Metro-Marathon, Düsseldorf 2017

Sometimes you get the pleasure to get a free start or you get a sponsoring. But sometimes you have to pay for this free starts. So it happened in April 2017:
A phone call: “I need your help. On Saturday we start at the relay at the Düsseldorf-Marathon. We are four, but one got ill. So, please help us.” It was not the most meaningful thing. For only 10km the whole Saturday would be gone. I had to come to Düsseldorf, wait 2 hours before and after my run and got back to my hometown. And that all for only 45 minutes of sport. But, if I wouldn’t agree, the relay would collapse. And that’s not fair. The three other trained a long time for their event. So I agreed.

Saturday morning I was picked up. Besides the driver and me, another runner still got in car. Then we drove to Düsseldorf. I was wondering because we were only three people and I knew that the driver would run the full marathon. So I asked, but I shouldn’t have. Because the answer was, that two other got ill too. Okay, I was trained and able to run a half-marathon. But the second one was shocked because he was only able to run around 10 or 12km. But he had to. So we both ran a distance like a half-marathon. I took the first two relays (11,3km+13,1km) and the other one took relay 3 and 4 (8,6km + 9,2km).

Sometimes it comes better than you expected. It was a good run for both of us. We didn’t run a good time, but we did it. It was a sunny and funny day. And it was much better to go for a half-marathon to Düseldorf as only for 10km.