Copenhagen 2024







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For this year we decided to return to Copenhagen for the marathon:



We arrived on May 3rd and went directly from our hotel to the Marathon Expo, to get my bib:


Here is the bag and the t-shirt. This year they decided to go with the colour black for the t-shirt, it looks very nice:


On May 5th I arrived forty minutes before the start of the marathon:


The line for the washroom was so long that I spent all my forty minutes in it. I was still waiting to go when the marathon started.

But, with fifteen thousand people waiting to start the race, I still had to wait with the crowd:



I started the race more than twenty minutes after the elite had gone.

I was with the 4h20 bunny at the start. The first two kilometers I had to go slower than I intended because the crowd would not allow us to develop our regular speed.

But in the kilometers after that I was able to run the time that I wanted. 

I started to struggle around kilometer 16. Up to that my averages per kilometer were around 5m35s, pretty good.

Then my legs started to harden, it was pretty weird, I could no longer bend them all the way without feeling a lot of pain. So I had to slow down considerably.

I crossed the halfway point at 2h00m24s, so I knew that the sub-4 would not happen today.

My average on the next 10K went to 6m30s per K and on the next 10K it went to 9m per K.

The km 27 was near our hotel, so my wife was there to take a picture of me during the race. It was nice to be able to see her, but I was already struggling so much that it didn't help much...

It started raining heavily somewhere around km 30, so an awful event got even more awful. By the end of it I didn't know what was worse: the cold, the wetness or the pain in my legs.

I finished the ordeal in 4h37m30s:



Here I am with my medal:



I got a banana, a bottle of water and a few other things and started the way back to the hotel.

It was cold and I did not have much for protection, the organizers did not have thermal isolators for the participants. So, after four and a half hours running in the cold, I had to endure another hour of walking in the cold. Not funny at all...


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