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Posted

Very cool!  My dad did the Nijmegan March several times w/ volunteers from his group.  50km per day, 4 days, w/ ruk - iirc, full BDU and combat boots as well.

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In the third week of July, we walk the 4Days Marches together, the world’s largest walking achievement event! Over 45,000 participants with more than 70 different nationalities, from as young as 11 to over 90, come to Nijmegen every year to walk 30, 40 or 50 kilometres for four days in this city on the Waal river and its beautiful, wooded surroundings. They all gather with the same objective in mind: being awarded the coveted 4Days Marches Cross.

 

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Posted

Lot of great marches in Europe. Never did one myself, but during my last period over there as a student, I took advantage of the great Wanderwege whenever I could, especially when I was in the Odenwald for about six weeks.

Done working for the day. Did lots of screen refreshing looking for Baatan results, but it's been only some individual results and none of the team stuff for quite a while. Time for lunch and finding the Horns playing softball. Gotta wait until next Sunday for Mainz, and definitely pulling for Stuttgart against Eintracht in the Saturday late game.

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Posted

Eh ... team results just got posted. U. of Minnesota light ROTC -- there are heavy ruck and light ruck categories -- finished the marathon in second for the second consecutive year with a team time of 4 hours, 27 minutes, 33 seconds.

They beat NMSU (4:58:47), which takes this stuff pretty seriously as the home team. But ... and I haven't heard from our son yet, so I don't know how the guys on the team are dealing with this ... they lost to Clemson by about nine minutes.

And not just Clemson, but a team of female ROTC cadets.

One of whom is named ... I kid y'all not ... Shay Studley.  Congrats to those women! They are going to have a hell of a party to celebrate this, I'd bet.

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Posted (edited)

You probably knew this, @Mittens, but I did not know that "Major Tom" had become the unofficial goal-scoring anthem for the German national team (learned this watching a replay of Sunday's Italy matchup in the Nations League quarterfinal), nor that there was a really strong Stuttgart tie. (from The Athletic -- if anyone wants the whole thing, I can post.)

No idea that Peter Schilling was offered a contract by VfB Stuttgart and turned it down to follow his musical dream. Nor this from 2024:

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Germany played their second group game of the tournament in Stuttgart. Before and after the 2-0 win against Hungary that confirmed their qualification for the knockout phase, 50,000 people inside the stadium sang Major Tom’s refrain together, sending it echoing out across a sun-scorched city.

Vollig losgelost (Completely detached)
Von der erde (From the Earth)
Schwebt das raumschiff (The Spacecraft floats)
Vollig schwerelos (Completely weightless)

“What many people don’t know is that I wrote the song 800 metres (half a mile) from that stadium. It’s from that area,” says Schilling. “So, I was watching that day and there were so many different things going on. The game. Germany winning. The people. The place where the song was written. And then there’s me, sitting in front of my TV."

“This is what it’s all about. It’s why I started making music. This is it.”

And there's a further Stuttgart tie in that Mittelstädt scored the goal when they first played it.

Adidas apparently had as much to do with this as anything. The company's "Typisch Deutsch" campaign is a blast.

The song was a hit when I was a student in Mainz. It's part of my German playlist, and the football tie and the story behind that make it so much more cool.

Man, what a great song.

 

Edited by Hayduke
contract, dangit
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Posted

Holy shit - I had no clue about any of that.  Very badass!!  I had no idea that anyone other than David Bowie was associated w/ the song.  Very cool that Max scored that goal as well!

I really only started following VfB closely (kind of a loose close, if we're honest) in 2018.  I don't speak German (I could speak enough to get around on the economy because my dad was fluent, but I was a smart ass American teenager and didn't take it in school) so reading articles is difficult.  I get most of my VfB news from American sources on social media, and there's really not that much unless something big is happening.  

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Posted (edited)

The Bowie association is a little less clear, based on what that article says, but I'm going to look into it a little more -- partly because one of my students just chose "Space Oddity" as a song to analyze for relationships to some of the textbook principles in our communication class, and we're going to talk about it.

Coincidentally, I was in a music studio in Australia with another class the day after Bowie died, and the studio director played "Space Oddity" on high volume with studio-quality speakers as a tribute to open our session. That was powerful. (Another aside: it was the studio where "Under the Milky Way," another '80s great, was recorded, and hearing that at the same volume, in the place where it was mixed by the guys who mixed it, was an incredible experience.)

But yeah, "Major Tom" and the side story are badass. Even in German, the song is more than catchy for non-German speakers. The English version falls only a touch short and apparently it was peaking on the charts around the time Rick McIvor was taking the Aggies apart in 1983 (a game I listened to on AFN). 

Edited by Hayduke
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