Berlin marathon. The experience

Can we do it again? Please! Please! Please?!

It's been nearly a week since the big race and I'm still glowing from the experience. I know I had spoken before about the excitement and compared it to what I had experienced in previous races but… this time it was for real. I set out on this journey with the goal of hitting a new PB. You know, the flattest course on earth, record breaking course, the best athletes of the planet come to Berlin to give it a lash. Truth be said, for mortals like me, Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Berlin have all been flat with perfect weather conditions so I don’t think it would've made a difference. I built the expectation for this one out of something that I wanted to do… just because.

On Friday morning I set out on the early Aer Lingus flight to Berlin. Apart from a few of families and two guys in suits, I think the rest of the plane was full of runners. For the next two hours you could hear bits of conversations and all of them were running related: stories of past races, stories from runners long gone, pace per mile, hydration tips, the lot.

Once in Berlin, it was the same thing but a thousand times bigger. Public transport was jam packed with people travelling to the expo to collect race bibs or coming back with bags full of impulse-shopping content "I didn't mean to buy this, but I REALLY need it now that I've seen it". The expo itself was crowded but not impossible to navigate. What can I say? If 46,000 runners are collecting bibs, it's likely to get crowded. Oh, and it rained… Jayney Mack did it rain.

On Saturday I was meant to do the breakfast run that finishes at the Olympic stadium. I watched videos from previous editions and it looked like fun; people are encouraged to dress up in costume and bring flags and what not. I couldn't make up my mind but after a rotten night sleep and waking up at 7 I decided to go out on my own around Tiergarten and come back in time for the Ireland match. Best decision ever as I got to see some of the elite runners going through their morning routine.

Comments

Visualization for beginners

I've been a competitive athlete all my life. I've been involved in different sports at different levels since the age of 8 and along the way, a lot of coaches have spoken to me or my team about visualization. "See yourself scoring that try" "See yourself winning that match". Only now I realise that I never understood what they meant. It's easy to close your eyes and see yourself scoring a try, a winning goal or whatever, but all boys do that when they play footie on the street. So how does that help you achieve anything in a proper competition? That's the piece I never understood and maybe my coaches never did either. I think the confusion comes from the overlapping of two concepts: imagination and visualization. Imagination allows you to see yourself on the pilot seat of a spaceship to Mars to rescue Lady O'Mygodyouregorgeous but has nothing to do with reality. Visualization on the other hand, is about seeing yourself achieving things that you

The hidden benefits of sport for teenagers

Following up from my last post , I have been giving some thought to the topic of teenagers and sport. Having a teenager in the house has taught me a thing or two about the way in which us parents, create a work ethic that will help them later in life, and the struggles we go through in order to turn actions into habits. Be the example We're all familiar with the old saying "Do as I say, not as I do" and it makes sense in a convoluted way, but not to a teenager. Imagine we tell them to get off the phone/tablet/Playstation and go to bed early, but they see us staying up till midnight browsing Facebook in bed. It sounds hypocritical, right? To a teenager, this feeling is amplified tenfold. If, on the other hand, we get proper rest, if we are commited to training, to fueling properly and we can show the results consistently, there's a better chance of the message sticking in their minds. Responsibility is personal When my son was younger, we would always mak

How will races look like post COVID-19?

I think racing the way we're used to is gone forever. There! I've said it. No more long queues at the portaloos before the start. No more corrals with 1,000 runners touching, shaking hands, and wishing each other luck. No more post-race hugs and tears, not unless you're part of the same household. So let's reverse engineer a race and see if we can come up with a picture Social distancing So, there are 10,000 of us converging into one spot in the city. How can you make sure we all observe social distancing? That's a bit of an issue unless we're running in the desert or high in the mountains where there are acres to spare. The queueing system We start by creating an orderly queue. In fact, we create many orderly queues around the access area to prevent overcrowding. First of all, the zone must be cordoned off for the queue system to work. Otherwise, everybody does what everybody does when there's no system in place: we invade the zone. So, all ru

26.2 Ways to Run

Search This Blog