Sub-three-hour marathon (...or trying to get on the Grinder Board). Day 5.

Hilly beach out-and-back, St. Lucia

It is not a good idea to go running at 12:30 on the afternoon on a tropical island. Even worse an idea to attempt this one night after about 15 havana cocktails and half a pound of salt pork. I was slightly dehydrated, to say they least. Nonethelesss, I ran. I would do it again.

I listened to music this time round, which I do not often do when I run with Mia. We chat instead. The Arcade Fire came on first, then a song by the Australian band Evermore. It made me think about music in a way I have not before. The Arcade Fire - the song was 'Haiti' (I just put it on now, again) - gave me a cool feeling. Despite the incredible heat. Colors can be warm and cool (red and blue), but I never thought of music that way. Evermore was warm. The song ('For One Day') had a decidedly warmer feel to it, particularly following 'Haiti.'

Music (or sound, I suppose), like fragrances, for me is more closely related to memory than any other sense. The amount of pleasure I derive from any particular song has more to do with where I was when I first heard that song (or, rather, where I was when the song became recognizable to me, when I got used to it). Music is connected to mood.

I first heard Evermore when I lived in Brisbane, Australia (maybe that's why it feels 'warm' to me?). I got to know that album there ('Dreams'), and listened to it often. I listened to it in New Zealand as well, when I met Mia. I recall one particular time taking a nap in our hostel in Taupo and listening to it as I went to sleep.

Another album (also called 'Dreams') by The Whitest Boy Alive I can only listen to in Sweden. I first got used to it there and it gives me such good memories of living in Stockholm that I do not let myself listen to it anywhere else for fear of ruining that. Likewise, another of their albums I have ('Rules') I first started listening to at home in PA, running on the new trail with Oatie. It will forever remind me of that one instance; that memory is inexorably linked to that album. Peter Bjorn and John's 'Writers Block' is perhaps the only album that I can listen to anywhere, and without recalling anything significant (though it does bring back memories of the concert in Pittsburgh with Nate and Ryan). It is my all-time favorite album though, and I have listened to it so often so as to perhaps have erased any specific memories abotut it.

Stats: 4.2 miles / 37:50 / 9:00 m.p.min. / 2:08 off the pace.

Getting better, only slightly.

ARC kids share thoughts on Atlantic crossing

ARC Village & the St. Lucia Hinterland

From a feature I wrote for the ARC website this afternoon:

The coconut vendors, of which there are plenty, admit that the tourists do not quite understand the attraction. “We sell most of the drinking coconuts to the locals,” said one particularly friendly vendor in Castries. “The tourists don’t even know what they’re missing.”


Check it out here.

Sub-three-hour marathon (...or trying to get on the Grinder Board). Day 4.

The best run so far. Legs were springy, it was early enough that the sun was not out yet and I had about ten hours of sleep and no booze the night before. We had posted a noticeboard in the ARC office for anyone to join us. No one did. We had fun.

Stats: 4.6 miles / 42:00 / 9:08 m.p.mile / 2:16 off the pace.

The Friday Column: 'Coconut Vending Area'

St. Lucia is getting more and more familiar. This is the third year Mia and I have worked here for ARC, and the fourth time we’ve visited including Broadreach (5^th if you count the time we anchored off the Pitons on the way back from Trinidad, but that was only for a few hours…we did buy fruit from a local boat though).

Monday we had the day off (days off always follow the 0200-0800 night shift – which we are on right this moment – and are followed the next day by a 0800-2000 double-shift. But that 24 hours without any responsibilities is wonderful). The yellow-shirt team has a rental car we can use, mainly to get back and forth from the marina and the hotel in the middle of the night, but also for use on days off.

We took the car south to the market in Castries, which we first discovered on that Broadreach trip. The traffic on the island is bad, especially in the first half-mile between Rodney Bay Marina and the new Bayview Mall (or whatever it is called). The intersection there is not well designed. There are loads of cars on this island. There are loads of cars on most of the islands here, and it usually makes for sour driving experiences. St. Martin around Christmas time was the absolute worst. We gave up trying to go for dinner that one night, barely making it a mile from the Pad. Instead, we went to the grocery store and bought beer and cheese.

One of the coconut men.

This day in St. Lucia was not bad though. After driving around town a bit, which was busy (there were two cruise ships in port), we eventually found the parking garage and happily paid the two EC dollars it cost to park securely (as opposed to the 25 we paid last year when we got a parking ticket).

Castries is a Caribbean city. A very nice harbor is situated to the east. At it’s terminus, a single cruising sailboat was anchored a couple hundred feet from the shoreline, on which the main road runs. The cruise ship terminal is what you would expect from a cruise ship terminal. It’s too-clean and filled with stores selling watches and jewelry. Across the road, the market comes in two sections – one for the locals (apparently) and one for the cruise ship tourists (obviously). The latter is lined with stalls under a wooden fixed roof, selling things you would expect to find in a market next to a cruise ship terminal. Crappy t-shirts that say ‘We be Jammin’! St. Lucia’ and photo albums made from palm fronds that you can buy in every single Caribbean city. This market is under the wooden roof so as to be in the shade.

Beer on the dock in Gros Islet.

The locals market is on the opposite side, further from the waterfront. Most of those vendors have tables set up beneath umbrellas. Some of them are in permanent huts, and colorful (like the one Mia’s bread lady operates). Along the streets surrounding the market space are several small pubs and food establishments, though most have only a few stools, if they have any place at all to sit down.

The locals market is where Mia and I go to buy food, where we have gone to buy food since our first year down here. Then, we found a guy, Brock-Up, who sells meat from a grill along the street at a place called Brock-Up’s. He is set up on the corner, and just this year got a nice new awning, ostensibly sponsored by Carib beer, because the awning says ‘Carib Beer’ in bright blue and yellow. He has a small hut inside which a woman cooks the side dishes, and he runs a big grill outside, this year comfortably in the shade. He sells chicken wings and pork cutlets. He remembered us last year – I took him some plantains from another vendor, and he grilled them for me. Plantains on the grill. He remembered us again this year, and questioned why I did not bring any plantains.

The bread lady was closed on Monday, so Mia was out of luck.

We drank two coconuts before buying meat from Brock-Up (and his special ‘banana salad’ side dish, which was an interesting mash-up of salt fish, boiled green bananas and mixed veg). Then we drank two more coconuts after, spreading the love between the various pick-up trucks. A nice guy wearing a Philly Flyers shirt (I do not think he knew where Philly is) sold us our last one, and I told him we’d return later for more. He told us the tourists do not really know about coconuts, so it is mostly locals who buy them, which is strange, because back home they sell coconut water in cardboard drink boxes in the grocery store. I have had about twenty coconuts since we arrived.

Today we have another day off. We will visit the market again.

Magnus Olsson sails on Triumph in ARC 2011

Christof Petter on Vaquita

Greetings everyone! I had the chance to chat with Magnus Olsson yesterday, the ex-skipper of Ericsson 3 in the 2008/09 Volvo Ocean Race. He sailed aboard the Swedish-flagged Triumph with a group of others. I chatted with him on the dock yesterday while he and his wife mended Triumph's genoa.

Martin Maier on Vaquita

I also had the chance to meet and chat with Andreas Hanakamp, another Volvo sailor who skippered Team Russia in the last event. His story is unique in that he partners all of his sailing projects with good-for-the-world awareness programs. This year, with Vaquita, he is partnered with the Whale & Dolphin Conservation Society (WDCS). Look for a more in-depth feature about those partnerships coming soon.

In the meantime, check out the feature I wrote on the ARC website about those guys and others.

Sub-three-hour marathon (...or trying to get on the grinder board). Day 2.

Rodney Bay to the beach...again

Erell, the French girl from Phaedo, was supposed to come with us, but she slept in. We were up at 5:45...Nick heard us walk past his door at 5:57 and thought he was late for something. When he realized we were out for a run, he thought to himself that we were idiots.

This one was better and worse than the first one. Better in that I ran some hill repeats, but worse in that the overall pace was slower. I don't have numbers for this one, not that it matters.

Sub-three-hour marathon (...or trying to get on the grinder board). Day 1.

Day One: 5 December 2011

Rodney Bay to the Beach. St. Lucia.

It was not pretty, but likely effective. I ran at 2:30pm, in the heat of the day, but I had to. Mia and I have a meeting with Magnus Olsson, the Swedish ex-Volvo Ocean Race skipper of Ericsson 3 this afternoon. We were off all day, so I have to make the best of the time. I know when we get over to the marina I will not force myself to run later (which is the sensible option, given the temperature), so I got it over with now.

We worked until 8:00am this morning (from 2:00am), slept for a few hours in the hotel room and took off in the rental car to Castries. I am going to write about the 'Coconut Vending Area' for my first Friday column this week, so look for that. We met the meat guy at Brock Up's and had cutlets with banana salad. More on that later.

I ran in my Five Fingers, turning right out of the Palm Haven and heading northeast, towards the Atlantic side and the beach. Google maps shows roads in that direction, but they are really 'roads.' After a half-mile or so, the pavement disintegrated and became a deeply rutted dirt track with shanty homes and stray dogs on either side, and the oddly placed upscale B&B lingering further off the path behind the palm fronds. The topographical map does not quite show it so dramatically, but the path was two distinct mountain climbs and descents, one after the other and more or less in a straight line. At the top of the first there is a horse farm, and I passed three white riders and a local guide, who gingerly led their steeds down the path. Mostly it was firm, with the odd muddy spot. Running downhill at speed on a dirt trail is immensely enjoyable. It requires unexpected concentration, focus on each footfall, and the time disappears. My steps are shorter and more deliberate. One the way back, my rhythm was in-sync with the beat to a Moby song, which I turned up very loudly.

On the other side of the second big hill is the Atlantic Ocean.

Once I got back to the main road that the hotel is on, I searched for 'Summertime Clothes' by Animal Collective and sprinted around the block with the sound turned up as loud as it would go.

Distance Covered: 4.26 miles

Time: ~40 minutes

Pace: 9:22 / mile

Pace Needed for Sub-3: 6:52 / mile

Discrepancy: 2:30 / mile

Long way to go.

'Kinship' Across the Atlantic

Saga 43 Sailplan

It is official. Thanks to the nice email I received from Tim Szabo the other day, Mia and I will be heading across the Atlantic again next spring. This time onboard Kinship, a Saga 43, and via the southern North Atlantic route through Bermuda and the Azores. We will actually be participating in the ARC Europe rally, getting a chance to sail in an event I worked on last year. The event finishes in Lagos, Portugal, a part of the world neither Mia nor myself has ever been, which is rather exciting (we have also never visited the Azores - part of the reason we went north on our boat last year was the inkling that we would likely get the chance to see the other route professionally someday; we never thought it would be this quickly though. Thanks Tim!). Though we have great fun working on-event for stuff like this (and plan to continue to do so), the ultimate goal has always been to keep sailing, so when the opportunity came up it was an easy decision.

Mia and I met Tim and Teresa in Tortola during the finish of the Caribbean 1500, which they had participated in to bring the boat south from the Chesapeake. Tim asked us to come by the boat to talk about sailing her to Europe. I do not have much experience with a Saga, but I was impressed when he showed us the boat, and I am more impressed after just reading a few things about it on the builder's website. The 43 is in my opinion, by far the nicest-looking boat that Saga makes. I look forward to sailing it.

Bob Perry designed the boat, taking cues from modern shorthanded ocean-racers like those in what used to be the BOC. The design brief was essentially opposite of what you find in typical production boats, emphasizing sailing ability and seakeeping qualities over interior volume. It is a narrow boat and long on the waterline. Read about the Saga 43 here. 

ARC Europe Route

It is quite interesting how we ended up in this position. I have never really been a fan, philosophically, of these cruising rallies, and yet this will be the 4th one I have participated in (my Dad has done one as well without me - by next summer, between he, Mia and myself, we will have done 9). Since working on the organizational side of things I have come to appreciate the attraction, and I respect the World Cruising Club for their emphasis not so much on safety in numbers (but heavy on safety in general), but more on the educational and social side of things. The seminars and talks they host are well-attended, and often by less-experienced sailors. There is a big opportunity to get across messages that emphasize the 'Right' way to do things at sea, from preserving the world's oceans to how to behave on the radio. 

The ARC in particular gets some high profile sailors and boats. I am working on a story for the website right now about just that - I had a conversation yesterday with the crew of Vaquita, an Akalaria 40, which includes Andreas Hanakamp, the ex-Volvo Ocean Race skipper of Team Russia. His Segelwelt company manages various sailing projects around the world, and his enthusiasm for the sport is infectious. Magnus Olsson, the skipper of Ericsson 3 in the last Volvo is crewing aboard the Swedish yacht Triumph, a Baltic 64 that arrived yesterday. Mia and I have a 'date' with him tomorrow afternoon on our day off to discuss my story. 

Phaedo, the Gunboat 66 cat that was third across the line in ARC this year, won line honors in this past summer's Trans-Atlantic race from Newport to the UK, beating out the Maltese Falcon at the finish. Andreas Hanakamp told me that several ex-Volvo sailors were aboard Med Spirit, the maxi that took line honors in ARC this year (and then promptly departed for Martinique). So despite my reservations about events like this - I still would not do one on my own boat, the reason we went north on Arcturus last summer - I now understand the attraction, and am delighted to be able to participate on other people's boats. 

Hanakamp incorporates good-for-the-world initiatives into his programs as well. Last year Vaquita was named We Sail for the Whale - both years, they promoted the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society, to raise awareness. Check out the ARC 'Features' page tomorrow for more details. 

Hanakamp said it best yesterday - "it's all about expectations," he told me. "I love working with people, managing their goals (whether it's the Volvo or something like ARC), and achieving success." His passion for the sport is infectious, and it is easy to see why he would enjoy the ARC as much as the Volvo. He told Mia later, when she went out on Vaquita to watch Scarlet Oyster finish, that "people love sailing with 'legends'."

Anyway, to my 'enlightened' self, these rallies are similar to a marathon or triathlon. You can run 26.2 miles by yourself, but a lot of the time it is more fun surrounded by thousands of other people who share a similar passion. That, above anything else, is why these events are so popular - and why, with the right attitude, they can be fun.