 mile loosen-up jog, came back, and took a shower.  The hotel had some interesting soap dispensers, and I couldn't resist a picture.  You will notice that each language places "hair," "hand," and "body" in a different order.  I'm not sure what this says about the different cultures, but it probably says something.  (The German, Spanish, Russian, and Arabic versions are in very small letters at the bottom, hence the giant picture.)

Hair: important to anglophones, unimportant to hispanophones, francophones are ambivalent.

Then I put on my new, magical Cornhusker shoelaces.  They barely fit through the holes, but I think this was actually a good thing.  Once I tightened them down just right, they weren't going anywhere!

With those, I went on my short walk turned long walk to pick up my race packet.  It was a nice trip.  I saw lots of side streets, ate a crepe, and got some ice cream.

When I got back to my room, I dropped everything off and then headed down the street to buy a Hannover Starbucks mug.  I just started collecting them this year (which is unfortunate, because I don't have them now from a lot of places I've been), and I really want to have them from places I've run in.  I don't have a picture of the actual mug, but I do have a picture of the statue of King Ernst August.  His statue is right outside the Hauptbahnhof at Ernst-August-Platz, which is not a great location to get a good picture of anything.  I took it just to prove that I actually went to the place to get the mug instead of trading for it.

The actual race was pretty nice.  The forecast had predicted heavy rains, but they didn't come until much later in the evening.  I'm not sure yet about my feelings on the weather.  I wore a baseball style running cap to keep the rain off of my eyes so that I could see while I was running.  I ended up wearing it despite the dry weather to keep the sun out of my eyes instead.  I could tell by the end of the race though, that it was starting to get hot under my hat.  In general, I would have preferred if it were 10 degrees cooler with less wind and humidity, but I was there to have fun, not break world records.

After I ran the race, I had a couple hours to kill before my train was ready to take me home.  My intention was to go visit a museum, but I noticed that I really just wanted to do a lot of sitting.  I did some sitting on a bench with some ice cream.  I did some other sitting on concrete blocks without any ice cream.  Then I took a very roundabout way back to the train station and saw this building.  I can't quite put my finger on it, but there is something very German to me about a Bäckeramtshaus.

When I was finally on the train back home, I learned a very important lesson.  Deutsche Bahn coffee is both overpriced and terrible.  The quality is comparable to American gas station coffee.  (The average German gas station coffee is actually very good.)  It costs 2,80.  So about $4.

The offending cup

You'll also see there part of a chart from my double knit Space Invaders scarf.  I got four aliens finished on my various train rides, which doubled the work I had accomplished over the two previous months.

Overall: Success!  Four German half marathons down, twelve to go!

WIP Wednesday

It's confession time.

I really like Harry Potter.  No, you don't get it.  I really like Harry Potter.  As in, I like it so much that I joined a group on Ravelry over a month ago where people get sorted into Hogwarts Houses, turn in knitting projects as homework, and compete for a House Cup.  They even have OWLs and Quidditch.  April is a break month, but everything starts back up again in May, so I've been waiting for then to cast on my knitting projects so that they will count for things.

But there's no point in not working on things I had already started.  And it seems a shame to deny myself knitting just because there's a game going on that I can also knit for.

Here's my Vasa, which is still a WIP because it has 50000 ends not woven in.  I was an absolute idiot and for some reason didn't carry the contrast color up the side of my first piece.  But it is blocked, even though that little piece of ribbing doesn't like to stay where he belongs.

I'm still deciding how I feel about the Vasa.  I think it's decently flattering, for a shirt with no shaping whatsoever.  If I do make another one, I am definitely doing it in the round.  I am all about easy finishing.

And what's this over here?  Could it be?  It's Visser's big cousin, Visser 4!  (It's only the second one I've made, but it's the fourth size.)  It's coming along reasonably quickly.  I've already separated the torso into front and back.  I'm working the back right now, because it's just mindless stockinette.

FO Friday - Visser

My favorite online LYS, Eat.Sleep.Knit, wrapped up their first quarter KAL challenge on Monday.  We were supposed to knit things that required us to learn a new skill, and we would get credit for 1000 yards in their yarnathon.

My initial plan was to submit Zantha, which you've seen here before, since I had never done lace before.  But since then, I've knit two more, and I am just Zantha'd out right now.  I didn't even want to look at it long enough to sew the buttons on and finish it up.

Instead, I grabbed a skein of Madelinetosh Pashmina and got to work.  My two skeins of Pashmina, in Cobalt and Citrus, reminded me of the bright, complementary colors I saw a lot of in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.  I decided to see if there were any typical Dutch sweater designs that I could translate into a baby sweater, and there were!

These would be quite at home in a Van Gogh work.

Dutch fisherman sweaters were exactly the thing I was looking for.  They are knit in solid colors, so the visual interest comes from various knit and purl stitch patterns that decorate most of the front of the sweater.  They also generally have a drop shoulder construction, which is much easier to measure and calculate for than the raglans I am used to making.  They are often knit very tightly, but I loosened up the gauge a bit, since a baby doesn't need to be waterproofed on a boat.  (They probably also weren't knit in a yarn with any silk content, but hey.)

I've named this sweater Visser, after the Dutch word for fisherman.

And what were the new skills I learned for this?  Many, to include casting on in pattern and the right twist mock cable.  But the one I am most proud of is seaming.  I'm no longer terrified of it, which is good, since my plan is to knit myself a seamed garment someday.  This also lets me use sweater construction methods other than raglan and circular yoke.

A list of various loves and hates

I love cardigans.
I hate sewing buttons.
(There is a way around this called open front cardigans that I am currently exploring.)

I love my dog.
I hate it when she is aggressive toward smaller dogs, because it puts me in an awkward situation with that other dog's owner.  Although to be fair, it was an albino dachshund, and she could probably tell that an animal like that does not belong in nature.

I love ice cream.
I hate, wait, no, never mind.  I hate nothing about ice cream.  Except when the ice cream store is closed in January.

I hate sitting in traffic.
I love seeing how far I can maintain appropriate speeds in said traffic using nothing but my clutch and gear shifter.  No gas, no brakes.

I love ordering yarn.
I hate the two weeks that it takes to get to me.

Sunday Six

In no particular order, here are six pretty cool things that happened this weekend:

1) Spring finally came to Germany.

When I went for a run this afternoon, it was around 60 F!  It was nearly 20 degrees warmer than last week's run, so my pace may have suffered a little.  I didn't bring a watch, because I didn't want to compare myself to last week since the weather was so different.

And flowers are starting to bloom.  I even saw a potted plant we had put outside last year.  It used to be a houseplant, but it looked dead, so we just put him outside.  Not sure why.  Anyway, turns out, he was not dead!  He was just done for the year!  (His friend behind him seems to be actually dead, though)

The Lazarus plant.

2) I bought a cool pattern and the yarn to go with it.

Someone in one of my Ravelry groups posted about Vasa, and I decided I needed one, too!  I bought the pattern (my first purchase on Rav!) and then wandered over to my favorite online yarn shop, Eat.Sleep.Knit, and ordered three skeins of Tosh Merino Light.  I plan on making the Vasa over and over again, so there's a ton of TML in my wishlist now, but I'm starting with Alabaster, which is a pale yellow.  [I just counted.  There are 12 skeins of TML in the wishlist for various projects.]

I hate seaming and purling, so I may modify it to be knit in the round, but that will depend on what size needle I need to get gauge.  If I need anything smaller than a 4, I will have to knit back and forth, because that is as small as my reasonably-sized circulars go.

3) I ran the highest mileage week I've ever run.

33 miles!  There were only 30 on the schedule for this week, but we had a 3 mile company run on Friday.  It was pretty slow, so even though Fridays are rest days, a slow three felt restful enough that I didn't think I needed to move around the rest of the miles and just kept with the schedule as planned.


4) Three bananas reached their banana bread prime.

I put them to use in some banana bread from the Smitten Kitchen.  I've already eaten half the loaf.

 

So tasty.

5) I found the missing piece of my coffee maker.

Senseo: One of the top things I will miss about Germany

You see that black shelf looking part?  The place where you would obviously put your cup?  I moved offices a few months ago, and the new office didn't allow coffee makers at desks (literally the only thing I miss about that other office and job), so it had to come home with me.  That one piece ended up misplaced, and before I found it again (in a suitcase?!?), I had a tuna packet balanced there that I could very gently put a little mug on.


6) My shawl started developing an actual shape.

That shawl from the last post is starting to take on the shape I was intending for it to have.  I'm using yarn leftovers right now just to test it out, but when I get yarn specifically for it, I'll alternate colors more often.  The stripes right now are a little wide for my taste.

And here's a bonus picture of the dog in the yard:

When there's nothing to compare her to, she looks bigger than 20 pounds.

Sneak Peek

Here's a little peek at the first thing I'm designing for an actual adult human!

This was taken in my dining room with no flash and a speed of 15 fps.  The motion control on this camera is incredible!

Eventually, my hope is that it will turn out to be a shawl.  I did some swatching, but I think I just won't really be able to tell if it's working the way I see it in my mind unless I get it bigger.  I wanted to order yarn especially for this, but as I'm on a bit of a restricted yarn diet, I decided it would be better to work with yarn I already had in the stash.  This right here is Tosh Merino Light, a fingering weight yarn, and you may recognize the Antique Lace colorway from the baby cardigan photo I posted earlier.  If it works out, I may order some laceweight and make it again before publishing the pattern.

Running, Yarn, and Beer in Amsterdam

I haven't been able to blog for a while, because I've been away in Amsterdam!  It was fantastic.  Everyone spoke English well enough, and since I can read English and German, I could read Dutch well enough that we got around just fine.

We had a general idea of what we wanted to do, but we were so tired that we only accomplished half of it.  I guess we'll just have to go back!

This picture is in front of the Rijksmuseum.  We didn't go into this particular museum, but we had to see the I Amsterdam sign.  It's also just a couple hundred meters from the Van Gogh Museum, which we did go into.  He only painted for a few years, but he managed to produce enough to fill an entire museum.  I have never been so impressed by a painting of a pile of potatoes.

Can't even make fun of everyone in front of the I Amsterdam sign, because we were there, too.

And of course I had to stop in an adorable yarn shop, Penelope Craft.  They had plenty of Madelinetosh, Malabrigo, and Cascade, but I can get those anywhere.  What I was really after were Loret Karman's yarns, which she dyes in Amsterdam!

 

We also took a tour of the Heineken Brewery.  The first half was very neat.  We got to look at all the copper vats that the beer brews in, split some barley, play with the dry ingredients, and taste the warm water and barley stage.  The second half was just a gigantic advertisement.

I also went running, of course!  I ran twice, once for six miles and once for eight, and I felt really good.  I'm very glad, because I had started to worry that my shin pain was compartment syndrome instead of just plain old shin splints.  I have no desire to have surgery on my legs now or any time in the future, so I'm relieved that there was no pain at all on either of those runs.  My times were also pretty good, since the city is so flat.  I ran mainly through the Rembrandtpark (which was near where we stayed) and the Vondelpark (which is on every "Running in Amsterdam" list).  I also learned that Dutch dogs are not as disciplined as German dogs.  Both parks were full of Dutch people looking and calling for their dogs, and I saw one tiny dog bite a man's leg.

Ouch!

Turns out, you shouldn't jump right into a heavy-mileage training plan after you don't run for three months.  Who'd have thought?

[Pause for laughter as "real" runners take a glance down below at the weekly mileage I was doing.]

I've developed some pretty awesome shin splints, only on my right leg interestingly enough, which I didn't know was possible.  I was supposed to have a three mile run today, but I was in pretty awesome pain after just a half mile walk with the dog, so I nixed it.  Something tells me an 11-miler tomorrow would be a bad idea.

It's hard to do, but I think I am going to have to start over with a lower mileage plan, like one for real beginners even though I've run five half marathons already.  Munich in October is my target race, and I don't want to injure myself training for a race I'm running just for the heck of it.

Not one to end on a negative note, I am also including a photo of my first pair of knitted mittens!  Just missing one thumb!

If you are a right thumb amputee, these are finished!

I'm a Real Person

I spend about an hour each day in my car, commuting to and from work.  Public transportation is, unfortunately, not efficient or cost-effective in my case, so I drive.  This means I have a lot of time to listen to podcasts, and one of my favorites is NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross.  One of my goals in life is to do something interesting enough that Terry Gross interviews me.* 

Terry Gross was interviewing Greta Gerwig a few months ago for her movie Frances Ha (which is pretty good, by the way), and Greta said that she felt like a real person once she was a member of the Screen Actors Guild.

All of the to say, today, having joined the Knitting Guild Association, I am also a real person.  I'm pretty sure you have to actually act on a screen to be part of the Screen Actors Guild, and you don't have to provide proof of knitting to join this guild, so maybe I shouldn't compare the two, but it still feels good.

You even get a membership card!

*I used to want to be on Conan O'Brien, but I've realized I wouldn't be able to make jokes fast enough, and it would be one of those really uncomfortable, scripted interviews.  Although, if you still want me, Conan, I promise I will make you look really smart.

Real Stashbusting - Donating Yarn

My goal behind designing patterns it to have others knit them, too, which means they should at least have access to the yarns I'm using even if they choose to substitute something else.

This is a problem when I have a yarn stash that I've been building since 2010 (I realize it's a tiny baby of a yarn stash compared to some of you) half full of discontinued yarn.  I don't have the energy right now to develop something that no one could reproduce.  And since all of my knitting efforts are currently focused on designing, I didn't want to do any of the typical tiny or heavily striped projects.

But the yarn has to go somewhere.  And I picked Project Warm-Up in Washington State.  They seemed the most legit, and their leader, Holli, was really quick to e-mail me back with an address to send the yarn.  (You can also find it on their Facebook page.)  They use yarn to knit items like hats and toys, and they also work with a Girls and Boys club that teaches fiber arts to at-risk kids.  Maybe something in these two boxes headed out tomorrow will keep someone from joining a gang.

Not all of it is discontinued, though.  Some of it is downright fantastic, but I know that I'll never be able to turn it into anything.  For example, my seven skeins of Colinette Point Five, no more than one per color, that I bought for no good reason.  Maybe someone can make seven really adorable cowls or baby hats.

An awful picture of beautiful yarn: seven skeins of Colinette Point Five, all headed to charity.

Now my yarn cupboard is quite sad and bare.  It's very tempting to go out and fill it all up again, but I think I'll be able to resist.

WIP (Almost) Wednesday 1

Apparently it is a tradition among knitting bloggers to post pictures of works in progress (WIPs) on Wednesdays.

Well, I am here to tell you that Wednesdays are terrible days to write blog entries, because I have homework due every Wednesday.  It's due at midnight, which means, guess what I'm doing with my evening up until midnight?  Guess what I say won't happen every week on Wednesday, but totally happens, without fail?

Someday, I won't be trying to work full time and go to school, but until then, here's my WIP Almost Wednesday:

Tosh Merino Light in Antique Lace - a dream!  The name of the sweater is a secret until I publish the pattern because I know there are thousands of you silently reading this blog, waiting to steal it.

This is the very first thing I've knit in lace!  It's a horseshoe lace pattern that's thankfully fairly easy to memorize and also easy to know right away (at the latest, two rows later) if you've made a mistake.  So far, the biggest mistake was not slipping on an sk2p, but I managed to fix it without having to rip it back!  I refuse to learn to crochet, but I do own a crochet hook for these exact situations.

As you can tell, it still needs a good block, ends sewn in, and buttons sewn on.  I blocked a swatch of the lace pattern, and it really opens it up.  The ends also end up looking way less lumpy.

The reason I finally got around to knitting lace was thanks to Eat.Sleep.Knit's "new to you" knit-a-long.  By knitting a project that makes me try something new, I get 1000 yards credited to my yarnathon progress!

The goal is to publish this pattern eventually.  I'm trying to work on a few extra lace details people can add on as they wish and to make the increases more symmetrical.  I learned how to do kfb's and yarn overs on the purl side, too, so I will try that on the next size that I test out.

Top 10 Reasons to Knit Baby Sweaters

Everyone* who knows about my knitting knows that it is 95% baby sweaters.  In honor of my tiny sweaters, here are, in no particular order, the reason you should knit them, too:

1. You get the satisfaction of completing a real garment in just a weekend!
2. You can splurge on really nice yarn, because you probably won't use more than two skeins.  One skein of Malabrigo Rastita or Madelinetosh Pashmina can make a sweater up to size 12 months (and maybe beyond, but I haven't tried it yet), as long as you don't get too fancy with the stitching.  A skein of Malabrigo Worsted makes a size 12 month cardigan with a cable on it!
3. The baby will not complain if the color isn't just right.
4. The baby will also not complain if the sleeves aren't just the right length.
5. If it really doesn't fit, just put it on a different baby.  Or wait two months.
6. They are just as portable as socks, but with no tricky heel turning or obnoxious single sock syndrome.
7. When airport security is suspicious of your knitting needles, they let their guard down once you tell them you're knitting a baby sweater.  (See number 6)
8. Even an ugly sweater is cute on a baby.
9. A striped baby sweater is the perfect stash-buster.
10. You can display them four across on the back of a tiny couch, in all of their unfinished, unblocked glory.

    

    This is a loaner couch.  I may not have great style, but I own nothing that ugly.

These were the first four sweaters of my sweater-knitting life, which started when I basically had a couple weeks off work nearly a year ago.  I hope to never progress to adult sweaters.  I am the Peter Pan of tiny knit things.

*This is mostly my mom.

Half Marathon Training Plan

Training for my race in Hannover starts today!  Today is a rest day, so I was incredibly successful.

Below is the plan I made for myself.  I had found a 14-week plan in a recent Runner's World magazine, but it had some crazy long weekday runs.  I know myself, and I can get out of bed to run four or five, but not eight or nine, especially when it's still completely dark out.  By the time I get to my first weekday run longer than six miles, dawn will be at 6:45, which is so much better than 7:45 right now.

Plus I haven't really run since my last half marathon last year in Dresden, so I didn't want to jump right into a 30 mile week.

The first training plan I have ever made!

I didn't want to clutter up my nice plan to explain the workouts, but I'll do it here.  Resting, easy running, and long, slow, distance runs are self explanatory.  For hills, I will do four long hill repeats in the middle of the run.  And tempo runs are just the middle 30-35 minutes at tempo.  No one wants to do an eight mile tempo run.  That's gross.

Yarn Haul

The yarn I ordered from Eat.Sleep.Knit finally showed up this weekend!

I've been designing and knitting my own baby sweaters for about a year, and the goal is to publish one by the end of the year.  Before, I had been creating each sweater separately, depending on whom it was for and the yarn I had on hand.  So I had to buy enough yarn to make the sweater in all of its sizes.

The Madelinetosh is being turned into an airy, lacy cardigan.  You can't see the lace yet, but I promise it's there.  This is also my very first lace project!

Madelinetosh Tosh Merino Light in Antique Lace, Bloomsbury, Vermillion, and Betty Draper's Blues

I don't remember what the Manos was for, but it's in my notebook somewhere.  And I've got a lot of Tosh to work through first, so it will be a while before I get to it.

Manos del Uruguay Fino in Delft, Ivory, Velvet Pincushion, Watered Silk, and Corsage

(Is it bad that I told a friend how excited I was to visit a yarn store, and when she was confused about why that was exciting, I seriously reevaluated our friendship?)

Getting Outside

I've recently been trying to do a better job of training Lena to walk nicely on a leash.  We've had mixed results.  When we stay in our own backyard, she doesn't pull at all.  I reward her as we walk to reinforce the good behavior, but we can walk for several minutes with just a few treats.  Once we leave that area though, she goes bezerk.  Too many new smells, apparently.

I suppose one solution is to take her on a ton of walks so that these smells aren't new anymore.

Another solution is to weigh her down:

Tiny backpack for a tiny dog!

Yesterday we went out with a few tea bags in her backpack.  The additional weight was probably negligible.  I'm not sure why I bothered.  Today she had a few of those single-serve applesauce containers.  We're working up to soup cans.  She also carried her own poop back from the field to the trash can, which was nice.

I added the D-ring to her backpack to attach the leash onto.  This is probably not approved by the dog backpack manufacturers, and after today, it's not approved by me, either.  The slightest tug on the leash would pull her backpack off balance, so I will probably move it back to her collar.

In a stunning example of financial irresponsibility, I don't know how much I dropped on races today, but I signed up for three.  (I hope the money spent now maintaining an active lifestyle will translate to lower healthcare bills down the road.)  One of my goals is to run a half marathon in every German state, and I'm totally behind.  So far, I've only run 3 of 16, and I don't have a whole lot of time left.

Munich is the race I'm focusing on, and it could be interesting.  It doesn't start until 2 p.m., which is both a blessing and a curse.  I usually have a tough time getting out of bed for my long run until noon, so this will make my long runs better practice for the race.  But I think I slow down five seconds per mile for every degree above 40F, and an afternoon race has potential to be pretty warm.  Here's hoping for some unseasonably cold weather this October in the alps.  I'm looking at you, Föhn that destroyed a Christmas snowboarding trip in Austria.  Don't ruin this for me.

Not enough blogs?

You might think the internet has enough blogs, and you'd probably be right.  The internet actually has enough blogs already about the two things I like to do, knit and run, as I discovered when trying to come up with a clever title (please note my failure above).  So why another one?

Here are the top reasons I chose right now to start blogging:

1. I only have a dog, no children.  I've heard once those happen, you can barely keep your hair free of puke, let alone write notes to strangers on a reliable schedule.  My dog has peed, bled, and shat on my floor, though, so I still consider her training for human babies.
2. For the first time, and probably the only time in my career, I have a 9-5 job.  This may change as soon as August.  Otherwise, the hours usually look like 6-7.  One is a.m., the other is p.m.  It doesn't really matter which is which, it's crappy either way.
3. I got a DSLR for Christmas, which makes me an instant photography pro, eager to share her photos with the world.  I will selectively color your newborn's portraits for $50, but you'll need to bring your own bed sheet to use as a backdrop.
4. The internet is forever.  Why journal or scrapbook or otherwise physically document your life when it could so easily be consumed in fire or flood (maybe even both, but this seems like an either-or situation to me)?  This is for posterity.  And while I was initially nervous about making that private embarrassment that comes with reading a five-year-old diary entry into public embarrassment, I realized no one will ever read this, so who cares?

I'm Rachel.  I run.  I knit.  With proper eye protection I may consider both simultaneously.  I live in an apartment with a man and a dog, and we all love each other.