Berlin - on tape

Sunday morning was the Berlin Marathon... Lily was stuck at work, so I had to roll solo. I showed up Saturday morning, immediately got hassled by the Berlin transit cops for not having a subway pass, thinking my ticket from Kassel covered the subway. Apparently "NO" is the right answer when they tell you that you will have to pay a 40Euro fine... I just flat refused and after an awkward pause, they let me go. I caught up with the bottomlessly generous Jens K for lunch at his favorite sidewalk cafe (handmade pasta the day before the race? Naturlich!), then went to see Madeline's performance (billed as a "Live drawing with tape") at Wilde Gallery in the evening.



Race morning broke clear and cool, the weather perfect. I borrowed Jens' little bicycle to ride over to the start at the Reichstag, an easy ten minutes on deserted back streets, over a little bridge. Ran the race feeling good, very steady through the first half. It's easy to be steady on a course that has all the elevation change of a pool table. I wanted to go through the halfway point in one hour twenty minutes... I went 1:20:14. DING! The second half I got on my horse and ran home, hitting my goal of running under two hours and 40 minutes, clocking in at 2:39:46 for 200th place overall (file under: nice round numbers). To give you an idea of how perfect the conditions were, and how fast the course is, this dude became the first man under 2:04 in history.

After the race, I was lucky enough to have been booked on a late evening train back to Kassel, so I got a few more hours to kick it around the capitol with Jens, Madeline, Roland, Christian and Uljana... this included champagne, sunshine, more fresh pasta, coffee, cake, and that impeccably lazy Sunday feeling magnified by autumn. Perfect.