Those of you following me for a while know I have been tracking my running since January of this year. While I’ve been running as my main exercise since 2016, it was not till September last year that I started to pick up things with dedication and distance-based schedules. I started with a 10-kilometer schedule for the fall season last year to rebuild my training rhythm and increase my pace. By January, I had picked up a 21.1-kilometer schedule as a New Year resolution, which ended late in April.
Early May, my family and I visited the Island of Terschelling for the first time, and I was amazed by its beauty. I knew from a friend that Terschelling hosts the (in the Netherlands) famous ‘Bear Run’ in the fall season and thought, why not give it a try? If I wanted to run a Marathon at least once before turning 50, it might as well be a beautiful and challenging one. While the ‘Bear Run’ wasn’t easy, the journey to deal with a Marathon wasn’t either. Training for the Marathon was intensive and required a lot of dedication. I followed an 18-week training schedule that started with being able to do a half Marathon within two hours. My training plan consisted of five runs a week: three recovery runs, one interval or tempo run, and one long run on Sundays. Getting these runs in wasn’t easy due to travel for my new job and dealing with jetlags.
My race went very well; I ran at a constant pace of 5:40 per kilometer until 32 kilometers and found myself a nice pack of 8-9 people at kilometer 8. We arrived at the beach as a pack of 5-6 people, where the group fell apart further. To my surprise, I was the one who could keep the highest pace in the deep sand. What was very cool was that everyone in the pack wished each other ‘good luck’; from here on, you were on your own for the last 10 kilometers.
Running on the beach after such a distance was challenging. My legs were exploding when I ran up the dunes again to find my way into the final forest section. Picking up the pace again to 5:40 wasn’t possible anymore. According to my watch, I was somewhere between 6:15 and 6:25. After passing the 36k mark, I ended up in a mental and physical area I had never experienced before. I went into a trance state and kept going where I saw others starting to combine running with walking frequently. Drinking or more food intake wasn’t possible, but my reserves were enough to keep going.
The joy I felt when passing the final 1k arch is beyond words. This was the first time I believed I would make it to the end, and my adrenaline gave me the power to accelerate back to 5:09 per kilometer to the end. From there on, it was all emotions, totally unexpected. I Facetimed my wife, and I could only cry, being so happy to have made it to the end.
Running a Marathon is different from any other distance I have run. It’s mythical and has brought me experiences that are very hard to capture or explain. Just wow.
Below are two images with my running buddy Olof, one from before the race and one from after.
