It’s been just over a week since the World Champs marathon, and I’ve finally taken some time to reflect on my 2:18:00, 33rd place, for my 3rd attempt at the marathon and my first (and hopefully not last) attempt at the world championships marathon. Here’s a little (lengthy!) report of what I was thinking and feeling during the 42.2km through the streets of Berlin.The race was due to start at 11:45am, which is an odd time to start a marathon (we later found out that the start time was such so that the race would be on during prime time Television viewing in the marathon crazy Japan) and made the weather a potentially huge factor. As late as Thursday it hit a high of 32 C. But some rain on Friday meant that they were only expecting it to be 20-22C on Saturday (race day). Certainly not ideal marathoning temps, but not horrible.
The one good thing about the start time of the race was that we didn’t have to get up terribly early to eat. I woke around 7.30 and at 4 pieces of toast with PB and banana and some coffee and sports drink. After that I just relaxed and got into my running gear and made sure I had everything I needed for the race. We boarded a bus from the hotel headed to the start area just after 10am. It’s hard to get nervous and uptight before a marathon, because it is such a long race and so much can happen, that wasting your energy getting pumped up for the race will likely just make you go out to hard in the beginning. But, I have to admit I got a bit nervous when our bus driver drove around in all sorts of weird directions for about 20 minutes before admitting he didn’t know the route to get us to the start line because of all the road closures. Luckily where he ended up dropping us off was only a 400-500m walk from the start area. We warmed up along a 250m stretch of road behind the start line that was blocked off for the marathoners. It was interesting to see all the different countries and the different things they did to warm up. Mostly it was just a lot of slow jogging. After a slow 8-10minutes of jogging and some light stretching we stripped down to our competition gear and went through the final check-in. From there we escorted to the start area 10 minutes prior to the start. The crowds at the start/finish area were huge and I got a little rush of emotion when we first made our way out and the spectators were cheering loudly. After a few minutes of light strides and standing around we lined up. Myself and the other Canadians stayed in the back row (about 3-4 rows back from the front) of the 100 odd man field. At 11:45 the gun went off, everyone started their watches, and it was time to for the end result of months of grinding out long runs and hard workouts to unfold...
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