Day 7, World Championships in Berlin

I found this left over in my draft of entries.  It is originally from September 2009 but is just getting published now.  One of these days I'll put up all my Berlin pictures, which was the original purpose of this blog...

On Day 7 of the World Championships, there were no qualifying events at the stadium. The only morning event was the Men's 50k racewalk, which was on a course then went all throughout Berlin. So, with a morning free to do what I wanted, I went to Alexanderplatz (I guess you might compare it to a borough of NYC), a region of Berlin, where a tour company gave guided bike tours of the city in English.

Standing right below the TV tower, where the tour met. As you can see it was a much cloudier day than any other day I had in Germany up to that point. As I found out, you can count on it raining 300-350 days out of the year in Germany, so I got very lucky with the weather...this day was the only day that it rained out of the 11 days I was in Germany!

First stop on the tour. The guy sitting atop the fountain is Neptune.

A shot of the TV tower from far away. Funny story behind it. It's in East Berlin. When Germany divided and the wall first went up, the East Germans realized that all their best and brightest, like the architects and engineers, were defecting or just leaving. So by the late 60's, when they wanted to build a large symbol of East German engineering/architectural prowess, they had nobody to design and build it! So the East Germans actually hired a staff of Swedish engineers to design and oversee the construction of thier tower...and this was all done in secret, to make sure nobody knew that it was non-communist westerners that were designing this supposed "East German" tower.

So they snuck in the Swedes, had them design and build the tower, then snuck the Swedes out. When it was done, the East German government marvelled at "their" new symbol of East German power and intelligence. As I mentioned before, its often rainy and cloudy in Germany. So the East Germans were in for a surprise on the first sunny day they looked at their tower...the way the sun reflected off the big ball at the top shown a very distinct vertical line and horizontal line that apparently looks very much like a christian cross! This, of course, left the aetheistic East Germans very frustrated. Despite many attempts to renovate the dome, they never succeeded in getting rid of the cross that the sun reflected off of it. So, it was a tower built by Swedes that reflected a religious symbol off of itself. A great testament to East German engineering indeed.

Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and myself. The guy on the left and guy in the middle were the founding fathers of modern Socialism and the authors of The Communist Manifesto. The guy on the right has yet to get into politics. This monument to those two is obviously in the East.

This big empty lot is actually a very historic site. This entire big empty lot used to be covered in one building...the Kaiser's palace. It eventually was abandoned and destroyed during/after WWI. Being in the East, the lot where the palace once stood became the grounds for East Germany's Parliament. After the wall fell, that building too, was destroyed. Now, there are plans to re-build the outside of the palace exactly as it once stood, but it will only be a facade...the inside will be a shopping mall.

Its hard to give you an idea of how big this lot was, and how big the palace used to be. It was HUGE. To give you a better idea...

THIS building used to be the horse stable to the palace!! If thats where the horses lived, imagine what the King's house was like!

This seemingly insignificant square was where a very sad moment in history happened. That building is a library, and in front of that library is where the Nazi book burnings took place. It is where German citizens were encouraged to burn books - burn any aspect of their own history - that didn't promote the Nazi agenda.

Its hard to see in this picture, but if you look close you can see some white lines through that glass. This glass covers a big hole in the middle of the sqare from the last picture. The white lines are actually empty shelves in a big room under the square. The shelves are supposed to be empty bookshelves, memorializing the books that were burned during the mass book burnings.

The Berlin Opera house. No exciting story behind this one.

Checkpoint Charlie. Originally a US military controlled checkpoint from when the Allies divided up Germany after WWII, it eventually became a border crossing between East and West Berlin once the wall went up.

A close-up of what once was the gate stand.

There is an open-air exhibition at Checkpoint Charlie explaining its history, as well as the history of the wall and German communism. These are pictures of what Checkpoint Charlie used to look like, and another East-West gate.

This, if you haven't guessed, is one of the last remaining sections of the Berlin Wall. I took a video because I wanted to show the entire thing, which I couldn't fit into a picture. It was interesting in that West Berlin was actually entirely encompassed deep within East Germany...so the wall was actually designed to keep the West Berliners in, on top of keeping East Germans from getting into West Berlin and once there, being able to travel to the west.

The wall really went up overnight - in the course of one night, the East German military surround the entire city of West Berlin with high barb wire fences, guards, and attack dogs. People went to bed on a Saturday night, seeing nothing but a city out their window, and woke up on Sunday morning to see a wall being built. It was only a matter of time before the concrete wall was up, and West Berlin was completely surrounded for 28 years.

This is the last remaining guard tower. It used to be along the wall, but the section it guarded has been torn down, and it now sits on a city street, just another part of the landscape like a bus stop or fire hydrant.

Imagine being a 20 year old German soldier, and being told "Go up into the guard tower. If you see someone trying to escape, shoot them. If you don't, we'll shoot you." This is while you spend hours at a time being able to see into the West. They put guards up there two at a time, so they could make sure the other guy wasn't planning to escape himself. In addition, you would never work with the same partner twice, so that you couldn't conspire with someone else to try to escape.

Just a parking lot, right? Actually, its where Hitler's bunker was. Desperate to erase any painful memories of WWII, the Germans caved in and paved over Hitler's bunker, and simply put a parking lot over it, with no indication of what had once been there. Imagine parking your car before work every day, having no idea that your car was parked right above where Hitler killed himself before the Soviets conquered Berlin. It wasn't until the Soccer world cup in 2006 when Berlin officials, realizing they were going to get a huge influx of foreign visitors curious about WWII history, put up that sign in the picture, recognizing that this was the site of Hitler's bunker.

The Siegessaule, or Victory Tower, a memorial to the Franco-Prussian wars of the 1800's. The Prussians (who eventually became the Germans) were ultimately the victors of all their wars...thus, the statue on top of the tower is facing France, reminding the French that Germany won!

Berlin Hauptbanhauf, the main train station in Berlin. As you can see, Germans take their trains seriously, and train is a very significant way of travel in Germany and all throughout Europe. Inside this massive train station is everything you'd find in an American airport - restaurants, information booths, currency exchange stations, everything. Some of them even have little supermarkets where you can buy groceries!

Look familiar? It should. The tour took us back past the Reichstag. Now I can say I've been there twice.

One of the coolest parts of Berlin is Museum Island, which is literally just that...an island on a river that runs through Berlin which has 5 different museums on it. I didn't get to go into any of the museums, but this is a picture of the "Old Museum", a national history museum of sorts.

I don't remember what museum this was, but I know its the one that has something from Babylon in it...give me a break, I had a ton of information to try to absorb in one day. Someday I'll go back to Berlin and if you're still reading my blog by then, you'll find out all about all the museums on Museum Island.
My tour now done, I grabbed a Doner Kebap before heading over to the stadium. Its got all the same stuff thats in turkish pizza except its on a pita type thing, as you can see. Now guess what I'm incredibly hungry for. These things and turkish pizza were so good, I'd live in Berlin just so I could have them every day.

Evening Session

A group of Japanese fans outside the stadium that travelled to support their athletes!
Terrance Trammell and David Payne went 2-3 for the US in the Men's 110m hurdles!

Graduation (kind of) and the USAW certification workshop

Three Fridays ago (May 6th for those who are counting) was my commencement for my graduate degree. It was actually a "hooding ceremony" - so technically, it wasn't a graduation. I guess its just easier for the school to have us all walk at the same time, since we'll all be finishing our theses and internships at different times. It was still a nice ceremony though, conducted like any standard graduation. One more summer class, an internship, and a thesis defense, (all of which I'm hoping to have done by the end of July) and I'll officially be done with my master's!


In more recent news, last weekend I completed the USAW Sports Performance Coach certification. For those of you who don't know, USA Weightlifting is the national governing body for the sport of Olympic Weightlifting. They offer a few different levels of certification, most of which deal with coaching competitive weightlifters. The SPC certification is more about learning the finer technical points of the main Olympic lifts (the snatch and clean & jerk), variations on the exercises, and how to teach them. I went in thinking it would mainly be stuff I alread knew, but I was wrong. It turns out that in both the snatch and the clean, my shoulders were never far enough in front of the bar...which is why my snatches and cleans from the floor have always sucked!
In addition, the teaching progressions that USAW present for teaching the lifts are certainly useful. While they do involve a decent amount of steps, it covers the basics of every portion of the lifts, and are simple enough to teach to almost anybody. I also met some new people and networked. One of the coaches there teaching had even been a hammer thrower in college. He certainly knew his stuff when it came to lifting, and was pretty strong (repping 190kg/418lbs in the front squat); however, a lot of the things he had to say about how lifting relates to throwing, I didn't really agree with. THAT is a topic for another time, though. Needless to say, I learned a lot, especially pertaining to how to execute and teach the lifts. Its a good feeling knowing that the USAW-SPC gives me things I'll be applying to my own and other people's training, and not just more letters to put after my name!

Been a while...

Hard to believe its been so long since I've put up a post on this thing...about a year and a half, in fact. Well, in that time, I began and ended working as a personal trainer. A season of coaching high school track and field (the throws, specifically) came and went. A trip to Boston the day after christmas 2010 is about the most exciting thing thats happened since then. That, and I also began grad school to pursue my MS of Exercise Science last July. If all goes well, I'll be finishing my MS this July. More updates on that, as well as my thesis, upcoming internship, and trip to the USATF National Championships will be coming soon. In addition, I hope to be posting weekly throwing/strength/general fitness tips, starting soon.





And believe it or not, you can now follow me on twitter @TommySutor


In the past 3 months I've gotten twitter and an iPod, I must be growing up or something...

A day off from the World Championships...

If you're reading this just for the throwing/World Champs stuff, skip this entry. I wanted to go to see all the throwing finals. There were no throwing finals on Day 6 of the world champs, so I went to Potsdam, rented a bike, and rode around all day. (Yes this was my 2nd day in Potsdam, for those of you keeping track.)

Berlin, and Potsdam, as I found out, are very bike friendly cities. They actually have separate sidewalks for bikes, and even seperate traffic signals for bikes!

So after what was a series of wrong turns and long rides in the wrong direction, I finally got to one of the places I wanted to go, Park Sanssouci. Its a Central Park-type place, but instead of being a park built for the people of Potsdam, it was a backyard for King Ftiedrich II. Here are some pictures of things in the park:

A building in the "Chinese Tea garden", not sure of its significance...

and a sculpture on one of the buildings up close.

I continued walking and came across this garden...

where you could walk through a tunnel made of plants. Sweet.

Another side of the same garden.

Windmill.

Schloss Sansoucci is at the top of this hill. This was the King's summer home...yes, the guy built a summer home in the backyard of his regular home.

A close-up of the fountain from the last picture.

An outdoor bathtub! I guess the king was into that...

A cool shot of a bridge and a river running through the park. This is still someone's backyard, mind you...

and THIS is the palace! I was standing as far back as I possibly could and still couldn't fit the whole thing in one picture, so I took this video.

Tats where one guy and his family lived. Its good to be the king.

So I left the park and kept riding my bike until I came across the river that runs out of TieferSee (Lake Tiefer), and I just snapped some pictures.

The last one is a picture of some graffiti under a bridge...Germany is so punk rock!

So as you can see from the pictures, it was a beautiful day, but it was HOT. And, I had been riding a bike around all day, and hadn't drunk enough water, so at this point I was very dehydrated, and if you know me (and how much I hate the heat and hot weather) was not in a pleasant state of mind. However, riding along the river I saw many people just hanging out, some were sunbathing, and some were even swimming, despite the numerous "Swimming Forbidden" signs all along the river. I figured if those people were doing it, I could too. I chained my backpack to one of the wheels on my bike, and jumped in the river for about 5 minutes. That cooled me off, and my happy mood was restored for the day.
On my way back to drop the bike off at the rental place, I snapped this picture of a castle. I don't know what it was really, there were no informational signs or anything like that explaining when it had been built or who lived there. I guess thats Europe though...there are so many old castles spread around that people don't really think they're anything special.

So I went back to my hotel, tired from all the bike riding. I brought back a Turkish Pizza mit Donerfleisch (I seriously want to go back to Germany just so I can have some Turkish Pizza, its that good, my mouth is watering just thinking about it!!!), and of course, some bier. This is Rex Pils ("Pils" being short for Pilsner, which is what a lot of beers over there were), and Schwarzbier. I'm not beer-literate enough to describe how they tasted, but trust me, they were delicious.

So the last thing of my day away from the championships...I obviously didn't go to Germany to see what was on TV, but occasionally I turned it on and one night I came across this.
You'll have to turn the volume up to hear it, but not too loud because halfway through I start laughing. Can anyone tell me just what the HELL this is??? I came across many American TV shows and movies overdubbed in Germany which were funny to watch, but this was on a level of its own. Whatever this thing was, it was on for literally hours every single night. No commercials, no change of camera angles, nothing except this little loaf of bread (or whatever he is) looking at the camera and talking for hours straight. I guess some weird people have their say in TV programming in Germany...

Day 5, World Championships

This is the first image of Day 5 at the World Championships. Each day they handed out daily programs, you can obviously see whats on the cover of this one. As I would find out later, it was a BIG deal that Steffi Nerius won that gold medal, all over Germany.

The Women's Discus qualifying rounds were that morning. Here is a video of the USA's Becky Breisch:

Here is the USA's Stephanie Brown-Trafton, the Olympic champion from Beijing. The automatic qualifier for the finals was 61.50m/201'-9", and this throw was just behind the line at 61.23m/200'-10"! She just barely made it to the finals with this one!

The decathalon also got underway this morning. Here is the USA's Ashton Eaton, this year's NCAA champion, getting a personal best in the long jump:

Woo! 7.85m or a 25'-9" long jump for Ashton Eaton.

The men's high jump qualification rounds also started this morning, here's a jumper going over the bar:

Back to Group B of the women's discus qualifying. Here's Aretha Thurmond of the USA. This wasn't her best throw, but in the later rounds she would qualify for the final.

Here is Germany's 3-time World Champion Franka Dietzsch, who said she was going to retire after the 2004 Olympics. She did so poorly there that she decided she'd keep competing, and won the 2005 and 2007 world champs. Things did not go so well for her here.

As you can see, she threw it into the cage on this one.
Here she is picking the disc up. Unfortunately, her other throws wouldn't be good enough to advance her to the final.

Meanwhile, Terrence Trammell was one of the Americans to advance beyond the first heats of the men's 110 Hurdles:

Song Aimin of China and Irina Yatchenko of Belarus, both former Olympic medallists, competed in the women's disc as well. Aimin would advance, Yatchenko would not.

The competition was run very smoothly at the stadium. As soon as the women's discus qualifying was over, the cage came down and they began setting up the shot put circles for the decathalon competition...

...and the disci (the plural of "discus") were wheeled off the field!

Since there were a ton of empty seats over in the end of the stadium where the decath shot put was, I went over there to get a better view of the two shot circles they had going on at once. On the way I got myself a beer and a Boulette...
Apparently, its a fried meatball. I'm not sure what makes it a meatball since it's clearly in patty form, but I don't really care, because it was, of course, delicious. Very moist, and I guess you'd say greasy, and it didn't taste like a meatball we'd have with pasta in America. Still very good though.

Here are some pictures from the decath shot put. America's Jake Arnold:

World record holder Roman Sebrle of the Czech Republic:

A picture of the two shot put circles with two competitions going on at once:

And just some cool pictures of the shot still in the air right after the thrower released it:

In between the morning and evening sessions I went to and from my hotel once again, and at the train station I took pictures of these newspapers:
Remember how I said it was a big deal Steffi Nerius had won the javelin? Here's your proof. There wasn't a little sidebar blurb about it on page 3A of the sports section, it was FRONT PAGE news on these and a few other newspapers I saw. I'm willing to bet my degree that would NEVER happen if any American won a gold medal at a World Champs that were held in America.

Evening Session

Things started off with some medal ceremonies, including the ceremony for the men's 400m hurdles, where Bershawn Jackson and Kerron Clement won bronze and gold for the USA, respectively.

Then the competitors came out for the Men's Discus final.

Jarred Rome takes a warm-up.

Virjilius Alekna stretching. He's about 6'7", 285 lbs, and as strong and powerful as they come, yet as you can see, still pretty flexible. There's no point in being that big and powerful if you can't hit the right positions...and believe me, he certainly does!

Here is Piotr Malachowski of Poland taking his first throw at 68.77m/225'-7". It would lead the whole competition through four rounds.

Jarred Rome taking his first throw:

Robert Harting of Germany takes his first throw at 68.25m/223'-11", putting him second behind Malachowski.

Here's Casey Malone, the other American taking his first throw. My camera died right after he released the disc. He would end up finishing 5th.

So as I said, Malachowski would lead with his first throw through four rounds. In the 5th round, Malachowski improved again with a massive personal best to 69.15m/226'-10". Harting couldn't answer. So in the 6th round, Harting was the second to last thrower of the competition. With the German crowd cheering and hollering like no crowd I've heard before, Harting unleashed a MASSIVE lifetime best throw of 69.43m/227'-9" to take the lead back from Malachowski (its been nearly a month, yet I'm getting goosebumps as I write about it now.) Malachowski couldn't answer with his last throw, and Robert Harting won the second gold medal of the Championships for Germany! It was one of the coolest things I've seen in my life, and a great competition. Gerd Kanter, last year's Olympic champion and the favorite coming in, finished 3rd.

My camera came back to life for a few seconds to capture a little bit of the celebration after Harting's win. The video is pretty blurry but what happened was Harting ran onto the track, and lifted Berlino (the bear/mascot of the championships) onto his shoulders.

On the way out of the stadium, a large group of German fans marched out, waving German flags and chanting "RO-BERT HAR-TING", and they did that from the stadium all the way to the train station. Not for a soccer player, but for a thrower. Pretty freaking cool.