The Berlin Marathon

Gary Derwent, March 2003

Skate a marathon…are you mad?

One of the main reasons I got into skating two years ago was to try to replace my favourite hobby of running. As I’m not the skinniest person around, my knees had always disagreed with me about the suitability of this activity. A series of injuries lead to frustration, an ever expanding waistline and, eventually, to skating. One of the most enjoyable parts of running, for me, was taking part in big events; the buzz and excitement of lining up with thousands of other runners, the anticipation of the cheering crowds ahead, the application of large quantities of Vaseline to various bodily crevices! A fast time would be nice, but really wasn’t the reason for taking part. My one attempt at running the London marathon resulted in an undistinguished time of five hours, but remains one of the most memorable days of my life. I wanted to do it again, but without the toll on my creaking joints. Having taken up skating with the intention of generally mucking about in parks for a laugh, it was with great excitement that I discovered inline marathons.

Equipment Selection

When I first heard about the Berlin marathon, in February 2002, I’d never done a street skate, never mind a marathon, but I signed up immediately and reckoned that I had six months to practice. A few months before Berlin, and with a few street skates behind me, I was lucky enough to get a chance to do the Le Mans 24 hour skate. During this event I found that my Crossmax skates were very wobbly at speed. (‘What speed ?’ – I hear the rest of my Le Mans Team thinking !). Never one to worry about looking like a plonker, I decided to invest in a set of five wheelers. I didn’t feel that my ankles were quite ready for a set of proper speed skating boots so I went for the Salomon Vitesse II. Not content with merely skating around with two large bright yellow banana boots on my feet, I decided to add a heel brake for absolute minimum street credibility. The heel brake, though, was a necessity for me, as I discovered on my first training trip into Richmond Park. It was only when I was zipping down a hill at fairly fast speeds with a traffic filled intersection ahead of me that I remembered that the skates didn’t come with a heel brake. More than eight months later I’ve still got scars on my arm. Although I opted for five wheelers, you can easily complete a marathon in any four wheel skates and very many participants did so, including a great many who finished ahead of me.

Getting there is half the fun

Flights to Berlin are quick, easy and most importantly cheap. The transport system in Berlin is easy to negotiate and accommodation is plentiful. The city itself is incredible, packed with history and modern developments alike. Despite nearly qualifying for veteran status in the marathon I stayed in a Youth Hostel. Apart from being cheap, its main advantage was that it was an easy skate to the start and finish of the marathon. Most of the 200+ beds were taken up by runners and skaters doing the marathon, which made for a very exciting atmosphere of friendly camaraderie. They even laid on a pasta meal the night before the marathon and opened the restaurant an hour earlier than normal for breakfast at 6am before the race, although a large quantity of lycra clad bodies was enough to put anyone off their muesli!

Making an exhibition of myself

Registration was open for several days before the event. As well as picking up your race number, ChampionChip and a goody bag full of items ranging from a sponge to a packet of Pot Noodles, there was also a huge exhibition of running and skating paraphernalia. Mainly running shoes and clothes but also plenty to interest the skater – seven or eight skate shops, many with a large range of skates and accessories that you don’t normally see in the UK.

Lycra clad five wheeled freaks

Berlin was my second marathon, but my first, the ridiculously wet Goodwood marathon, hadn’t given me much clue what to expect. I was quite nervous as I skated towards the start. I was worried that the entire race would be populated with lycra clad five wheeled freaks who would zoom off into the distance leaving me trailing far behind being laughed at for having a set of banana boots with a heel brake – the skating equivalent of doing the Tour de France with stabilisers. In the end I needn’t have worried. As I approached the starting area, I saw skaters of all shapes and sizes, with all sorts of skates and of many levels of experience. I saw lots of skaters with the same skates as me, and a good proportion of those also had heel brakes on them. If I was to be humiliated, I would be in good company! I soon started to relax and enjoy the buzz.

The start of the race was a massive exercise in logistics, as thirty thousand runners and eight thousand skaters tried to find the correct place to leave their gear. As usual however the Germans were very well organised and a large number of tents were provided for the skaters, each labelled for a particular series of race numbers. It took only minutes to stash my gear in the appropriate tent and make my way to the start line.

The start consisted of two wide roads which converged about a hundred metres after the start line. Even with two roads, the thick mass of skaters stretched back hundreds of metres behind each start line. Each skater was allocated a starting zone based on previous best marathon times. Not having recorded an official time before, I was way down at the back. I thought of trying to inveigle my way forward a bit, but some very serious looking members of the German army were on hand to make sure there was no skulduggery.

And they’re off

The race started with a dramatic countdown at 8.30 am, but for those of us at the back, there was then an anti-climactic three minutes of slow shuffling before we got to the start line and were away.

The race itself is hard to describe. At the time I often felt like I was on a huge roller coaster, with the sights of Berlin passing in a blur. It was like a longer faster street skate with no stops and a lot less socializing. A typical Friday Night Skate in London is about eleven or twelve miles long and takes about two hours. A marathon is twenty six miles long and the winner will do it in about an hour. The lesser mortals amongst us can still do it in under two hours. If you like street skates, you’ll love marathons, but there’s one big difference and that is the pace line.

Line Dancing

Pace lines form within yards of the start and can consist of fifty or more skaters, skating ridiculously close to each other to benefit from the slipstream of the skaters ahead. Its difficult to understand the difference that drafting in a pace line makes until you’ve tried it, and the extra dimension of strategy it adds makes the race almost as cerebral at it is physical. You are constantly being passed by faster lines or passing slower lines and each time you must make a quick decision about whether to abandon your current line and throw your lot in with a new group. All these calculations must be made while concentrating on skating as fast as you can only inches behind another skater and still keeping an eye out for obstacles in the road like gratings and tram tracks, which are approaching very fast with no regard for the fact that your field of vision is obscured by the many skaters in front of you. All this adds up to an amazing adrenalin rush and an incredible experience.

As Berlin was my first big marathon, I found the whole concept of pace lines quite difficult to deal with. Skating so close to someone in front of you is quite disconcerting when you are not used to it, but the closer you get the more advantage you will have. Similarly, having someone skating very closely behind you can sometimes give you the urge to turn around and punch them, but unfortunately, that kind of behaviour is frowned upon!

Judging the speed of other lines, in relation to your own capabilities, and timing your acceleration to leave one line and join another as it passes, are also skills that take some getting used to. On several occasions I was with a line I felt was too slow for me, but when a faster line went past and I tried to join it, I couldn’t keep up. By that time I’d been slowed down by wind resistance after leaving the shelter of my line, and that line, which I had been skating quite comfortably with, was now gone in the distance beyond hope of catching. Your only recourse is to drop back to another line and put it down to experience.

If the skater in front of you suddenly slows, you have a few alternatives. One is to pull out to the side slightly, letting air resistance slow you and allowing you to then slot back into the line in your previous place, but this also risks losing too much speed, and with it, your position in the line. Another alternative, and the generally accepted practice, is to put your hand on the back of the skater in front, thereby simultaneously stopping you crashing into them and giving them a little boost of speed. At the speeds everyone is travelling, putting your hand on the skater in front generally amounts to giving them a poke in the back and it takes some time to realise that everyone is used to this and that you don’t have to apologise. You must also get used to being poked in the back at regular intervals yourself without taking offence.

Another alternative, if the line is going too slow for you, is to throw caution to the wind, take the lead, and set the pace of the line yourself, but this approach also has its pitfalls. The professionals race in teams and have well practiced routines of alternating the lead in a pace line, but back in the pack with the riff raff its every skater for himself. If you’re brave enough to lead a line you will find plenty of volunteers to follow you, but by the time you feel like someone else should be leading you’ll often find them remarkably shy. If you try to pull over to one side and drop back, you’ll sometimes find the whole line veering madly across the road as they try to stay behind you and everyone tries to avoid leading. If you lose too much speed in an attempt to shake them off, then you might overdo it, lose momentum and lose contact with the group. It’s extremely frustrating to see a line you have lead and helped for a long time, disappearing into the distance without a thought for you. All this may sound quite difficult and intimidating, but I can assure you that it isn’t. It takes a little getting used to, but once you’ve got the hang of it, it is amazingly exciting. In other marathons with fewer participants, you can sometimes find yourself isolated and unable to attach yourself to a pace line, but in Berlin with so many skaters, you are always in good company.

Sightseeing

In addition to concentrating on your speed and strategy, it would be a shame if you didn’t spare a few brain cells to admire the passing scenery, and there is a lot to admire in Berlin. The route passed most of the major tourist attractions in both former East and West Berlin. Within a couple of miles of the start you pass the Siegessaule (victory column) then go beneath the Brandenburg Gate and down Unter Den Linden, across the Museuminsel and past the huge 365 metre high former East German Fernsehturm (TV Tower). More modern sites are also included, like Potsdamer Platz, once a no-mans land just on the eastern side of the wall, and now a stunning and futuristic shopping and business development. The marathon ended along the Ku’Damm, the main shopping street of former East Berlin.

The road surfaces along most of the route are smooth and even, with only one or two rough patches and a few tram tracks. The hardest obstacles to negotiate are the mats put down to record competitors times via the ChampionChips attached to their skates. Everyone slows to get over these mats and this can cause a few pile-ups and collisions. I saw one of the pro team skaters being loaded into an ambulance beside one of these mats. Another hazard were the water stations which were each followed by a few hundred yards of suddenly soaking slippy roads strewn with plastic bottles and half chewed bits of banana.

The finish at last

Throughout the marathon there are kilometre markers every five kilometres, but you often flash past them at such speed that you miss them and lose track of where you are. By the end of the marathon I was so knackered that I’d totally miscalculated my progress and the finish line appeared, to my great surprise and relief, when I thought I still had about three kilometres to go. The finish was as well organised as the start and having passed through the finishing arch you were funnelled past various groups of people who conferred medals, plastic thermal sheets, bottles of energy drinks and rather dubious looking blackened half bananas upon you. You were then spat out of the finish area into the same place where all the skaters gear had been stored in tents earlier on and this was the only time when the organisation came slightly a cropper, as there were far too few staff returning the labelled bags to their owners, and it took a good hour of hanging about and barging through groups of grumpy Germans before I could get my bag of gear back. I realised that it would have been far easier to leave all my gear in the youth hostel and just skate straight back after the finish. A series of showers had been set up, and some of the hour waiting was passed watching incredulously as naked Germans of both sexes strolled about in the open with no apparent concern that they were completely starkers in the middle of a Berlin street. I decided to postpone my shower until I got back to my accommodation.

I was extremely pleased with my official time of 1 hour 42 minutes, which with typical German efficiency was texted to my mobile phone within minutes of crossing the finish line. My only previous marathon, at Goodwood, had been completed in 2 hours 32 minutes, so there was quite an improvement. A lot of the difference was due to the far better weather conditions in Berlin, but there is also no doubt that Berlin is one of the fastest inline marathon courses in the world.

Bear necessities

On the evening after the marathon, I completed my skating trip with a visit to one of Berlins two Ice Hockey teams, the Berlin Eisbaren (Polar Bears) who were playing Hamburg Freezers. The stadium was way out in former East Berlin and was surrounded for miles around with very bleak looking concrete apartment blocks, many of them covered in the graffiti which seems to have become a feature of Berlin. It was quite a change from the centre of Berlin which has already undergone extensive redevelopment, and offered an insight into what pre-1989 life was like in East Berlin. The match itself was great and the local crowd extremely enthusiastic. A row of fans with large drums immediately behind me left me with ringing ears for many hours afterwards but an Eisbaren victory sent everyone home happy.

Why not give it a try

Skating a marathon is a fantastic experience for skaters of all standards. It can be taken as seriously or light-heartedly as you like. In most marathons, and Berlin in particular, there are far more ‘recreational’ skaters, out for a good time and a laugh than there are lycra clad five wheeled freaks, and I would recommend a skating marathon to anybody. You don’t have to train like mad for it either, anybody who can finish a London street skate comfortably, will be able to get round a marathon and have a very enjoyable experience. If you want to take it a bit more seriously and train for a better time, you can join up with a team like Team e2xn London, for some great training sessions. In particular, practicing drafting at high speed with a group of like minded nutcases is invaluable, but it is also perfectly possible to train for and complete a marathon independently if you prefer.

The route and format of the Berlin marathon will be changing slightly this year. The skating marathon is to be split from the running marathon and will be held on the Saturday afternoon before the running marathon on the Sunday. This will enable even more people to take part and the organisers are anticipating 12,000 skaters this year.

Although the Berlin inline marathon isn’t until the 27th September, you need to think about entering quite soon if you want to do it. Places will start to fill up by May and the entry fee goes up after the 11th May. Registration costs 50 euros, which may sound like a lot of money, but the organization behind the marathon is tremendous, and I think it is well worth it. After the 11th May the cost goes up to 70 euros.

If you can’t make Berlin, then there are inline marathons in Europe practically every weekend of the summer, and although these won’t be as big as Berlin, most still attract competitors in their thousands. Details of all events can be found on the Team e2xn website (details below).

The Berlin marathon is one of the best skating marathons in the world with thousands of skaters of all abilities. It is relatively cheap and easy to get to, is simple to enter online and is set in a historic city, perfect for a long weekend or longer break. So what are you waiting for!

Useful links:

Berlin marathon website: www.berlinmarathon.com

Team e2xn: www.teame2xnlondon.com

Air Berlin: www.airberlin.com

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