The ING Marathon

Today we’re onto Luxembourg City, the capital of Luxembourg, a small country in between Germany, France, and Belgium.  Unfortunately, we’re only stopping here for one night because all the hotels are quite expensive and there weren’t any suitable options for budget accommodations. Although I would have preferred a bit more time to explore Luxembourg, we managed to see a lot of the city and we got to be a spectator at the ING Europe Marathon, which was quite the event!

We ended up booking at the four-star Hotel Novotel Luxembourg Kirchberg, which is part of the Accor hotel group that own the Ibis hotels, because they had an early booking rate of €79/night (prepayment required). The room is huge (with a king sized bed, an extra sofa-bed, and a large desk) and all the furnishings and linens are definitely a step up from the Ibis hotels, but I don’t think it’s worth the €250/night regular rack rate they charge. The nice thing about being in a four star hotel, though, is having a mini-fridge in the room! I haven’t seen a mini fridge in our hotel room in ages…

The first thing I did after checking in was jump in the shower since I hadn’t showered during our two nights at the hostel in Köln (the showers were just too gross there!). After getting cleaned up, we headed out to the starting area of the marathon to see the start of the race which, unlike most marathons we know of, began at 6 pm. We picked up free hats (decorated with the ING lion, see pic) and whistles and joined a huge crowd of spectators for the biggest race start I have ever been to – there were so many people everywhere you couldn’t see the end of the line!

When most of the runners had headed off, we hopped on one of the free shuttles running throughout the city (we had taken one earlier to get to the hotel) and went back to town center to get some dinner. We wandered around the historic town center and decided to try some ribs and beef stroganoff on a street called Place de Paris where there were a number of restaurants. By the time we sat down the runners in the lead were coming by, and we were amused to see that, as with most marthons we’ve seen, a guy from Kenya was at the front of the group. Why is it that there’s always a Kenyan in the lead at marathons and races? After dinner (which was really good but a bit expensive), we wandered around all of old town, following parts of the marathon route and veering off at other parts to look at buildings, cathedrals, and shops. There were spectators and bands all over the place and the atmosphere was quite lively everywhere we went. I think there was something like 8000 participants in total so the whole event was huge and there was media coverage all over the place.

As we crossed the bridge back to our hotel at 11 pm, I watched the runners at the back of the pack push themselves to get to the finish line (which was still about another 3km away) and I felt inspired to get back into the running training I had done last year, before we came up with the idea to travel. I’ve always wanted to be able to run a marathon but I’ve never made the time (or effort) to go through the training necessary. Last year I trained for an event called Seek the Peak, which was 17km uphill, but as soon as the even was done with, I got lazy again and stopped running. The funny thing about travelling is you have all this free time to be inspired to do all this different stuff, but when you get home, the reality is you can’t do all the things you want to do! So far I’ve wanted to learn to speak fluent French, start my own coffee shop, build a model railroad, and run a marathon. I wonder which, if any, of these I will actually accomplish when we finally do go home…