I’m writing this while sitting on a train and returning from my weekend trip in Luxembourg. It was finally time for a short running adventure after almost 2,5 years… Sorry I haven’t been writing lately. The work and all other life stuff takes its toll and this nice writing hobby has suffered a lot lately.
I was really excited about the fact to be finally be able to have a proper running event, but on the other hand I haven’t been really training a lot during the past few months. Nevertheless I wanted to travel to Luxembourg for the ING Night Marathon and have a nice run with a few friends of mine. The event had already been postponed twice due to the pandemic, but this year it finally was possible to arrange a full running event mostly without any Covid19-related restrictions.
I hit the train on Friday and took a trip from Bremen to Frankfurt where I met the Finnish friends of mine. From there we took a rental car and had a nice road trip to Luxembourg. On Saturday morning we fetched our bib and had a brief glance at the city. All in all we tried to have a normal day before for a marathon – with a lunch with plenty of carbon hydrates.
After a short rest at the hotel we took a fully loaded tram to the expo location. We reached the location well in advance before the start, because that was the recommendation. In Luxexpo that was easy to understand as due to the high number of team runners and half marathon participants there easily were 15 000 participants gathered to the same area. Unfortunately I don’t have any photos from the actual event to share, as I left my phone to the hotel.
After the plenty of waiting the time for the start had come. We started in a fabulous sunshine and were hopeful to see the best of Luxembourg. My mood was not the best possible, because I did not feel fully healthy. My fears were unfortunately proved to be true – already after a few kilometers I could say it was gonna be hard run. I felt my stomach was like a stone and it didn’t seem to improve a lot during the run. I didn’t want to have too big chances in order to be able to finish so I reduced the pace accordingly. I knew it would not be a great result, but to finish is the most important thing – at least for a recreational runner like me. My friends were a great support to me which I’m deeply grateful of and cheered me up when I was having hard times.
The marathon route in Luxembourg is equipped with a plenty of curves and there also are considerable ascends and descends on the course. What was absolutely brilliant, was the support from the spectators that really gave one an extra boost. It’s a really great atmosphere out there!
After we had reached the 30 km mark I was pretty certain I could finish after all difficulties and with the help of cola that really made my stomach feel better and also provided the highly needed energy. During the final kilometers I had to resort to walking – mostly on the uphills, but in the end we could reach the finish line, with a result of about an hour slower than expected, but I still was able to finish. This was the marathon #28 for me and the next one will probably be in Berlin in the autumn. Now I feel like I would only like to sleep and rest, but first I have to get home.
I’ll try write my thoughts about the running a bit more often. I have no idea if anyone reads this, but it’s at least a collection of notes for myself…
Cheers,
Juoksijapoika