Track to Berlin, Germany
Deutsche Bahn (DB) journey from the very South to the North of Germany for the marathon weekend.
5:56 AM on Friday, the 22nd of September 2023. It’s dark and wet. We board the regional train at home, in Garmisch-Partenkirchen with destination Berlin, to run the marathon on Sunday.
This is more than a story about our 6 hour journey; this is a story of emotions building up to this weekend, months of training, working with and sometimes against our own body. We step on the train at 5:56 AM, outside it’s dark and wet and we know now it’s out of our hands and we can only hope it all comes together on the day of the run.
The first leg of the journey seems to be a quiet one. I grab my camera and, although I can only work with an 800 ISO film, I am trying to capture the mood since it somehow seems to match my thoughts. I have injured my right foot while running on cobble roughly two months ago, at the beginning of August, and continuing running on it has made the pain worse over the past months. I can barely put my foot down and only stretching seems to temporarily ease the discomfort. It’s been a rollercoaster trying to figure this one out: I did stop training by running eventually and changed to uphill cycling instead hoping I can keep my endurance level high without further damaging my foot; went to the doctors, had some scans done, went to physio. There are no signs of a fracture so at the moment I am set on trying to race. Mentally I am struggling though with what the best decision is and I know it’s only me who can decide. I know the pain might force me to stop and abandon the race. That’s if I can start in the first place. Many thoughts are running * ha * through my head and it feels the train is giving me the peace and quiet I need to try and sort them out.
And so we reach Munich where we board the ICE to Berlin.
The second leg of the journey, Munich to Berlin, takes roughly 4 hours by train. We made our connection in Munich with no trouble at all and we were even able to grab a coffee and some breakfast to properly start our day before we board the ICE. It’s still quite wet outside but the sun has risen by now, at least somewhere behind the clouds. We find our seats and enjoy the moments before departure. So far, it’s all quite familiar territory.
We set off and I feel different. We both enjoy travelling long distance by train; there is something about settling in and watching the world pass by that is very calming. Today it’s more the excitement and rush that I feel, the life of it, the adrenalin. A few hours into the journey I realise I haven’t been staring out of the window taking that calm in but observing the inside, Sam, the other passengers, the atmosphere, the hustle and bustle of getting on and off, the sound of the tracks and it feels almost like a world I didn’t appreciate as much before. It feels centring and alive. I feel this energy around me and then within me and I am sure I want to take this feeling into the weekend and give the marathon a try.
We get into Berlin at lunch and notice straight away how the city is already buzzing from the atmosphere around the marathon. We go straight to Tempelhof to pick up our bibs and let the atmosphere sink in. This is the last of the shots from the weekend since I could not take my camera to the race itself. But I did start and did run and did finish with a PB. And we did take the train back to Garmisch on the same day, a few hours after the marathon and this time I did stare out of the window during the entire journey.
