September 2012

After enduring 14 hours of sleeping on the cold floor at the restaurant of mv Aqua Hercules, squeezed between a table and the wall, using my carry on luggage full of wine bottles as pillow and hugging my backpack tightly lest it gets stolen, I finally arrived at the small port of Corfu. My body was so swollen and tight that you can hear my bones cracking with every movement.

I was also starving. When I left Bari, I didn’t realize that I only had €15 left, which I spent on dinner of overcooked spaghetti, cola and a bottle of water.

Visited three countries with backpack and a carry-on luggage.

A 25-degree Mediterranean weather welcomed me and although the sky was covered with clusters of dark clouds, the sun was warm, peeking every now and then. It was still so much warmer than the 15-degree weather in Hamburg, where I left five days ago.

My journey was long and back-breaking. I was very tired and  all I wanted to do was check in in my hotel, change into my bikinis and jump into the ocean.

I think I will never stop running. There will be days that I will be lazy, days when I wouldN’t want to lace up my running shoes, days that injuries will prevent me from pounding the road, but I will never stop running.

Barely five weeks after the very challenging Torshavn Marathon, here I am, with my husband, signing up for yet another 42,195 kilometres of unknown roads.

We’ve planned our trip to Japan for the Autumn holiday already last year. But those plans did not include running a marathon in Japan. Because Robin got so inspired by Jurgen, the 75-year German runner we met on the Faroe Islands, we decided, why not? While we are still young, able and enjoying the long distance runs, why not go on with it?

So we signed up for the Osaka Yodogawa Citizen Marathon in November. This is not the famed Osaka Marathon. I think this is a much smaller race (although small races in Japan are usually capped off at 7,000 participants). Information about this race is also hard to find. I think I only found one blog about this marathon and the registration page is in Japanese with one dedicated page for foreign runners. It might not be the idea of “small” we have in mind like in the Faroes, but we thought, that’ll do. Our goal is to just run and finish.

We’ve already started training two weeks ago, building up from the very beginning again, 2x 7kms during the week and endurance run in the weekends, first a 10km and then 14km yesterday. It is going very well although I think this will be quite a difficult training. We haven’t trained in the summer and based on this year’s experiences, the heat is perhaps our biggest nemesis. There’s just no way we can run in 25-degrees+ weather.

We have about 16 weeks to train. It’ll be 16 long weeks. And I am very excited.