My Goal For the Stockholm Marathon

It is now T-3 days to the Stockholm Marathon. A bunch of people at work has started asking me how I feel about the race. I’ll tell you what I told them – surprisingly indifferent!

Sure, of course I am excited to be taking a day off work to travel to and visit Stockholm. But on actually running a marathon? It doesn’t really feel real at the moment. This is because, for once, running a marathon isn’t actually my goal race, but can instead almost be treated like a training race. This time around, the Stockholm Marathon is acting as a Super Duper Long Run training sesh in the lead up to my target race, the London Triathlon.

My training cycle leading up to this has been a hybrid schedule, targeting mainly a triathlon, with some weekend Long Runs thrown in to ensure my legs have the physical strength to see me through 42.2KM. Saying that, my training has been, by no means consistent, due in part to stupid working hours and the stress and physical (and mental) tiredness that comes along with it. Whilst I might have entertained the idea of going for a sub-4 hour time at the start of this training cycle, I’ve decided on something better…

My goal for the Stockholm Marathon is just to let loose and freaking HAVE SOME FUN!

Saying that, it is actually going to be somewhat hard for me to do. This will be my 4th marathon, and first attempting to run with no time target. I am very much a numbers person, especially when it comes to training and running, so I’m not quite sure what I’m going to think about when running if not about my Garmin beeps, average speed, current lap pace, distance to go, potential finishing time if I continue running at this pace, etc. etc. etc.

Then a novel thought – what about actually doing what I actually set out to do when I first signed up for the marathon? My reason for choosing Stockholm was because I have never visited the city and have been wanting to (I love the Nordic / Scandi region!). And what better reason to visit that to run a marathon eh?

But what generally ends up happening in any race I run? I get way too focussed on running my race and checking my Garmin splits that I forget to look around and enjoy running in the city I am running in and that I came specifically to see.

Not this time round hopefully! I’ve checked out the race route and it passes through a few Stockholm sights that I have on my list to visit. I am determined to keep my head up and observe what I am actually running through. I am even thinking about running with a camera! Do a bit of the tourist thing whilst running a marathon? Sure, why not? 😉

The Stockholm Marathon race route

So if you know Stockholm, you’ll see that I am going to be running through the following:

• the Royal Park – “Djurgården” – home of the world’s first open-air museum, Skansen and the famous Vasa museum
• the Royal Palace
• the City Hall – where the Nobel Prize awards are held
• the Royal Opera
• the Houses of Parliament
• Gamla Stan – the Old Town
• Västerbron bridge – Sweden’s largest arched bridge (and toughest ascent of the race which we have to do twice!)
• the 1912 Olympic Stadium

You’ll also notice that there’s a fair bit of running to be done by the water, in addition to runners actually having to cross over from island to island (at least I think they are islands!). I am really looking forward to that!

Photo from the Stockholm Marathon official website

So there you have it, my goal for my next marathon. Now I’m really starting to get excited! Stockholm, land of salty fish, IKEA, ABBA and beautiful men and women, here I come! 😀