My Monday motivation - Road-to-Berlin (1)

I promised a few posts around my motivation to go run a major city marathon in another country this year, and so I start with simple "connection to location". As it is I know Berlin a little having lived there twice in the period before I'd started junior school and visited again several times through my life it is not such the great unknown leap it might on the face of it appear. Of course the city (like all major cities) has evolved immeasurably since my first or even last visits, but it feels emotionally like somewhere part of me belongs.

The Berliner Bear - from www.seeklogo.com

So already you see a chunk of my motivation simply lies in having made it into a kind of hometown run, or at least a coming home run. Simple as it seems a connection to location for an event can make all the difference in the world, imagine running somewhere you'd not heard much about or even heard bad things about wouldn't that then detract / distract from your run? I ran once in a place I only had a vague sense of and found that although the location, course, organisation and people turned out to be amazing I just wasn't 'into' it and it was a horrible run personally (in fact on of my worst). In Berlin there will be familiar landmarks I know, places I was pushed around in my push chair, and street names long since burned into my memory. It truly is somewhere I WANT to run around and there in lies a nice big motivational foundation.

I have begun to recognise I am an emotional runner, running makes me feel great, and running location lifts that to a whole other level. Give me sights to run around and not dull city dual carriage-ways leading to nowhere any day. All being well I'll be on the move past the Brandenburg Gate, the Tiergarten, the Siegessäule column, the Reichstag and Berliner Dom, Kurfürstendamm, Potsdamer Platz, and the Staatsoper this autumn (to list just a few) feeling absolutely connected and super motivated.

What does a good connection to a location mean to your running?