The Amsterdam Marathon

"The marathon. How an average runner becomes more than average."
New Balance

The big day dawns, K2 runs the Marathon today, her first.  It starts at 9.30 am, which gives us enough time for a relaxed breakfast and time to get to the first "checkpoint", 11k into her run, just across the Amstel from a Metro station.  Fortunately R has installed a tracker App on my phone so we can follow progress.  Excitement builds as the helicopter appears overhead, following the leaders, then the police outriders appear and then the first of the Kenyan runners.  A trickle of runners soon becomes a steady stream and soon R comes into view, and equally quickly disappears around the corner - only another 18 miles to go!  It seems a painfully long time for the tracker to register that K2 has actually started the run, much less passed the 5k checkpoint.  The elasticity of time, no sooner is she registered as past the start than she's ticking off the checkpoints and soon coming into view, beaming at us with a cheery wave as she too passes the 11k point.

We have to hurry through the streets to catch K2 at the return leg of a short loop, arriving just in time as she heads off into the country leg of the course, about 15k along the river Amstel and back.  Time to find our next viewpoint at the 26k mark, in front of a hotel which provides an excellent loo stop - for us, not the runners.

We don't have long to wait for R to appear, all smiles which is quite impressive after 26k, over half way around the 42k [that's 26 miles in old money] course.  And maintaining her steady pace is K2, wreathed in smiles and looking so fresh; she runs across to give us a kiss without breaking step and is soon gone.  We planned to catch them at another point but they were so well into their stride they'd already passed by the time we got there.  Well we did only have the Metro to help get us around the course! 

We kept an anxious eye on the tracker and were relieved when K2 completed in just over four and a half hours, as close as I could imagine getting to a target time after over four hours steady running.  This after a recent knee injury had raised serious doubts about whether she'd even be able to run.

We all met for dinner in the city later in the evening with J to hear something of the drama of the closing stages where there had been pain - so it was probably better that we had missed that.  Such an inspirational day; impossible to find words to describe the emotions of witnessing such a fantastic achievement.