Is that a Snickers zipping past? No, it's a Marathon.

Berlin Marathon 2011 - Paula Radcliffe. Seriously, how cool is that?

Berlin Rollerblading Marathon 2011

This weekend was Marathon weekend in Berlin. I never knew I liked marathons so much until I came here. No, scratch that, I never knew I liked spectating so much. Stevie asked whether I thought I could do a half marathon, to which I replied that I had my doubts as to whether I could run or rollerblade my way through a 1/26th marathon.

Anyway, having things like this going on in Berlin of a weekend make me glad to live here. I get that excited feeling of being in a place where there's just oodles of interesting things just around the corner. And in fact that's pretty much where they were. Last year I only discovered the rollerblading marathon because I needed to go to the supermarket and I couldn't get across the road. As it was pouring with rain, I gave up and just went home. But this year we've had fantastic weather for yesterdays' rollerblading and todays' 'proper' marathon.

I took my camera and walked a little bit along the rollerblading route and tried to capture the competitors against a bit of a Berlin backdrop. Unlike the east side of Berlin, it's a lot harder to find graffiti in the west. It also took me a while to jiggle about with my camera to get it to catch the competitors without them fuzzing into a speedy blur. But then later I realised I preferred them that way.

And then today we all went down the road to where the Ku'Damm meets Tauentzienstrasse at the Gedachtniskirche to watch the runners at the 35km mark. Last year we missed the lead runners, but holy smoke, we got to see them this time, and they are just SO fast! Unbelievably so. It's so impressive and certainly I never realised just how impressive they were whenever I had seen bits of the London Marathon on tv in years previous.

So it was great, there was a fantastic atmosphere and there were bands dotted all along the route. Where we were there was an excellent steel drum band, and just a little further down near Nike World there was a brass band squished in on the centre of the road crossing, playing contemporary music in between the pedestrian lights.

So I thoroughly enjoyed this weekend. My love for Berlin has gone up a notch, and look, LOOK! I even got a photo of Paula Radcliffe! Woo hoo!!! I'm dead chuffed.