Walls and fasttracks

With 1,171 km of running behind me this year, it was finally time to meet my demons and the proverbial “wall”, a wall that turned out to be all too real in the end. I guess I should start with the good news though, I did finish Amsterdam Marathon 2018 in 4 hours, 16 minutes and 40 seconds. Yet, the last two, three kilometres were beyond gruesome, in fact I had to walk the very last kilometre as I entered the 1928 Olympic Stadium.

When I signed up back in May, I was unsure what group to be in so I settled for the slowest one which meant that I had to expend a lot of energy in the beginning with overtaking other runners. Running with ten thousands of other people is clearly quite different from my previous laps around Nydalasjön but it also made the whole experience feel incredibly social and kind.  When I passed the 21.1 km marker at 1 hour and 57 minutes, I was feeling absolutely fine but once I passed 35 km, something began to happen with my body despite the steady flow of energy gels and sport drinks. Funny enough, my phone died soon after so my Strava record will forever remain incomplete.

Sitting in the lounge at Schiphol, I have now finished my third salad bowl to which I even poured up a glass of wine from South America, as a taste of what is to come in just ten days. But first, a long journey home through Stockholm and the night train to Umeå before heading up to UPL for my course on theories of learning, all assuming I can indeed walk tomorrow :-)