Berlin Marathon 4:04:20!

It was incredible & unforgettable! running the last km and seeing the Brendenburg Gate and more than 10,000 people cheering... I was very happy and delighted to have completed the berlin marathon and acheive my personal best.

To put things in perspective I have run 5 marathons in the last 13 months and I don´t recommend doing this! It has been one heck of an experience to learn about myself and my limits. I have promised my wife that I will concentrate on doing maybe one or two marathons a year from now on!

I accomplished one of the goals of beating my personal best, here is the official result. I was impressed with the result certificate. Here is the split up of my time and average pace:

I was quite impressed with the organization and the event management. There were 40000+ runners and everything went very smoothly atleast for me and our team from Iceland.

Haile Gebrselassie broke the world record at 2:04:26, what an incredible acheivement!!! I can tell from running 5 marathons, every second improvement is an accomplishments and he shattered the world record by more than 29 seconds.

Everyone from my running group did very well, Villi and Joi my buddies did great! Villi completed the marathon in 3:24:24 and Joi in 3:37:40. I am very proud to have been running with them and to see them accomplish their goals. It was Joi´s personal best.

Berlin Marathon Day

It is Marathon day and I am up at 5am, excited about the day. checked the weather and it is going to be perfect :) about 12 to 14 degrees celsius. Last evening was great, had a sports massage and a 10 minute sauna, showered and ate a lot of pasta. Went to bed around 11pm. To summarize everthing is going according to plan, I bought myself a new pair of shoes Brooks Trancer 7. I feel very good in the shoes and it matches my outfit :) I am sure my wife will be very proud of me.

Three goals for the day:
1. Beat my personal best of 4:08
2. Less than 4:00
3. Less than 3:49 :), my colleague Jan Forsbom has challenged me that he did the Berlin Marathon in that time and I should be able to beat it as I am a younger man than he! well, it is a stretch but I am going to give it my best shot.

Training Log Updated

I lost most of my training data just before the Reykjavik Marathon. But I have updated my training log with whatever I could salvage. I have to admit that it looks rather bleek with me just having run 152 kms so far, but I know that I had about 350 km or something like that before I ran the Reykjavik Marathon so I am feeling ok. I missed running a long run this weekend because I went to the sports massage and I was hurting after that... just wanted to heal before I took a long run.

I have been focusing on building up speed by doing more tempo and speed workouts. I have to admit I am not feeling very confident with my performance so far... lets see what the next couple of weeks transpires into.