Berlin Marathon 2005

This is the must go marathon of the skating year. I think there is no inline skating marathon to come even close to the excitement, size, atmosphere and x-factor of Berlin. With 8,000 skaters and 300,000 people lining the route to support you, it's a tremendous experience that I would recommend to anyone.

Getting out there

I flew out from London on the 06.30 Ryanair flight from Stanstead, which unfortunately had me waking up at 02:45am, and back home again on the 22:10 departure. Still, at least I managed an hour or two's sleep on the plane in both directions. I flew with Belotti Dave, so had a good time in pleasant company. We got to the airport and left for the Vital trade show to pick up our registrations and meet the other Londoners. Then across to the start and a few hours of relaxation and a meal or two.

Although I loved the day trip, I did also miss out on much of the social fun that makes the marathon so special. Most of the team flew out on the Thursday or Friday, and stayed both Friday and Saturday nights. And of course we missed the skater party on the Saturday night too.

The Race

I was much more prepared for a warmup since last year I didn't manage to warm up properly and lost out in the cold conditions. This year I took a good 30 minutes and got in a nice routine with low intensity cruising, and a couple of intense sprints. I'm pretty sure this is why I felt so strong during the first half hour. A bit of study and quality advice from pros does a world of good.  Oh and a friend saw me with apparently "a very focused expression" on my face.  LOL, most likely this was me just trying to get over pre-start nerves.

The start was as exciting as ever, my heart was racing all the way from entering B block.  A quick loo stop was mandatory before the start too!  My first big memory of the race was a large crash with maybe 30 drinks bottles and several skaters spread out across the entire road in the first couple of kilometres. I heard that this involved maybe 100 skaters and broken bones, though that's just a rumour. Unfortunately I skated somebody's sunglasses to smithereens, I just didn't manage to avoid all the debris in the road.

Just after this I had my own first near crash, a rough bit of street and a momentary loss of coordination resulted in my skates touching and a swerve, enough to draw a shocked gasp from the girl drafting behind me.  I was surprised at the pace for the first 15 minutes, it turned out to be a little less than I had expected, and as a result I felt able to relax knowing that I'd almost certainly make my goal of 1:20-ish. At the half way split my time was some 37.52, roughly in line for a projected 1:16, which I was very surprised at. I chose to back off the pace slightly here, as I'd been on the boil for a while, pulling the paceline in regular stints shared with the other skaters. That was an improvement over last year too, I didn't quite have the spare energy or power to do much pulling then.

I was very glad to have started in B block, last year I started in C and it was noticeably more crowded with less organisation.  In B the class of skater was generally much higher, and I felt less at risk from inexperienced skaters.  There were still a few, however, and clearly lots who didn't have a huge amount of group skating experience.  Oh, I nearly didn't make one corner and had to skate on the left hand side of the road across the median strip, a combination of turning too tightly and having my line cut off by skaters.  We weren't supposed to skate there and some marshals shouted at us, too late and we were too fast past them.  Luckily this was only for a couple of hundred meters, we soon rejoined the race.

Every time I'm surprised at how continental speedskaters, especially the girls, tend to hold your hips and bum.  That's not really the tradition here in the UK, maybe I've been in the UK too long!

Soon after this I nearly had another crash, this time it was the girl who was behind me earlier. She was just unlucky, hitting something rough that took her down, and the guy right behind her too as she was spinning round on the ground on her bum. I was next in line and just made it past them on one skate without getting taken down too, I'm not quite sure how but was quite grateful to have survived anyway! Such a pity, because she is a very good skater and I was most impressed with her technique and strength. I saw her at the finish again, and I was relieved to find she hadn't lost much time.  I think there were quite a few crashes this year, perhaps more than last year when it was wet and slippery.  I often heard the bang of a fall followed by that horrible rasping sliding sound.

From here on I got more tired and started to take strain, particularly in my lower back. This is the first marathon where the second half was much tougher for me than the first half. Usually I'm hanging on by my fingernails for the first half, and then when most people slow down in the second half I get going with energy to spare. Not this time, I was a little slower in the second half, no doubt to my lack of on-skate training. Not only that but my heart rate was higher than last year, I think I averaged some 180bpm for the race section when my max is around 188-190. I guess this high heart rate was both an indication of my relative lack of fitness and shortage of sleep.

Come the last 4km and I felt as though I was barely surviving. My lower back was really weak now and hurting a lot, and I could feel myself pronating. Lots of focus on my set down kind of kept things together, but just barely, until we passed under the flam rouge at 1km to go. I thought that was a brilliant touch by the organisers! The flam rouge is a red flag flown under an inflatable archway, well known in bicycle racing.  It adds to the excitement and gets everyone ready to up the ante for the final sprint.

By this time I'd steadily fallen back in the pack of about 50 skaters I was with, everyone was starting to accelerate. Thank goodness for Bill Begg's sprinting and low walking training, as I leapt for it with about 700m to go, and managed to pass nearly everyone in that pack back again. Leapt might be a bit of an overstatement, more like a treacly acceleration whilst firing on 3.5 cylinders. Again, super focus on technique, mostly outside edge and straight ahead set-down, heel carving, and as low as possible.

Oh, and just before this I threw my last water bottle in a big overhand throw, just the thing to imagine myself a pro cyclist in le Tour. Unfortunately in my tired daze I didn't see this 2 metre German giant coming up on my left, nearly got him in the head with the bottle. He saw the funny side as I apologised LOL. I didn't want the bottle in the road either, it might have caused a crash otherwise.

I was so cream crackered when I crossed the finish line that I rolled as far as the Brandenburg gate without seeing or hearing much, I couldn't do anything but hold onto my knees and hoarsely rasp for breath. Mucho celebration after this of course!

The communal showers were very pleasant, and much needed before our dash back to the airport. Unisex though.

The flood of ants video, a wide video of the race from the helicopter.  What an unbelievable number of skaters!
http://www.rbb-online.de/_/themen/beitrag_jsp/key=teaser_3160537.html

In conclusion

What a great race! Super fast conditions, 22 degrees Celcius, almost no wind, perfect! Our team has some incredible results, many excellent personal bests and lots of happy skaters.

Click here for LondonSkaters Speed Team results (This is an image, so you may need to click the button on the bottom right of the image to return it to full size to make it easily read-able).  I bet now you can see why I'm so impressed with our entire team!  I also love how the weekend has made the team closer than ever, we really got a good buzz and excellent team spirit out of this weekend, not that we were short of it before.  If you want to get faster, even just for streetskating, come and join the team - www.londonspeedskaters.com.

I was also a little surprised by the ungracious nature of some skaters at this speed. I got a lot of "Nein, nein" when indicating to join a paceline. I can't agree with this unsociable way of skating, and I think it's not very sporting in a social marathon like Berlin. It's not as though we started in the Pro or A categories after all. I'm much more a fan of sharing the effort and including people, and was quite happy to let others into our paceline, especially as they would mostly help us all go faster. Thanks to my hockey and streetskating experience, the "Nein"s didn't really have much effect and I usually still stepped in when I wanted to, even to much protest. One guy was even hitting me lightly in protest, it was very satisfying that I managed to beat him and his team paceline in the final sprint.

This graph is very interesting, it shows finishers by age group.  I'll bet you didn't expect that the most were in the age range 35-40 and 40-45.

What worked for me this year?

In the end I got 1:17:48, and was very surprised at my time. Given the tiny amount of skating training I've put in this summer, I had no expectation of doing anything better than a 1:25 or so. At first there really seemed to be no justification for a 9 minute improvement in my personal best, but I thought about what helped me this time, and came up with the following in no particular order. It comes down to a big improvement in technique more than anything else, plus a lot of cycling fitness:

• Lots of cycling - I've done 5000km since January, mostly commuting, and a few longer rides such as the Dunwich Dynamo and Tour of the Surrey Hills. Cycling fitness (and I'm not particularly fit or fast on a bike) crosses over to skating surprisingly well, I think better than I'd given it credit for.
• Bill Begg of Bont gave me a lot of help last winter, and I've used it throughout this year. He's additionally helped out LondonSkaters Speed Team a bunch too, in giving me so much priceless advice that I could pass onto the team. Bill also gave Gavin a skate in the Bont International Le Mans team. Bits that worked particularly well for me were:
  • A weekly technique "intervals" session, skating slowly and concentrating on one element of technique at a time. I think this and the video review were the biggest part of my improvement since my technique was noticeably better throughout the race this year. My technique was getting noticeably wobbly in the last third of the race, but that happens to all of us, and at least the degradation was less than before.
  • 10x500m sprint sessions. This really helped me push through the pain and wobbly legs. Unfortunately with such a hectic spring and summer I simply wasn't able to do nearly as much of Bill's excellent training schedule as I would have liked to.
  • Low walking, again not as often as I'd have liked, but still enough to get me skating with a much lower kneebend than before. More lactate tolerance and more power were nice bonuses from this part of the workout.
  • Video review of my skating. Bill picked up a bunch of stuff I needed to work on, as did Peter Doucet.
• Eddy Matzger and Sebastian Baumgartner also gave me a bunch of invaluable technique tips that fixed some serious problems with my stride and made me considerably faster than ever before. I couldn't more strongly recommend a skating workshop from either Eddy or Sebastian, they are both top class teachers with huge amounts of knowledge to dispense. See www.skatecentral.com or www.experts-in-speed.de for their respective websites. I do work for Eddy and am friends with Sebby, just to state my bias.
• Amongst those longer cycle rides I did this year, there were just a couple of long and tough hills. Forcing myself to ride up them under the pressure of riding with other cyclists who were usually much stronger and fitter than I, really had me learn about how far I could push through the pain barrier and yet keep on going. This was a little like the pain of the 500m intervals, only much more pain for much longer.

I only wish I'd been able to give Bill's training program the justice it deserved.  I know how good it is and I know what I need to do for next year!

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