Month: April 2017

Saturday night before the race I started to panic: I visited Hamburg’s recently opened opera house Elbphilharmonie and nearly froze to death. The building is truly amazing with viewing platforms and awe inspiring architecture, inside and out. But the location is also extremely windy and despite the 8 degrees temperature it felt like zero. The weather forecast for marathon Sunday said the same 8 or 9 degrees temperature, but even more wind. So I worried that my shorts, short sleeved…

Does Rome have more rain than London? Some articles out there are seriously suggesting that and today I might start to believe it. I had been running 37 marathons (about 10 of them in UK alone) without ever experiencing severe rain. The most unlikely candidate to end this streak did end it: Rome. It was raining today and it rained hard. Not all way through, but a solid 90 minutes at the beginning, to get the runners completely soaked, and…

The Rome Marathon preparation presented a rather different challenge to me: getting the medical certificate which should prove that I am fit to run a marathon. (The fact that just ten days ago I had successfully completed one does not seem to prove anything.) I had been there before in 2013 when I did Florence and Pisa, which also required this certificate (it comes down to an Italian law from 1982 after all) and while it had been a sort…