September Runfessions

It’s the last Friday Saturday of the month, and that means it’s time to open up the Runfessional! I’m linking up with Marcia from Marcia’s Healthy Slice for another Runfessions session!

I have to runfess, despite the fact that the Berlin Marathon was almost a full two weeks ago, I have yet to write my recap, and at this point I feel like it’s a distant memory and I should just move on. After the marathon, we hit the ground running walking and had very little downtime in Europe where I could actually sit down and write. Now that we are home, I have a million things to catch up on, and I’m not exactly sure how I’m going to get all of it done (of course I will, as always). It didn’t help that we did not have WiFi access on our 10-hour flight home from Kraków yesterday. I planned to get a boatload of work done then, but instead I finally delved into a great book that I have been wanting to read for months. That’s definitely not a bad thing. I spend far too little time reading for enjoyment.

The Berlin Marathon and our continued travels through Europe brought us from Berlin to Prague, then to Vienna, and finally to Kraków. I must runfess, despite the fact that it was the primary reason we went on this trip, I didn’t particularly care for Berlin. My first impression on the taxi ride to our hotel is that it is a dirty city. We arrived on a dreary gray and rainy morning, which probably didn’t help. Our taxi driver was very nice and talkative, but after that? Not so much. We found the servers in every restaurant we visited to be particularly cold.

I runfess, although I’ve been talking whining non-stop about how much weight I’ve gained in the past year, all throughout Europe I ate about three times my weight in food. Let’s not discuss how much jimne piwo (cold beer) I drank. Once we got to Prague and Kraków, all bets were off. This is the food I grew up eating, and it was just too good to resist! We’re talking rabbit soup, tripe soup (cow stomach, in case you didn’t know), and enough Pierogis to feed an entire army. Does the tripe soup gross you out? Let’s take it a step futher. I searched and searched, but could not find a restaurant that served czarnina (duck blood soup) or the dreaded scrambled eggs and brains (okay, I didn’t search too hard for that last one). I did find some great head cheese in Prague, though. The first thing my mom said to me when we got home last night was, “you look like you gained weight”. No kidding. Mission accomplished.

I runfess I am probably 50% disappointed and 50% relieved I didn’t make it on my first attempt at a lottery spot in the Tokyo Marathon. While completing all of the Worlds is on my bucket list, Tokyo will be quite the expensive excursion, and we definitely overextended ourselves a bit on this trip to Europe. Just one more year of college to pay for, and then the travel expenses to fulfill my goal of becoming a Six-Star finisher will be a bit of an easier pill to swallow.

Last, I runfess that I probably wasn’t thinking too clearly when I signed up for both the Berlin and Chicago Marathons. Thinking running two marathons three weeks apart was not that big of a deal, I went for it. But at some point recently, I realized the bigger issue was arriving home from a long trip with a seven hour time difference just nine days before running the Chicago Marathon. Oops.

How has your month been? Do you have anything good to runfess? Who’s all running the Chicago Marathon next week? Let’s try to meet up!