Waking up at 0800 I checked the forecast and it had now been updated to be -1°C feeling like -7°C at start – so no miraculous warming during the last 8 hours. Getting dressed I went outside for a for a quick jog around the block to get a feel for the weather. At least it wasn’t snowing despite the forecast last night. Moving around it felt like almost too much clothing, but turning a corner and realizing I had been out of the wind until then the amount of layers definitely weren’t overkill. I ended up wearing a thin baselayer, a thicker, slightly wind-breaking, layer/jacket-thing and the official running t-shirt on top. Sweating like a pig when inside but feeling much more appropriate outside.
I returned to my room, grabbed my jacket and wrapped up before leaving for the starting area. Around 45 minutes before start I entered the closed off area and wandered a bit around and tried killing time until the start. There was surprisingly little to see or do, and no one handing out drinks before the run. But to my surprised they probably had the highest portapotty-to-participant ratio I have ever seen. Even close to start the queues were very short. So happy to see that.
I handed in my jacket and it didn’t take long for me to start feeling the cold creeping in. At one point I just wished for the speaker to announce “screw it, guys, it’s cold, we’ll be starting in 5 minutes!”. It helped when one of the streets between the waiting area and the starting corridor turned into an improvised jogging ring where people circled at a gentle pace. Also, the street being shielded from the wind it was a nice way of (re-)gaining a bit of warmth.
But finally the clock struck 10 and we were off. The weather was nice even if it was cold, there was no snow (or rain) despite of the forecast, and it only really felt cold when you got hit by the wind (though that could also be due to the multiple layers). There was a part towards the beginning where we were running in a straight line south and I ended up taking off my beanie because I was starting to get hot and worry I might have put on too much, but as soon as we reached the 180 degree turn-around point and starting running back north I quickly had to put it back on again realizing that we had had the wind in our backs. It was windy throughout the entire run but at least there were passages where we weren’t affected by it. And there were definitely passages where we were.
The course was up and down on along the river on both sides so we didn’t get a chance of running through the old part of town. That was probably a good thing because there aren’t many wide streets around there, and even if “only” app. 11.500 people had signed up for the run and it wasn’t crowded after the first few km I could easily see a bit of traffic jams if we were led through those parts. There would also have been many more cobblestones if we had been led through the old part, and any chance of avoiding cobblestone during a run is a good thing. Running on both sides of the river required us to cross it a total of 6 times – fortunately they were all relatively flat so the amount of ups and downs were limited.
I crossed the finish line at 1:44:41, within my goal of 1:45, but only just. Walking through the finish area I was given heated energy drink (at this temperature it was worth its weight in gold!), a banana, energy drinks and obviously a medal before I wandered off to grab my jacket and return to the hotel. After a long hot shower I rested a bit before returning out to grab a chimney cake with ice cream (how people can eat those without making a mess is beyond me!) and a humongous hotdog. Returning to the hotel I rested before going back out (again) for dinner where I ended up in a place where I had a pork knuckle. It had a massive bone so it ended up not being quite as intimidating as it initially looked, and the taste was fantastic. And the meat was enormously tender – a well-made osso buco is more coherent than this was!
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