HOLIDAY TIME

Planning a holiday can almost be as much fun as the holiday itself.
Back in 1997, Dawn and I planned our first big holiday together. What started out as a little trip to the USA to stay with friends and run their local marathon turned into something out of the “Amazing Race.”
Amsterdam, New York, Boston, East Lyme (where I ran my first international marathon), Houston, Texas – College Station (to visit my sister), Bermuda (ran the local T.T., a cross-country and a 10km road race). Back to Amsterdam, via New York, took a train to the south of France (Belarga) and back to Amsterdam, London for a week before heading back to Amsterdam to run their marathon and head home. All this in just 6 weeks….

I now have 8 overseas marathons and we don’t head over without the chance of lining up for another one. London, Paris, New York, Boston, Berlin just don’t excite me. The last one I did was in Macau (Far East) with only 500 runners. So what next you might ask? Well 2011 is still a long way off and anything can happen but we have a few plans. Dawn has started running in the mornings with a lady from Prague, well need I say more. Out come the Distance Runners magazines and yes Prague has a marathon in May. Now wait for it, my best friend lives just outside Salzburg and they also have their marathon in May, just one week later. So I was thinking about racing Prague and jogging Salzburg with Richard. Sounds like the makings of an epic holiday. Forget about the running, how can one go wrong visiting Prague and Salzburg. Ok Prague is expensive and the Salzburg marathon is boring and not well organized, or so I’m told. So keeping our options open we kept looking. Scratching through old brochures Dawn came across something that has thrown a spanner in the works. Switzerland, the land of chocolate, cheese and snowcapped mountains… She had found the brochure for the Zermat Marathon in the Alps. We love Switzerland and I’ve already run a couple of marathons in the Alps and would love to run another.