In November 2016, I finished a marathon while 5 months pregnant.

When I found out I was pregnant, the first thing I did was madly Google stories of pregnant women running marathons. Even before I called my doctor and looked for a midwife. I wanted to know the possibilities and consequences. Or maybe I was just searching for confirmations. I knew, deep in my heart, that I will

I had too many doubts about this marathon, too many fears. The timing was very wrong because we were moving house and there were circumstances that forced me to slow down. But there was one thing I was sure about, that I will finish. After all, there’s a cut-off time of 7.5 hours. Long enough to walk to the finish line.

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.