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Amsterdam Marathon 2006.
My sister, my mate Pete and I travel to the Netherlands for my 11th marathon. October 2006.


		This page is a photographic account of my visit to Amsterdam with my sister Lucy, and mate Pete; in order for me to run the Amsterdam marathon. I picked Amsterdam as it's a relatively local race to both England and to Switzerland, where I have been living for most of this year, and sounded like an interesting race and a new city to see. The three of us met at Amsterdam airport on the Friday ahead of the run on Sunday. Lucy and Pete flew together from Heathrow, whilst I flew in from Zurich. After checking in at the hotel Bema near to the museumplein district and Vondelpark, we took the tram straight to the race expo adjacent to the 1928 Olympic stadium. I put a huge amount of effort and preparation into training for Canberra marathon, in April this year, and managed to obtain a personal best there. Compared to that, my training for this race had been short, just 12 weeks; and I ended up being ill for two of them. My coach Huw setup training schedules for me, but I knew I'd be going into this race a bit on the back foot. I had another reason for running this marathon. in February 2007, I'll be setting off for South America en route to the Antarctic, where I'll be running 2 marathons in 7 days. One on King George island and one in Ushuaia, Tierra Del Fuego. I wanted to run 2 marathons in a week before heading down there, so that it wouldn't be such a shock; so I'm running Amsterdam and Lausanne this week.

The race expo was pretty cool, and they had the usual amount of cheap trainers on sale, and someone to help talk me through the route. There was some confusion picking up my race number and championchip, my Dutch isn't very good, infact I don't know any, and the lady at the expo kept getting mixed up as well. I already knew that I was runner 440, a low number because I'm in the male under 35's category. There aren't that many young runners in marathons outside races like the London marathon, which seems to attract many young runners, and marathon's seem to attract an older crowd. To my relief my race pack was found after a few minutes haggling and me presenting my passport, I suppose that I don't the easiest surname to spell. We wandered around the expo for a while looking for bargains, but it wasn't particularly well stocked, I suspect the real action would start on Saturday when no doubt the place would be heaving with runners.

We spent the rest of the day wondering around the city and trying to visit some of the top 5 must see's from my lonely planet guidebook. Interestingly the notorious red light district was top of their list. We ventured over that way in the last of the daylight thankfully; after a 10 minute walk, we all wanted to leave the sleaze pit of an area that seemed to have attracted all of europe's scum. All of us are into running and fitness, and none of us have ever taken any drug, and never intend to. It was a real shame to see this nice historical european town stained with (mainly English) scumbags up to no good. We read about an excellent restaurant called Blauw Aan de wal, down a dodgy graffitied alley in the middle of the district, and tried to find it, not surprisingly it was fully booked, and we had to walk through the now even busier area. It reminded me of Mos Eisley spaceport from the star wars movies, quoting Obie-Wan Kenobie: "Mos Eisley Spaceport. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy". We spent ages trying to find a decent restaurant, and eventually had to admit defeat when Lucy came up with the brilliant plan of the local Hard Rock Cafe.


		We spent the Saturday checking out more of Amsterdam and visited the Van Gough museum in Vondelpark within sight of our hotel. I wasn't supposed to do too much walking and had to take time to drink plenty of fluids, and even smuggled in my 700ml drinks bottle in the inside pocket of my barbour into the museum. It's very easy to de-hydrate wandering around a foreign city, which is very bad the day before a race. I retired to the hotel mid afternoon and watched a movie whilst Lucy and Pete went to see Anne Frank's house during the Nazi occupation, and shop for my marathon breakfast food, for which I was very grateful. We were very pleased when we found out the the marathon start time was at 10:30am, sometimes races start very early in the morning so as not to disrupt the city; when Pete and I ran the San Francisco marathon, it started at 5:20am, which makes everything more difficult. We got up at a very civilised time, ate breakfast and wandered down to the Stadium passing many other runners along the way and chatting to another English runner as well. Pete and Lucy took the camera and went inside the stadium, carrying my St Georges cross flag, so that I would be able to see them.



		A chap called Solomon Bushendich from Kenya won the marathon in 2 hours 8 minutes, I finished over an hour and forty minutes later, quite pathetic in comparison, and it pains me often that I can never have the natural ability and talent of those top athlete's. Running in an 70 plus year old olympic stadium, is about as good as I can ever hope for sadly, it's most depressing. Still, I had my Lucy and Pete with me, and I saw them as I left the stadium by way of the flag hanging down, the only flag on display was my St George's cross, which did bring a big smile to my face. I also saw them both at the 10km mark, but the photo came out quite blurry, I had set the ISO speed to only 100, which was too low before handing Pete my complicated digital SLR. The race itself was great, I didn't even wear my heart rate monitor or bother with gels, I knew with the level of training I'd done, that it wasn't likely to be my fastest race and I figured I'd do it low tech for a change. The route (click to see it) went along the river Amstel, which was amazing, and such a lovely part of the course, which seemed to go on for quite a long portion of the race. After the lovely Amstel section and running past a few iconic windmills, the route changed to a low industry area. The course was not too heavily lined, and I just got my head down and chugged along.


I finished the race in 3:50:12, about 11 minutes off my personal best, and it was about what I had expected, my legs held out until just after 35km with no pain and a really easy run, but if you haven't done the mileage in training, you can't blag it, and I my speed rapidly decreased. The championchip from my shoe recorded exactly what happened, (click here) to see a graph of my race. I finished almost dead on the 50% mark of finishers. More importantly I'd had a lot of fun, enjoyed my race and not worried about anything, and seen some really great parts of the city and had a great weekend with my friends.

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Authors:	Page created by: James Bartosik. Race photographs by Pete Clements, city shots by me.
Date of event:	Sunday 15th October 2006.
Page History:	First created: 19th October 2006. Last Revision: 31st October 2006. Revision version: 2.0.
Camera and Lenses:	Canon 350D, EF-S 17-85mm IS, F4-5.6 USM.
Locations:	Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Click for Google earth links: Amsterdam Olympic Stadium.
Wikipedia links:	Marathon / Amsterdam Olympics / Amsterdam.
Copyright:	© Copyright material, all rights reserved.