Berlin Marathon 2024 – race recap

After a few weeks overseas, I’m back!  The main purpose of our trip to Europe was the Berlin marathon, but we did so much more than that.  It was a fantastic trip! We spent half of our trip in Germany (Berin, Munich area) and half in France (Paris!).  We used Marathon Tours for the Berlin portion of our trip and I highly recommend them. I’ve never used a tour service before because I like to plan, but it was nice to have this part of the trip all set up for us.  This race recap will be a bit more detailed in case you happen to be researching the Berlin Marathon like I did!

Did you know… the Berlin Marathon 2024 set a world record for the largest marathon!!  There were 54,280 finishers.  It was the 50th anniversary of the race and they celebrated in a big way! Race day weather was perfect – 48 degrees at the start and sunny.  It was beautiful!  By the time I finished it was around 60 degrees.

We flew to Berlin on Thursday morning, starting out Wednesday night from Detroit, to Toronto, to Frankfurt and finally to Berlin.  To be honest, I had a bit of anxiety about flying at night overseas.  When we fly home from our ski trips out West we do get some turbulence and being on a plane like that in the dark makes me claustrophobic!  Thinking about a similar situation for this trip led me to actually purchase seats on the flight 🙂 I read that seats closer to the front felt the turbulence less, so that’s what I picked.  I was pleasantly surprised that we barely had any turbulence in general, and when it did get a little bumpy, I looked at the flight attendants and took comfort in the fact that they had no concern on their faces and were happily just doing their jobs! PHEW.  I did get some sleep on the plane too thanks to a couple of motion sickness pills which made me drowsy.  Yay on good flights!  Unfortunately we had to check our carry on bags so we ended up missing a tour we had planned for this day.

Berlin Marathon participants were all given a train pass for Thurs – Sunday which was nice.  We didn’t really need it much though because the city is very walkable!  There was talk on the Berlin Marathon Facebook group that some of the race merchandise sells out fast at the expo, so we shopped at a popup store by the Brandenburg gate.  This race does not include a race shirt or any gear.  It is all purchased individually.  Merch obtained!

We attended a reception with the Marathon Tours group.  It was a fun way to meet the other runners and hear their stories.

On Friday we joined a tour (both bus and walking) of Berlin.  We saw all the major places and learned a lot about the area. 

It was a good tour and we were dropped off at the race expo afterwards.  The race expo was in an old airport.  Pretty cool!  As expected, the expo gets very busy at certain times of the day and I’d say it was “mostly busy” when we were there.  It was well organized.  The only complaint was that the bib pickup dumped you into the expo hall which had race gear first.  The line of people buying gear wrapped all around the room a few times and it was insanely busy. I am so glad we bought our stuff earlier because I would not have waited in those lines!

One thing unique to this race (I’ve never seen it in any other race!) was that we got a race band put on our arm.  This band was needed to enter the race area on Sunday.  After the race we plan on making this band into a key chain!

We carb loaded with a delicious Italian meal at Ristorante Marea.

Saturday was a free day for us.  We tried to limit the amount of time on our feet, but also still see some sights.  We did a short shakeout run at the Tiergarten, which is a huge park very close to our hotel and the start/finish area for the marathon. 

The Berlin Marathon has a marathon for inline skaters on Saturday, which is also a pretty unique event.  It was a beautiful day for it.  The winner finished the 26.2 miles in 1:00:02.  I loved to hear their wheels spin as they skated past us.

Race morning was pretty relaxed for us.  Alan’s wave started at 9:15am.  He walked over from the hotel with a group from Marathon Tours at 7:45am.  My wave didn’t start until 10:10, so I left the hotel at 8:45.  It was pretty easy – just follow the crowds over to the start area!  I do love race morning and seeing all of the runners. 

There was a huge pre-race area with porta-potties and large monitors so we could watch the elites and the start line.

Soon it was finally time to make our way to race corrals!  It was kind of a crazy mess of people but what do you expect with so many runners? I was a bit confused though because I didn’t realize I had passed the last porta-potty areas when I entered the corrals. We walked through a wooded park area and many people were sprinting off into the trees and going to the bathroom.  Most people were quite visible.  Far more than I had seen in Boston!  I did have a bit of time so I decided to leave this area and find a porta-potty. I was back in my spot with time to spare. There was a lot of great energy in the corrals.  At 10:28 I started the race!

The first mile was my favorite of the race.  The course went around both sides of this monument.  It was spectacular seeing this on the monitors and then actually running it!

So how did the race go for me?  Well, it could have gone better.  I was honestly a bit stumped by this one.  This training cycle was only 12 weeks long due to a bad injury I had at the Glass City Half Marathon on April 28th.  Even though I did not do any speedwork during the training plan, I did complete all of the distances of the workouts and was feeling all better on race day.  I was excited to see how I could do (not to mention Garmin gave me a prediction of a 3:51 finish.  LOL!). I was hoping to make it to mile 18 feeling strong and then just see what happened from there.  I fell into a comfortable pace around 9:30 and things were going well.  And then, after 10 miles I started to feel cramping in my legs.  The pain was at the top of my quads.  Ughhh.  Far too soon for this stupidness.  I was really confused because I had some strong long runs this cycle and never felt this pain.  I used to blame this pain on wearing race shoes with plates, but for this race I was wearing the same boring shoes I had been training in.  Soon after the mid point of the race I had to shift to run/walk the best I could.  I also started eating bananas that were offered at the aid stations like it was my job 😆 Aren’t bananas supposed to help with cramping? Sadly, that didn’t help. Oh well.

Crowd support for this race was really good, so they kept me moving!

As you can see by my pace chart, my pace pretty much tanked.  By the time I reached the finish line my time was 4:46:38.  Oof!  That was almost ten minutes slower than Chicago last year.  Yep, now I have a new PW but also a PR for Berlin 😉 

I was very happy for Alan – he did better than his Chicago last year with a time of 3:29:13 today.  Goal accomplished and a BQ!  Woohoo!

Can you believe that this race (in Germany, beer capital of Europe it seems) serves non-alcoholic beer after the race??  It was not good.  We saved our celebration for the dinner with our Marathon Tours group.  And in Munich at Oktoberfest! Cheers to crossing another finish line!

Although my race could have gone a lot better, I’m very proud to be a finisher and part of this record breaking race! It was a great day with a lot for me to be thankful for. I’m not injured which was really primary goal for the race. So it’s a win today!! This is my 3rd star of the Abbott World Marathons Majors and my 18th marathon.

Need some more inspiration? I’m linking up with Deborah at Confessions of a Mother Runner and Kim from Running on the Fly for their Weekly Run Down. Check out all of the fun blogs there!