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| Dave, Mike, and Dave post-race in the Biergarten. |
By Dave Connally
My journey to the Berlin Marathon started almost 2 years ago. I had recently joined GLRR and was having dinner with my wife and an old friend (Dave) from high school who was in town for a conference. I told him how excited I was to be a part of a running club as I’d not really done a lot of training or running with others. I’d also registered for my first Boston that fall so there was a lot of talk about marathons. He told us about the sabbatical that he was going to take in 2015 to Berlin. As we had previously discussed running a marathon together, I immediately got on my phone (my wife loves this) to see what time of year the marathon was run in Berlin. Dave had previously run it and thought it was in the fall and we were pleased to find out that it was indeed a late September race. We agreed that night that we would do everything we could to meet up and run together.
We’ll move quickly to the summer of 2014. I had been running a lot, both training and racing, with Mike Luebeck and Katie Gessler. I can’t remember when we discussed it for the first time, but for some reason the thought of going over to Germany for a marathon, a trip down to Salzburg, and finishing up in Munich for Oktoberfest was appealing to them. Add in a couple of other friends and suddenly we were up to 6!
October came quickly and it was time to get in the lottery. Mike, Katie, Dave, and I all entered, as well as another friend, Mark, from Scotland…it was really becoming a destination trip. Out of the 5 of us, only Mike and I got in. That was a pretty big downer. Mark decided to register for another local marathon at the same time as Berlin. Dave, of course, was already going to be in Berlin. To my surprise and delight, Katie said she wanted to make the trip even though she wasn’t going to be running but that story doesn’t end here.
With the marathon entries set, it was time to start planning all other aspects of the trip. I won’t bore you with all the details, but if anyone reading ever wants to do a trip like this, I’d be happy to talk about it at length. There were some good decisions and some questionable calls made by me. The quick itinerary/summary is: Wednesday overnight flight to Berlin from Boston. Thursday through Monday in a 3 BR apartment. Race Sunday. Train Monday to Salzburg (bad call number 2 by me). Monday through Thursday in a 3 BR apartment in Salzburg. Train Thursday to Munich. Thurs to Sunday in a 3 BR in Munch. Numerous tours planned in all cities. Sounds easy, right? The truth is, it took a lot of planning and coordination. Even with everything planned out as well as we could, there were things that we couldn’t anticipate (like hundreds of thousands of refugees making their way across Hungary through Austria into Germany).
Most of that except for the day to day tours and activities and trains were set by February. In April, I think the week before Boston, I received an email from Dave saying that he’d gotten into the marathon by purchasing one of their charity entries. I was so excited that Katie might actually be able to run that I registered her (bad call number 1 by me). She wasn’t at work yet and I didn’t want her to miss out. It seemed at the time like everything was going to work out perfectly for all of us. Anyway, this is important for any of you that may want to do Berlin if you don’t get in via the lottery. Every year the marathon supports a charity by reserving about 1000 spots which they open up in April. Unlike charity spots where you are required to raise money, these entries are only an additional 60 Euro, no fundraising required. The marathon cost itself is 98 Euro plus some amount to rent the timing chip. WTH, get into the 21st century and put the timing chips on your bibs. I guess Champion Chip is still pretty popular in Europe. Shirts are an additional 30 Euro, both participant and finisher. Read as: everything is a la carte, but the total cost winds up being around the same as Boston, New York, or Chicago for the marathon entry.
After Boston 2015, which Mike, Katie, and I all ran, we had about 6 to 8 weeks before training for Berlin would start in earnest. Another long story short: Mike had what seemed to be a great training session over the summer. We didn’t run as much together as we did the previous summer but at track I could tell he was faster than ever and solid. Katie started and stopped a number of times trying to get over an injury likely caused by Boston. Unfortunately, it was evident she wasn’t going to get through it in time to train sufficiently run Berlin (still coming on the trip though!). As for me, I wound up getting a stress fracture in my left shin in mid to late June that caused a 6 week hiatus from running. No problem, it’s summer! I spent a lot of time cycling and swimming. Thank goodness for Amanda Benoit (you are an Ironman!), Bob Kearns, and a bunch of new Trifury friends during that time. 6 weeks to go when I got back, 4 weeks to build back up and 2 weeks to taper. Solid marathon training plan, right? We’ll see.
Since this story is primarily about the marathon, I’ll skip to the good part. For those of you that want to hear about all the ancillary activities, I love talking, don’t be afraid to ask.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t throw something in about the Expo. It was held at the old Berlin Tempelhof airport. There’s quite a bit of history involved with the site which I read up on before arriving and it is still an impressive facility. Mike and I went to the Expo together. We were forced to walk through the entire facility, past all the food, sports clothing, and marathon vendors to get our numbers. There was also a BMW i8 and an i3 on display as they were the presenting sponsor. Just before number pick up, they sealed a polyester cloth band around our wrists which indicates you are a marathon participant and can get into various areas. Mike and I decided to have a bet about who could keep it on longer. I owe him a beer and I’m reasonably certain he is still wearing it. After this we found out why they use chips that we had to attach to our shoes. Rather than having bibs pre-printed, we could go to any station and present our packet pick up card after which the largest bib I’ve ever worn was printed right there for me. On to pick up pre-ordered shirts. I pre-ordered the participant and finisher (presumptuous, I know) shirts. Mike had only ordered the finisher, but decided he wanted a participant shirt too. Understandable as it is pretty nice so we proceeded to the Adidas shopping booth. If you’ve ever been to the craziness that is the Adidas booth at Boston…this one was as well organized as that one, but Mike eventually did get his shirt. Suffice to say, we were a little disappointed at the Expo experience, though it was fun to have our picture taken with the times we hoped to run.
Sunday Sept 27th arrived quickly. Mike and I got up early. I probably slept about 3 hours the night before because I was so excited. That hasn’t happened to me since my very first marathon. We went through our pre-race routine, eating bagels, drinking water, etc. Standard stuff. Got dressed and left to make our way to the start line. Berlin has a very reasonable 9 AM start time. Our apartment was about 2 km from the start line so we left around 7:15. The Start and Finish are located in the Grosser Tiergarten. It’s a large park just west of the Brandenburg Gate. The start area is highly organized as one might expect from a race of this size and caliber. There were specific tents and tables within those tents where we were assigned to drop our bags. Interestingly, men’s and women’s bag check tents were separated and you’ll see later that this is probably a good thing. From the bag check area, there are specific paths depending on which corral one is assigned. Mike and I were both in corral D so we started to make our way along the proper path. During this time, I saw no less than 3 people smoking cigarettes. Not volunteers, folks with bibs on. I guess they were waking up their lungs in preparation for the race effort. As I mentioned, we’re in a park. Though there were plenty of porta potties, I’ve never seen more people avail themselves of trees and bushes…both men and women. Hey, it’s Europe, more on that later.
I’d agreed to meet my friend Dave on the border of corral D and C so I left Mike in line for the porta potty and headed for the corrals (we probably should have agreed on where to meet after we were done before I did this). This is another interesting note about Berlin, they seem to assign you to your corral based on your marathon PR. So if you ran a 2:58 20 years ago, you’ll be in corral C even if you haven’t run that time since. Or in my case, corral D for a 3:12 if you haven’t seen that time in 2 years. Dave hadn’t show up by 8:53 so I proceeded to get into the corral. Unlike Boston that starts in waves separated by 25 or 35 minutes, there were 40 something thousand lined up for a 9 AM start. They did go out in 2 waves but neither Mike nor I knows what really happened with that 2nd wave. It wasn’t very clear.
Amazingly, I saw Dave waiting for me at the start line and we proceeded to cross the start together as planned! We had never run together, even in training, as we’ve been in different cities for a long time. I knew I was severely undertrained and it turned out Dave was too. He has been and likely could be again a sub 3 hour guy, however, we agreed the previous day that we would try to run even 7:40s for the race putting us in around 3:21. Our first mile was 7:17. Fail. It felt good so we kept a similar pace for a while despite trying to slow down. Sometimes I think I will never learn. At the 5k mark we saw my wife, Katie, our friends who traveled with us, and another couple who came over from Scotland to meet up with us. It’s early, but it was nice boost. Still feeling good. At the 10k mark we saw Dave’s wife and 2 young children, another adrenaline boost. I should pause here to tell since I’m talking about km marks that Berlin is wholly measured in kilometers. They come fast, but there’s a lot more of them, of course. If you decide to run it and don’t wear GPS, you may want to train in km or at least know the conversion. Back to the actual race…none of our first 7 miles was at or below the 7:40 mark we’d set for ourselves. Did I already say “Fail”? That changed at mile 8. Something caught up with me and for the first time ever in a race I felt nauseous and almost lost it. 7:54 for that mile and I was already feeling like it might be a long day. 18.2 miles is a long way to go when you’re feeling sick. I decided I’d push through the half and hope that I felt better. I almost made it. We held the pace through 20k but that km+ to the halfway point felt ridiculously long and I knew I was done. Another 2 side notes here. First, the water stops were not my favorite. They used eco friendly plastic cups and there were a LOT of them on the ground, very slippery. Second, the park experience with the porta potties continued throughout the course. Both men and women had no problems using whatever light cover was available to relieve themselves.
21 km to go, and our pace is way down. Trying to slow down has never worked for me. It seems like the pace I go out is the pace my body wants to go so I am either running that pace or walking. Dave stayed with me through 35k despite me telling him multiple times to finish his race. At that point, he did decide to go because I wasn’t sure whether I’d be able to finish running or if I’d have to walk it in. Just after he left, I saw his wife and kids again. They’d made it to a cheer area where apparently children are fed candy non-stop to make them as excited as possible. Speaking of cheering, the spectators were fantastic. Somehow “you’re almost there” doesn’t sound as bad at mile 20 when it’s spoken in a language you don’t understand. I even got some recognition of my GLRR singlet from the crowd, which was awesome. Somehow I slogged through the final 7k, I remember a lot of turns at the end. I kept wondering which turn was going to be the one where I would see the Brandenburg Gate which is when you know you’re basically done. I missed seeing one of the latter km markers which really got me down at that point, it was all erased when I finally turned that corner and saw the gate. I tried hard to get in a good spot for photo op, but it didn’t happen. I think Mike got a good one. Made it through the gate and ran the last few hundred meters to cross the finish line…in my worst time ever.
The finish chute was a madhouse. Like most of the course where you never felt like you were alone, it was packed full of folks. There’s a reason the volunteers at Baystate tell you to keep moving, despite the fact you may have just run 26.2 miles. Medal, water, a bag of food, and alcohol free beer (what?!) was the order. Yeah, as much alcohol free beer as you wanted, which was none in my case. It was a bit of a walk to get back to the bag check but eventually I made my way there which is when I thought “gee, maybe I should have had a plan to meet Mike somewhere since he may have finished an hour ago”. I retrieved my bag and sat down in the big field that was in the center of the bag check area. Here’s where I learned why it was good that men’s and women’s tents were separated. Guys were changing right there in the sunshine, no using towels clumsily like we do around here sometimes when we need a quick change. Full monty, leave the kids at home. I actually thought about it because I was pretty gross but my American sensibilities took hold. After sitting for a few, I thought maybe I should go try to find Mike so I walked in the direction of his bag check. In a moment of serendipity, he actually saw me and called me over. We sat for a few more minutes and talked about our experiences and whether we wanted to hobble over to the Adidas booth to buy any more gear, which we did not. So we limped to the exit and dropped off our rented chips on the way. Remember that 2k walk to the start? It’s a little more daunting after running 42.195 km. Luck was on our side though and an empty cab was driving by just as we exited the park. I flagged it down and we happily rode back to our apartment.
We’d agreed to meet up with Dave and his family at a biergarten near their place. Beer gardens are not typical for this area of Germany so we were pretty lucky that there was one nearby. They are normally in Bavaria in the south where we would be later in the week but that’s a different story. Mike, Katie, Karen, John, Linda, Tracey, Steve and I took the bus and a tram to get there. I think the beer I had may have been one of the best I’ve ever had and the sausages were delicious. As I sat around the table with all of these friends and reflected on the worst marathon time I’d ever run, I realized that it didn’t matter one bit. I’d planned for and traveled to Germany with my wife and 4 good friends. Run 35k with one of my oldest and dearest friends. Been through training ups and downs with two of my newer and still dear friends. Met up with mates from the UK who came for no other reason than to be with us. In that moment, my Berlin Marathon finished just as it started 2 years (and 3 pages) ago, an opportunity to celebrate friends and be with some of the people who matter most in my life. Thanks for taking the time to read this and share in the experience.
