June
In June I ran Mozart Ultra in Salzburg, Austria. It has a friendly elevation profile similar to Istria with the hard climbs cramped in the first half and second half being more flat. Even with these parameters, forgetting running sticks at home was a huge mistake and my quads were hurting from 70km onwards. Furthermore, I didn’t eat nearly enough which turned out alright, but might have killed my race if it was any longer. In the end, 35th place (out of 411) and valuable experience for next time (Kullamannen in Sweden in the autumn).
Week later we flew to Israel to visit Iris’s family (and there’s a lot of it). Iris’s dad picked us up at the airport and a few minutes later we were joined by her niece - Amit - a 1 meter 50 petite girl that came in an army uniform with a gun her size hanging from her shoulder. We came for me to meet everyone, eat, and visit a few places…
As it turned out, we also arrived just in time for Israel to bomb Iran and kick-off a nightly missile exchange that bound us to the vicinity of a [?makbuba?] at Maya’s (Iris’s sister) place for the foreseeable future. A short 5 day visit quickly turned into a 2 weeks long sleepless vacation with every single night interrupted with sirens to warn against incoming missiles.
After a couple of days of suspended commercial flights and no de-escalation in sight we started looking for a way out. For me this meant checking with the Czech embassy whether there will be another repatriation flight and for Iris the same, except with the Germans. I got lucky, Iris didn’t. The Czech embassy was planning another flight from Egypt and I got on the list for it. On the other hand, German website for the registration of people traveling abroad didn’t accept any other identification number than German ID, excluding all residents without a citizenship out of the repatriation process.
In the end, I headed home on the 25th - 10 days later than planned - onboard the Czech Special, a state-owned Boing XXX, flying from the private terminal of XXX and landing in the XXX army airport in Prague. Iris arrived 2 days later, taking the first outbound flight from Tel Aviv to Rome, staying there over night, and then flying to Berlin with another airline.
It’s been a full Israeli experience, great food, hot weather, and missiles overhead.