And Lard Shall Be Your Reward.

I'm just going to come right out and say it: I ran the Bonn Half Marathon on April 6th and I kicked butt. The race wound through the cherry blossom lined streets of Bonn and along the beautiful Rhein river promenade.

Of course I didn't see any of that, because I like to run with my eyes closed. This is not a joke. I open them from time to time to make sure no major obstacles are coming. It helps me to sink deeply into my thoughts about analytic methods in number theory. Cause that's what you do when you run really far. You've got to pass the time somehow, right?

Now, I won't bore you by explaining the obvious and important parallels between extreme sports and mathematics, because the great Prof. Keith Devlin has already said it so much better than I ever will.

Nor will I bore you with my splits, training strategies, or praise of the amazing new running skirt that I scored at the race expo, because we can all agree that is boring to all but a set of measure zero.

That said, if you personally belong to that set of measure zero, just say the word, and I can let 'er rip.

What I will tell you is the one glaring difference between this race and the previous ones I've run in the US. Typically you cross the finish line and there is some volunteer immediately pushing bottled water, bananas, and orange slices on you. After the Bonn Half Marathon, I dragged my dehydrated carcass across the finish line and past beer tent upon beer tent and couldn't find a drop of water to slake my thirst. And in place of the potassium rich post-race banana, they offered up a mound of hearty schmalzbrot -- yeah, you read that right, black bread with a thick smear of lard.

Nothing like a warm Kölsch and a nice schmear of lard to wash down 21 Kilometers. Coming up, stay tuned for a mathdigest post about one of the baddest number theorist slash athletes in town: Ken Ono.

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