Well, I did always say it was going to be close. But to go for sub-three and finish Berlin marathon in 3 hours and 7 seconds …
I had actually had a running joke with a friend about how if it was that close, I’d sit down and wait for two minutes before crossing the line so I didn’t have everyone asking me “Oh no, are you totally gutted?” for the next six months. But surprisingly, I’m pretty sanguine about it, because I feel it was slightly of my hands. Or my feet, given I fell over twice at the overly crowded drinks stations.
Still, on the bright side, I finished 87th women overall. And my time, which was so close to three hours (as @MattSowton put it, I ran 2 hrs 59min and 67sec) was a PB by nearly four minutes. I also didn’t get injured. Or lose my insoles. Also, massive congratulations to my colleague – and below the line regular – Jonathan Haynes on completing his first marathon.
And so, on to there was the post-race fun. No cake to report yet – shockingly! – just a particularly fine ice cream and then the pleasure of meeting several people for drinks afterwards including Mr Astasolillja – who ran a bewilderingly fast 2hr 38mins. It made me think I’d love to meet more of this lovely running blog crowd in the flesh, so I may look into organising a meet up in the near future, if anyone is interested.
All of us afterwards agreed that while we’d enjoyed the race, we were genuinely quite surprised by how poorly organised parts of this one were.
I was expecting the fastest race in the world to be run with the usual Teutonic efficiency. But the start was horribly crowded – not just the actual start pens but the scrum to get into them. For some inexplicable reason there were separate bag drops for men and women, and the women’s one involved having to battle through the massive and slowly shuffling crowds going to the start pens. Then the pens themselves were tiny and packed tight as sardines. The slightly odd system based on PB rather than estimated time (so presumably you could be in a pen based on a 20 year old best time ..) meant that the 3 hr 15 min pacer started ahead of me, in a pen that was supposed to be for 2 hr 50-3 hr runners.
And once we were off that crush just never went away. I’ve never done a race where I have been so utterly oblivious to where I was or what landmarks I might be passing. I know Berlin pretty well, so should have had a decent sense of my geography, but it was so hard to do anything other than concentrate on your immediate few metres at all times.
Then the water stations. Everyone I spoke to agreed there were far too few of them – every 5km or so. That’s not nearly enough. The weather was actually perfect, but what if it’d been a hotter day? That also puts pressure on those stations because everyone is going to try and grab water at every one. So why, then, have incredibly short tables, hardly anyone actually handing out water, and from plastic cups almost impossible to easily grab, or drink from, which are then discarded everywhere, making it incredibly treacherous underfoot. Never have I appreciated more the little bottles you can grab at every mile of the London marathon course (and the incredibly efficient bag drop, come to that).
I really hope this doesn’t sound like sour grapes – as I mentioned, everyone I spoke to, with times varying from low 2hr 30s to five hour-plus, said similar things. And in my case, those tables of precious water, with people launching themselves across you suddenly, stopping suddenly, veering everywhere, caused two falls. The first not too bad – caught myself in time – the second more jarring and right near the end. Getting up caused my calves to somehow go into cramp and the last few km were spent fighting that.
Perhaps those who have done Berlin in previous years can comment – is it always this crowded? Have they massively upped the numbers of runners? When did they become mean enough to not even give you a T-shirt for your 90-odd Euros and 42 and a bit km?
Well that was my weekend. Now over to you now, runners. How was your weekend running? Anyone do the lovely Ealing half marathon – enjoyed that last year though vividly remember a few surprisingly hills! As always, I want to hear about your woes and triumphs.
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