A Poor Excuse for a Post

I'm back into a rhythm with training, but not a rhythm of blogging. I have to confess that I think I'm struggling with blogger's block. It's not from lack of things to blog about, but rather the opposite. I'm training like crazy, discovering a host of new and interesting things and loving my life in France, and I'm not sure how to begin to write about any of it. And as for being vegan, it feels so normal to me now that it doesn't feel remotely interesting to share about it.

So while I regroup and rediscover my greater purpose as a blogger, here are some pictures I took from my ride this morning.

Sunrise down on the coast:

And up in the vineyards, I love these little tractors that putt along between the vines:

A random Roman ruin on a ridge outside of town:


Some of the salt lakes just south of Narbonne:

The road back into town:


Call it page filler; but it's the best I can come up with right now. As I'm sure many a writer has felt, I hope this isn't the beginning of the end.

Blind-sided by a social calender

I've ditched the friends map; after volunteering at the local triathlon on the weekend and meeting what feels like a hundred people, it got out of control. Plus, this week I've had people stopping by to do things like help me hang curtains and I didn't want to weird anybody out.

Suffice it to say that making friends in my new French town is a big success so far, and the triathlon club is a sudden and a big contributor. Not one English speaker, which is forcing me to learn a whole new vocabulary very fast (wetsuit = une combinaison, un enchaînement = a brick workout, these waves are very big = cettes vagues sont très grandes, I have a flat tire = j'ai un pneu plat and so on); I've temporarily sidelined my French current affairs studies in the mornings to make way for tri-vocabulary. I also attended a rugby match last week and learnt all sorts of interesting words which I won't repeat here, but which I foresee being useful in heavy traffic so it's worth spending some time committing them to memory (in a similar vein, I learnt at dinner the other night that many food words can also be used to describe members of the opposite sex, so again, it's like double-points vocabulary if you learn them).

My new social life has taken me a bit by surprise; I wasn't expecting to meet so many people so fast, and for them all to be so incredibly friendly and helpful. They are, after all, French (they tell me that I'm confused and that it's only Parisians who are that special combination of stuck up and rude, and they've ruined it for the rest of the French). Unexpected social demands not withstanding, I've been continuing to work at getting into a rhythm for training, and it's slowly coming. Speaking of which, it's time to get out for a run before the sun gets too hot, so I'm going to default to posting some pictures from the triathlon on the weekend to give this post some substance.

Narbonne's beach at dawn:


The sprint distance swim start:


Half-ironman athletes warming up:

And skipping ahead six hours, the beginnings of the afterparty in the vineyards:


And on an unrelated note, but since I'm in a grove with uploading photos: the poppies are in bloom and I can't help including a picture I took from my bike yesterday:


Must press on; places to go, people to see and some running to do...

J’ai aucune idée

I had coffee with the President of Narbonne’s triathlon club today (friend #15). He explained the club’s general workings, about half of which I understood and the other half I hope is not important, and the structure of the workouts. He’s sending me the paperwork for my club registration next week, as well as the application forms for a license and insurance to race as a French resident. The club’s training hours are perfect for me; we swim on Mondays and Fridays at lunchtime and on Wednesdays in the evening, long run on Saturday mornings, long ride on Sundays, and track work on Thursday nights (which I’ll skip; I’ve never gotten over the association of track running with anxiety-ridden PE class). The President, Arnold, is doing the same Ironman as me in October (Challenge Barcelona - see my last post), along with a handful of others in the club, so I’m excited about that. It seems like a lot of the club’s members are long-course athletes; a group are going to Nice for Ironman France next month and another group to Challenge Roth.

I also got myself recruited to help with the club’s annual triathlon event, which happens to be tomorrow. I offered to help on the condition that I have a post where nobody could get hurt or go the wrong way if I don’t understand a question being asked of me. I went to the volunteer briefing tonight, and they wisely put my on a water station. I will hopefully be able to mutely hand out water and give some encouragement in the form of allez! allez! as they pedal off. I’m still a little anxious; I know what it’s like to ask an important question of a volunteer while racing, and the volunteer doesn’t know the answer, or worse, stares back blankly in stunned confusion (something I’ve been doing a lot of lately). So I’m now spending my evening ‘studying’ for tomorrow’s volunteer experience by looking up as many words and phrases that I think might be useful. So far I’ve come up with what I think is a good catch-all, to be delivered while pointing to my nearest fellow volunteer:

J’ai aucune idée – demandez à lui/elle! (I have no idea – ask him/her!)

That should do it.

Buying Flowers, Making Friends and a Race Registration

I made friend number 14 at the flower market today (friends 9, 10, 11, 12 and 13 make up my new French class, which I discovered when I literally walked into it by accident while looking for a wifi zone in the community center - more on that later). Back to the market: in addition to the daily morning food market in a covered market hall known as Les Halles, a bio food market on Saturday mornings in an open air park, and an everything-you-didn’t-know-needed market that stretches along the canal on Thursdays and Saturdays, Narbonne has a Thursday morning flower market along the right bank of the canal that includes a lot of herb and vegetable plants, which couldn’t be more convenient for me as I have big plans to grow as many edible things as possible on my suntrap of a terrace.

After buying an assortment of parsley, thyme, mint and cilantro plants to get my herb planters started, I bought a large potted jasmine vine from a kid with exceptional sales skills and a remarkable horticultural knowledge (for an adolescent), with a special focus on roses. He was manning his uncle’s stall while his uncle smoked. That kid became friend number 14 when he insisted on walking me home to carry the jasmine. He introduced himself as Ludec as we walked. Ludec was dying to practice the English he's learnt in school, but after we discovered he didn’t have more than a dozen words in his vocabulary, we switched to French. By the time we reached my front door – it was a short walk - I had learned that he comes from Toulouse and does the two-hour drive to Narbonne with his uncle every Thursday for the flower market. Next week he’s going to help me pick out the right roses for my terrace, which isn’t what I was planning on growing (not edible) but it’s hard to decline enthusiasm like that.

Now back to the community center: I was scoping out a possible wifi zone there because I still have no internet at home. It’s coming, they assure me, any day now (oh – and the hot water arrived two days ago). The upside of this inconvenience was discovering that there is a once a week French class in town, which happened to be in progress when I was making my wifi inquires. They asked me if I wanted to try it out, which I did, so I sat down and joined the last hour of class. I found that it was just my level and registered for the remainder of the sessions, which finish up for the summer in late June. I was surprised that there were any local non-French speaking residents in Narbonne, and they seemed just as surprised to see me. I think that must be all of them, in one room together. Now we are five. And I got to add five (including the teacher) new people to my friend map in one afternoon, and while I was feeling a little proud that no one on the map speaks English until now, new friends are new friends and I’m not going to discriminate (God help me if any of them ever read this).

So improving my French is very much on track, as is meeting people, as is being vegan (it’s hard to go wrong with this many markets, and it’s actually a little overwhelming after the slim pickings of Switzerland; I think I might have vegetable choice anxiety) but training is lagging behind a little. I caught a slight head cold and there have been heavy rain showers for days, which is not exactly what I had in mind when I picked a town that claims to be the sunniest in all of France to live in, so I’ve been reluctant to do much. I did, however, register myself into an Ironman race. I had been planning to do a somewhat obscure Ironman-distance event called Elbaman on the Tuscan Island of Elba in late September, but hadn’t actually registered for it yet. When I discovered that there is another late-season race that’s easier to get to and has a flatter course last week, I registered into it in a heartbeat. It’s also a week later than Elbaman, which buys me an extra week of training time, which doesn’t make a modicum of difference in a nine-month training program but feels psychologically good right now.

Challenge Costa Barcelona-Maresme is second year of operation, is capped at 2,000 participants, and is organized by the same group who do Challenge Roth in Germany (one of the most popular Ironman-distance events in Europe; it sells out in hours). It’s a two-lap ocean swim, a flat and fast bike and run, and it’s a short 2-hour train ride away in the coastal resort town of Maresme, outside Barcelona. I couldn’t have asked for a better first Ironman race than this, and there is truly nothing like actually registering into something to encourage a quick re-focus and get the excitement going. I’m suddenly feeling ready to move into the next phase of training and see what this vegetable diet really can do.

The First Semblance of Structure

It didn’t take long to come up with my first idea to put some structure into my new life. The following structure for my weekday mornings, like all my better ideas, came to me on a long run. I put it into practice for the last two days with great success:

Rather than my old routine of getting up and making coffee at home, then drinking the coffee whilst pouring over emails that came in last night and all the while procrastinating about getting a workout in and eventually getting around to it sometime before lunch, on weekdays I will now get up, wash face, brush teeth, make hair presentable and do the two minute walk to the main square for morning coffee in one of the sidewalk cafes, with a notebook in hand. While sipping my one-ounce coffee (when will they introduce the grande? It’s a French word, for goodness sake), I will make myself read whatever the lead article is on the front page of any French newspaper, looking up the words I don’t know and making note of them. I then return home to change and get out the door for a training session.

This new structure accomplishes two things that are near the top of my new-life priorities list: I’m expanding my French vocabulary and I’m brushing up my knowledge of French current affairs. It's multitasking at it’s best: two tasks accomplished without a division of attention. My list of new words will go on the refrigerator and become my ‘words of the day’, to be practiced whenever I go to the fridge (which is a lot – I work from home, remember) and are subject to a self-administered test later in the evening. It took me an arduous thirty minutes to read this morning’s article on the results of a survey of what the average French person would do if they were President (bring back the Franc, increase taxes for the bourgeois, eliminate them for everyone else, etc.), but it still leaves me plenty of time to get a morning workout in and stops me from pushing it till the late morning; something that will become important when the midday temperature is 30C+. This new structure will also start my weekdays off right by getting me out of the house and around people before I have time to even think of holing myself up with my various inboxes, which in turn stops me stressing out about incoming items I can do nothing about until North America wakes up and I can get on the phone to my office and stress out in a more useful way: into somebody's ear.

Speaking of meeting people, I have decided it might be interesting to track the formation of the relationships that will make up my new community here in Narbonne, so yesterday I drew up a map of the first people I have made friends with and will map out the friendships I make as I go. I have eleven friends/acquaintances so far, which is really quite good – that’s one new friend per day and eleven more than I made in my first month in Switzerland. If I can keep this up, I’ll know the whole town in exactly 136 years (a population of 50,000, less the eleven I already know, divided by 365 days in a year). The rules are that I can only put a person on my friends and acquaintances map if I know their name. So the man in the market who sold me his homemade ratatouille and who told me about his brother who moved to Canada and he’s always wanted to go but hasn’t made it yet cannot go on the map because we have not exchanged names to date. But Caroline the esthetician who moved here from Carcassone fifteen years ago and who’s shop is across the street from my bedroom window and who exclaimed ‘nous sommes voisins!’ (we are neighbours!) when I introduced myself does make it onto the map. My banker, Mr. Perelez, who went to live in Paris for a while but came back to Narbonne to play rugby but says the team is not what it used to be, Renee the realtor at the rental agency and his secretary Helene, both of whom deserve some sort of medal for the help they have given me even though they speak three words on English between them, the owner of my apartment Mr. Levirat and his wife Marie Paul who both live upstairs and keep popping down to tell me something I need to know about he apartment, but that I don’t understand and have started to pretend to or they’d never go away, and two friends of Renee the realtor, Pascal and Babeth who invited me to have dinner with them at Pascal’s cousins’ restaurant by the beach last night and who both grew up here in Narbonne, married, have two children together and are raising them in the house next door to the house that Pascal grew up in, with Granny and Grandpa next door, are all on the map.

I’ve stuck my spidery pictorial representation of my first relationships on a cork board on the kitchen wall; it’s a structure of sorts to encourage me to keep working on the friend thing, and it will also remind me that I do, in fact, have a community of people around me and will thus (hopefully) ward off any panicky I’m-all-alone-in-France moments. I will just have to remember to take it down if any of these people are visiting, or it might raise some serious red flags and I’ll find myself quite suddenly and understandably cut off from a mapped friend.

One of the next structures I am going to get in place is joining Narbonne’s triathlon club. I’ve been in contact with them; I just need to do the paperwork and go to my first training session (which I’m hesitating over – a little like the impulse to tidy up before the housekeeper comes over, I feel like I need to get a few weeks of training under my belt so that I arrive at my first training session with a passable level of fitness). But I know that joining the club will have great implications for my friends and acquaintances map and I’ve left lots of room on the cork board for extra pages to be added to deal with the imminent explosion of additions. And it might just help me get ready for Ironman, too.

What Structures and Armchairs have in Common

I’m one week into my new life in Narbonne, and things are shaping up well. Other than having no hot water and no internet, my apartment is now set up and is even starting to have that certain feeling of familiarity that only a home can have. The upside to not having hot water is that it’s forced me to the pool every day for a shower, and if I’m going to the pool to get clean, I might as well get a swim in too, so I’ve unwittingly gotten back on the swimming wagon. I’ve done some running along the canal with no particular time or speed goals, and I plan to get on my bike tomorrow with a similar turn-back-whenever-you-want rule in force at the outset.

I’ve opted for this strategy before when I’ve lost my inspiration and momentum to train, either through distractions (like Christmas) or periods of high-stress (like multiple deadlines at work). My recent relocation to France was like Christmas and multiple deadlines all bundled together, so my hope is that this approach will bring back the desire to train in short order and I’ll slip into something that looks like a routine soon. From speaking with other athletes, I know it's an approach that works for those of us who tend to put a lot of pressure on ourselves and completely opt out when things are not perfect.

I’ve been thinking this week about the importance of routine (a debate in itself), and how best to establish one when there are no markers to use as a basic framework. Anyone who has worked from home will know what I’m talking about, but add to it that everything here is new for me: every face and every shop, the sounds from the street below my windows, the bank opening hours (better than Switzerland, worse than Canada), the pathway to the bathroom in the night, the recycling rules. I’ve gotten myself lost trying to find my apartment in the old town’s web of narrow streets more than once, and I always seemed to be carrying something heavy at the time. I have no coordinates but I’m determined to get my bearings as soon as possible; so I’m going to start implementing some new structures into my life. The structure has to be firm but flexible; it has to support the things I want to achieve with a weighting that reflects their importance to me. Training for Ironman, performing well at work, getting proper nutrition, becoming fluent in French lickity-split, making friends (don’t laugh, but I’m going to need a structure to do this – again, anyone who has worked from home knows what I’m talking about) and (this is a new one) brushing up on my knowledge of French history and politics are the first that come to mind, and I’m sure that there are more.

My very wise friend and superb life coach, Sandi Amorim (www.devacoaching.com), once told me that structures in life should feel like a big comfortable armchair; once in place, they are something that you sink into and breathe a sigh of relief. I’ve missed the mark before when setting up structures and have ended up adding to the background of anxiety I was trying to eliminate; an example of mission very much not accomplished.

So, where to begin. I think I’ll head out for an untimed run through these unfamiliar streets to mull it over. I’ll hopefully find my front door again on my first attempt.

Belated Taking Stock of the Month: April

In the fracas of the last few weeks, I didn't have the opportunity to say many goodbyes in Switzerland. I have happily been given that opportunity through an invitation to stay in Karen's home for a few days before making the final journey back down to Narbonne with the last of my things. So I've been decompressing in Grandvaux, a village not far from my (now former) home of Chexbres, and today I head back down to Narbonne. It's been really nice to be able to spend a few days saying farewell to the people and places that have made up my life over the last year, without feeling like my head is going to explode with all the things I need to remember to do to organize my move. I've been sleeping in, getting in some gentle runs in the vineyards and lunching with friends who I'll miss terribly but who promise to visit and I think they might just mean it (one of the benefits to living in the south of France).

With the first few days of May behind me, I can reflect on the month of April with a certain degree of detachment that is allowing for some objectivity and just a little bit of insight; the kind of insight that arises with hindsight but that you wish you’d had the faculty for at the time. So in no particular order, here are my insights from the month of April:

1. I tend to ask the world of myself and others.

2. I can be hard on myself.

3. There does not have to be any rhythm or reason for calamity; or put more colloquially, **** happens.

My last post described a little bit of how it hit the fan in the last week of April, but it was certainly an incomplete account of the variety of mishaps and unforeseen complications and pressures that converged to create an experience unlike any I’ve had before or wish to have again. I didn’t mention that this was a particularly high-pressure month for me at work, and at a certain point my manager and I agreed that taking a few sick days (read: mental health days) would be a good idea for everyone concerned. That happened right about the time that my laptop, my window to work in my Vancouver office, was starting to fry, my Swiss cell phone ran out of credit while in France and their website went down so that I couldn’t recharge it, the van rental company couldn’t reach me by phone so they sent me an email to tell me that my credit card was being declined, and that by the way, the charge was three times what I had expected because I did the math on the extra kilometers incorrectly, and I couldn’t make sense of what my new landlady was telling me I had to do to get my gas connected: it was either that I should stay home because she had made an appointment for the plumber to come and do it, or I had to call the plumber and make an appointment for him to come and do it, or I should go to the gas office to make the appointment for the plumber to come (and I still haven’t figure it out, but I do have an appointment at the gas office for when I return, which will hopefully result in someone connecting me).

Somewhere around this particular point, right after I got my phone working and Michael called to say that someone had crashed into the van on his way back to Lausanne, I noticed that I began to ask myself a disempowering and ultimately useless question: why is this happening? When a series of things go wrong that are seemingly unrelated and totally random, it’s hard not to begin to think along the lines of: what did I do to deserve this? Is this a test? If it is a test, who is administering it and what is the pass mark? I’m a painstakingly organized person, I’m a good planner, I understand that the devil is in the details and I build contingencies into my plans and can generally adapt to rapidly changing rules; how can this be happening to me?

None of which, of course, is useful, and all of which was an attempt to do what we cannot help doing every single day: assign causality to events in an attempt to cognitively organize our worlds. I don't know if I recognized this at the time or not, but I did somehow have the wherewithal to make the decision to focus my thoughts on a better question: what can I do in the next hour that will move me forward towards my desired objective? That became further distilled into: what can I do in the next ten minutes that will move me forward?

And this somehow got me through it.

And I somehow did it on a vegan diet.

And I’m going to stop being hard on myself for the abandoned training plans and abandoned objective to lean out. So here’s what I did accomplish in April:

- 33 hrs of riding
- 6 hours of running
- 30 minutes of swimming
- some serious heavy lifting of boxes

And to finish my round up of the month, we move on to my favourite bit to reflect on: recipe of the month. For those who think it would be insane if I had actually been experimenting with vegan recipes over the last four weeks, you would be absolutely right. April’s recipe of the month is less of a recipe and more of an adaptation of a favourite standby which, in under three minutes, can be slapped together when everything else feels like it’s falling apart:

Peanut Butter and Apple Sandwich

Spread organic peanut butter on one side of two slices of thick cut whole-wheat bread, add thinly sliced apple slices inbetween, ensuring that the peanut butter covers the apple surfaces to avoid oxidation. Pack in a ziplock bag for a bomb-proof vegan sandwich which can be squished at the bottom of a bag, left unrefrigerated for a long period of time, rediscovered later and still taste good with black coffee at a road side stop.

Now it’s time to turn the page on the next chapter. A few more words from my favourite small bear:

“Pooh looked at his two paws. He knew that one of them was the right, and he knew that when you had decided which one of them was the right, then the other was the left, but he never could remember how to begin”

I know exactly what he means; and I think I'm close to figuring it out.

Hanging in Here

I’m still here, but only just. Since signing the apartment lease in France three weeks ago, life has been hectic in a way that brings a new meaning to the word. I'm not sure what I was expecting, having conceived and orchestrated a relocation between two countries that I am not native to, nor speak the language of, in a three-week time horizon. I feel like my world has been turned upside down, I’ve been turned inside out, hung out to dry and am hanging by a thread. If I hadn't had the help of two very good ex-pat friends, Karen and Pam, who pitched in and came down to Narbonne to help unload without hesitation, and the sainthood of Michael who drove the truck between Swtizerland and the south of France in one day (over 1,300 km's) while trying to arrange his own move up to Munich, I'm not sure I would have lived to tell the tale. Actually, I'm still not quite sure that I have.

One day after the official D-day of April 30th (D stands for Derangement, as in the corybantic state of mind that takes over on the last day of the month when, after days of packing, painting and cleaning, one has to remove oneself and all traces of oneself from one abode by 12pm sharp, take up residence in a new abode, do inspections at either end with respective agencies and then in my case, negotiate an emigration and a u-haul border crossing in between), I am still in a state of being semi-moved. I have personal effects in both countries but no fully assembled furniture in either. All in all, this is not an enjoyable or sanity-promoting place to be. I'm not even going to talk about how my Canadian credit card company froze my cards on the day I was trying to pay for the moving van in Switzerland and then buy some large appliances - like a fridge - in France, my British bank blocked ATM withdrawals for no apparent reason on the very same day and the only account I could access, my Swiss account, had no money in it since I had diligently transferred all of it out in preparation for my Swiss evacuation. I also won't mention how, while on a VoIP call with Visa made from my laptop in a wifi cafe, answering a series of questions designed to infuriate the most patient person on a good day, my laptop's fan malfunctioned and it became a burning hot slate of aluminum which I had to handle with napkins while trying to explain in French that I needed my bill right away. You can't make this stuff up, and nor would you want to.

As for training, all ideas of scheduled exercise were put on hold three weeks ago when I realized this relocation might be more complicated than my previous moves, although carrying boxes up and down staircases in 19th-century buildings with no elevators has to count for something in a training program. Being vegan is the only thing I can profess to be sticking with, though I would hardly describe my diet as model right now: peanut butter sandwiches have made a strong comeback and feature as the center piece of at least two meals a day. I’ve otherwise been grabbing anything that looks butter-free in early-morning bakeries, picking egg off premade Niscoise salads at autoroute reststops and drinking a lot of black coffee. Needless to say, my grand plan to cut out sugar and flour to lean out for racing has been long abandoned. Any inclination I had to do an early summer race is out the window and the thought of Ironman in September seems obscure and almost laughable (because if I didn't laugh, I would cry). In my brief moments of objectivity and/or lucidity, I tell myself that the desire to pursue my goals will reignite when I am firmly settled in my new French abode and can resume training, along with other semblances of a normal routine such as getting up and having a shower in the morning (haven't figured out how to get the gas connected in my new home yet, but I'm working towards a solution with the authorities).

I will write a better update when I feel like my world is the right way up again. I’m hoping that will come sooner rather than later.