Training for Chicago Marathon While Backpacking Germany in 2009

On 27 August 2009 I published a running diary from Germany. Chicago Marathon was on 11 October, and I had begun training on 1 July while travelling in Bolivia. By late August the scenery had changed, but the basic arrangement had not: I was trying to prepare for a first marathon inside a backpacking trip, rather than arranging a trip around a carefully organised training programme.

This October 2026 retrospective follows that particular diary, not an imagined training log. Its strongest details are wonderfully specific: a 55-minute run in hot Munich, laps around Nuremberg Castle, my dad’s old Hitec trainers and different-coloured laces. They tell a more honest story than a polished account of disciplined preparation would. I was running, but I was also travelling, going out and doing little else to support the commitment I had made.

A marathon deadline in a travelling life

The original entry explicitly connects the German runs to Chicago. That matters because the Munich run was not an isolated holiday jog subsequently recast as endurance preparation. I was already describing myself as someone training for the October race. The date was fixed, even while my surroundings and daily routines kept changing.

The earlier chapter is in my Bolivia marathon-training notes. Those record the South American beginning, including short runs in different towns. Germany belongs later in the same preparation, with a different setting and its own source. Keeping the two accounts separate lets the actual journey show through, without merging every run into a smooth story of continuous progress.

I do not have a complete mileage record behind this German entry. A run lasting 55 minutes is evidence of duration, not distance, pace or fitness. Nor does the diary establish how many uninterrupted weeks of training I completed. I can describe what I recorded, and leave the missing numbers missing.

Fifty-five minutes in Munich

My diary describes going out with a travelling companion for our first run together on this trip. It says my own run lasted 55 minutes in blazing sunshine. Munich was the setting; the source does not give a mapped route that I can responsibly reproduce here.

The clothes are almost a second character in the entry. I wrote about football socks, a bright orange Peru backpackers’ top and my dad’s old secondhand Hitec running shoes. The separate shoes had black and white laces. Those details are not an endorsement of makeshift equipment. They are what I was actually wearing, and they explain why the original photograph looks like a traveller out running rather than a runner dressed for a promotional shoot.

There is a lot of teasing in the old prose, including jokes about my companion and myself. I have not carried another person’s name or personal details into this new account. The relevant part is that I had company while running. That is enough to preserve the social texture without turning someone else into a searchable supporting character.

Running around Nuremberg Castle

A second photograph in the same entry places me at Nuremberg Castle. Its caption describes the first of two laps. My younger self immediately undercuts the running pose by saying it looks more like an attempt at modelling. The bright top remains visible, linking the photograph to the rather improvised kit described in the text.

This is where the travel and the training really occupy the same frame. I was not setting the city aside until the day’s exercise was finished. The place I had come to visit became part of the run. The diary also mentions rivers and runs of varying lengths, but it does not supply a reliable itinerary of each outing.

I am therefore not naming a modern running circuit around the castle, recommending a surface or assigning a kilometre total to those laps. What survives is simpler: a traveller preparing for Chicago, running in Munich and around a castle in Nuremberg, with enough enthusiasm to photograph and joke about it.

The evenings did not match the ambition

The title of the original post puts running beside drinking and rolling out of bed. That was not accidental. I described hard runs followed by nights out, then waking wanting water and sleep. The diary’s own conclusion was that, apart from running, I was doing little to help the training.

I do not need to turn that into a physiological explanation or an account of injury. The honest point is about the mismatch between the goal and the rest of my travelling routine. I could take Chicago seriously enough to go running and still organise the evenings poorly. Both things were happening in the same trip.

Looking back, I would rather keep that contradiction visible than manufacture a transformation scene. This entry does not record the moment I became perfectly disciplined. It records someone trying to fit a difficult future event into a present life that was still mostly organised around travel and company.

What Chicago eventually establishes

I finished my first marathon in Chicago on 11 October 2009. The official net time was 4:25:55, with a gun time of 4:47:50 and bib 21910. My Chicago report preserves the result and original race account, including the fast opening and later slowing.

That finish should not be used to certify everything I did beforehand. A result establishes that I finished the race; it does not prove that old shoes, disrupted sleep or poorly planned evenings were a good preparation method. The German diary is useful precisely because it resists that retrospective tidying.

Sources and the photographs

Read my full original running diary, published 27 August 2009. The running portrait displayed here was embedded in that owner-authored post; its filename is not evidence of a separate capture date. The original entry and its historical publication date remain untouched.

The wider Germany blog contains the other travel entries. This retrospective does not claim to have reconstructed every city or day from them. Continue through the original adventure travel collection for the South American diaries, then Chicago, and later European journeys: separate sources, connected by the travelling life in which I wrote them.