Berlin Marathon 2004

About Berlin!

Photo by Frank Räcker, www.skate-fotos.de

Berlin is one of the biggest and fastest inline marathons in the world.  It's also one of the last of the World Inline Cup marathons of the year.  It's so big that the organisers have split the running and the inline marathons so that the inline marathon takes place on the Saturday with around 8-10,000 skaters and 250,000 spectators, and the running marathon on the Sunday with around 35,000 runners and up to a million spectators.  This was the 31st year of the running marathon, and the 8th year of the inline skating version.

This is the second big marathon I've skated in Germany now, and I have to say the excitement and atmosphere is awesome and highly addictive.  Best of all nearly everyone is easily capable of skating a marathon since it's so much easier than running one.

I'm hugely pleased that inline skating has taken off so well on the continent, it's clearly in the big time sports now.  Now my dream is to see the same sort of thing happen to the London Inline Marathon!

Getting there and hostels

We took a cheap Ryanair flight out from Stansted on Thursday afternoon, what a mission getting there via train and bus. Luckily everything went smoothly, and upon arrival at Berlin Schonefeld we met more and more skaters from the UK who came to the marathon. A quick S-Bahn trip later we arrived at Warschauer Str. where I disembarked for the Sunflower Hostel.  The hostel was really decent, clean, and well run, and an absolute bargain at 15 euros per night.  I stayed in a room with 6 beds and had very decent and quiet people to share with thank goodness.  I'm not so sure how the Friday night party people appreciated AlastairJ and I getting up at 7am on a Saturday morning, though we did our best to be super quiet and get out of there as quickly as possible.

The Marathon Expo trade show

We had to turn up here in order to collect our registrations, race bibs and chips for the race on Saturday. Since the race started at 10am this year, registration had to be done on the Friday. My registration was for block G based on my 1:50 time in Bonn earlier in the year. My LIM time of 1:49 the previous week got me an upgrade to block F, but unfortunately for me both those marathons are very slow compared with Berlin, and a rough rule of thumb was to drop 20 minutes from the LIM time to get an estimated Berlin time. (As an example, winning times compare as 1:20 for LIM, 1:25 for Bonn, and 1:04 for Berlin this year)

Wow, the Berlin Vital was an amazing trade show. It covered a huge area over 3 big halls, a lot of running equipment and services, but quite a lot of inline skating stands as well. We arrived at around 12.30 on Friday after having met up with the others near Frederich Str. at their hostel.

Had a good wander around looking at many of the stands, scored a free DVD of the 2003 inline marathon at www.inlion.com, and ate 2 pasta meals. These meals were great - really tasty pasta for 3.50 euro. Also picked up a free Adidas plastic pre-race warmer to fight the cold since you end up standing around for ages in lycra and not exercising.

Lastly got to meet Sebastian Baumgartner again, although he was very busy with all the work on the inline marathon. He put together a great video of the marathon course showing all the turns, hazards, and other things to watch out for, top presentation that got large applause from the audience.  It was also good to see that the scar from his helmet-less fall had almost completely disappeared.

A bad night's sleep

After the trade show AlastairJ and I went back to the Sunflower hostel for a quick spruce up and returned for a team dinner, great fun and a good time! I did find out that Hans had signed up for Sebastian Baumgartner's Follow Me race pace setters, which made me kick myself for not doing so as well at the Expo earlier in the day. Resolved to go meet up with Hans and the others and see if I couldn't get myself onto a group in the morning.

Sebastian organised this setup, whereby he had around 15 leaders in several groups that would skate to a pace of, for example, 1:20, 1:25, 1:30, 1:35, 1:40. For a small fee marathoners can then choose their time and which group to skate with, and in return get a guaranteed pace line to join with at about the right pace, a t-shirt to identify the group, and some pace line training for those who've never done this before. I thought about the 1:25, but in all honesty I wondered whether this wasn't being far too ambitious given that my previous personal best was 1:49. The others in the club felt that a 20 minute reduction in time was a good estimate when moving from London to Berlin. Since Hans had chosen the 1:30 group, my competitive nature took over and just forced me to try the 1:25 group.

Sleep that night was somewhat difficult, not because of the 4 other people staying in the room with us, but because I was strangely nervous and excited about the marathon. Maybe my body knew something about the next day that I didn't? LOL.

Saturday morning

I figured I'd get to the start early to see if I could find Sebastian and ask to join in the Follow Me group which he very kindly allowed. I was quickly sorted and I met Jork and Joachim, the leaders of our 1:25 group. I was also chuffed to meet Andrew, who I remember from the days of the old LondonSkaters yahoo group and who was also in the same 1:25 group.

We skated off and dumped our marathon bags in the appropriate truck, shower stuff and a clean change of kit for after the marathon. In the end this was our entire warm-up, and unfortunately not enough for my liking, especially because with such a large marathon one ends up standing around at the start for ages. I like perhaps 25 minutes warm up at low intensity, and I know I suffered at the beginning of the race because I was so cold.

Anyway, back to the group meeting place to stick a name on masking tape on the back of my helmet. I was the only one out of the group who didn't have a Follow Me t-shirt on because I came along too late, but no matter. I was anyway more comfortable wearing a skinsuit and not having a flapping t-shirt on. We skated off to the start, straight into block C given the Follow Me goal time. I suspect it might have been much more difficult for me to do 1:26 if I'd started in group F, where I should really have been. Another good thing about starting in C is that the wait till our group was brought to the front for our start was much shorter.

Knowing that I already had a group to skate with made the final moments much less stressful - otherwise I'd have felt the need to sprint ahead for a few minutes to make sure I could catch a fast enough pace line, and then there's always the difficulty of finding a pace line at the right speed.

Come the start we went off fairly relaxed, but Jork and Joachim kept accelerating and accelerating until I almost couldn't believe they intended to skate the whole marathon at this pace. With hundreds of skaters around you providing draft, luckily there was almost no wind to fight against, one of the reasons Berlin is such a fast marathon.

A lot of the first part of the marathon was rather wet, providing much reduced traction. I'm quite glad I had my softer Bont wheels on as they gave plenty of grip for most of the race. Etienne apparently put on brand new wheels that hadn't had the sheen worn off them yet, and really suffered in the wet because of this. He only caught me with around 6km to the finish despite starting in the same block.

I was most impressed to see all the tram lines filled in with rebar (metal rods) to help prevent people getting skates caught in the rails and possibly falling. Since we're used to skating on London surfaces which are sometimes very rough, these were no problem at all. I did hear that the occasional skater fell over these, but really they were a great solution and I think the safest one.

Jork and Joachim were great in managing the Follow Me paceline - they ensured good rotations, and often got us to jump out of the overall long paceline once or twice when, for example, that horrible surging started that you sometimes get with long pacelines, or they weren't going at the right pace for us. They were great at encouraging the group and helping to pull up the slower ones once in a while. I skated directly behind Jork a couple of times, and enjoyed watching and learning from his superior technique.

I noticed that some of the group weren't strong enough to maintain the 1:25 pace and they started to drop off after the first 5 km or so. To be honest in the first 10km I nearly dropped off myself as well. I stuck it out about 100 meters back from the front three Follow Me guys for 10 minutes or so, and then managed to dig deep and hooked onto a faster skater to catch up to the front two and hang with them for the rest of the race. Doing some crossovers around the corners usually leapt me up a couple of paceline places - almost nobody else was crossing over during the corners. Had to be careful though, this resulted in a large speed differential to the rest of the skaters around me.

For most of the rest of the race I stuck with the remaining two Follow Me skaters, but struck out on my own in the remaining couple of kilometres and didn't see them again.  From shortly after the half-way point I realised that I might well make somewhere near the 1:25 goal time if I didn't take a crash and could just stick with the paceline.

The finish

I never managed to spot a single kilometre marker during the entire race, probably because I was suffering with lactate pain and struggling to keep my technique together, so the only way I knew we were approaching the finish line was because of the time on my heart rate monitor and that we crossed the Spree river a couple of times.  Time to start accelerating a little, or at least that's my usual strategy if there's someone to draft and I still have something left in the tank.

Although I didn't feel like I had much left at the time, I did manage to skate a lot faster towards the end and passed what seemed like hundreds of skaters, and even had enough left for an almost sprint at the end.  I can't help but love that feeling of coming past someone, sensing them grunt with effort and try not to let you pass.

Crossing the mats was a big relief!  It took a good minute before I was in any condition to talk to anyone - I was almost immediately greeted by Christophe and EricB who had come in just behind me, and in the end had almost the same time.  We slowly skated through the Brandenburg Gate (how cool is that?), on to collect our medals, and continue talking.  I was most pleased to finally meet XSFred in person, chatting to Etienne and Eric.  XSFred and I have been online friends for four years now, but this was the first time I had the honour of meeting him in person.  I should add that he beat my time by 22 seconds, well done!  We skated a very pleasant warm down together after collecting a cup of hot sweet tea and plastic blanket.

My finishing time was 1:26:40 which equates to 638th position out of 8190 skaters, I'm most pleased with that and I'm really grateful to Sebastian and the Follow Me guys as well. I'm not sure I'd have tried to skate this fast if on my own, and they really provided the motivation for me to stay with them during the race so I pushed myself harder than ever before.  They were also the reason I could start in Block C rather than Block F and thus have many more fast skaters around me than I otherwise would have. Well organised, friendly, and I hope to do the 1:20 group next year.

Meeting and chatting afterwards

Having made the stupid mistake of trying to collect my marathon bag from the X series trucks (these are for the ladies), I got mine from the right truck and proceeded to the meeting point to meet the rest of the London crew.  Much time for mutual congratulations, collecting our preliminary result certificate, and eating recovery food.  In fact we hung around for several hours if I recall correctly!

Moritz Sell, a well known LondonSkate marshal, very kindly invited us to a barbeque at his penthouse, so we made arrangements to meet up there after going back for a shower and change of clothes.  The afternoon turned really pleasant - mostly warm sunshine and we couldn't have had a better ending to the race.

Bummer on having to go back to the UK though - a 22:15 flight back to the UK, followed by the long trek back home got me there by 02.30 on Sunday morning or so, and that was early thanks to a very kind lift from Rick back from Stansted.  I didn't really care much since I was in such a warm glow after the marathon.  There really is something special about these massive marathons that makes you want to come again and again!

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