The Urban Trail series is relatively new here in Belgium; the idea behind it is to turn running a race into a fun way to explore a city. The course typically includes running through novel locations like museums, tunnels, landmark buildings, and past tourist attractions. So when I heard they were going to stage one in Brussels, Florian and I signed up right away.
Thankfully the morning of the race was cooler than previous days had been (we'd been having a heatwave here in Belgium, with temps hitting 38 degrees C - not pleasant when you don't have air conditioning!), but it still promised to be a warm 25-28 degrees and sunny. Florian and I were glad we were in one of the first starting waves, meaning we would start running at 9:20. We bumped into my husband's cousin Luc while waiting for our turn to start; he was going to be in wave 4, starting 40 minutes later.
The idea behind the waves was to spread the field of runners out enough to ensure everyone could pass through all the narrower parts of the course smoothly. As we lined up at the start, we could see that it was going to take a while before we actually got going.
They were letting runners through one-by-one in a chute system, to make sure that we were all spread out enough.
My friend Aisling was cheering us on and got this great picture of us as we came out of the chute:
Don't I look happy and excited here? I had no idea at the time what a killer course I was going to have to face the next 90 minutes...
And off we went, as Aisling got a last shot of us, on our merry way...
The first thing we ran through was the Royal Library. Through some reading rooms and then a darkened exhibition hall of rare books and then back out again. This was just the beginning of innumerable flights of stairs we would be going up and down during the race, which made it tough. Not to mention all the cobblestones and hills on the streets of Brussels! Florian has a thing about not taking walk breaks, although he (thankfully) doesn't mind running at a very easy pace, but I told him I was not going to run up all those stairs - I walked them, and once I got to the top continued walking just until he turned around and caught me, and then I started running again - LOL!
There was a major hold up of runners just before we entered the Jewish Museum. I was really surprised we were going to run through it because I figured it would be considered too much of a security risk since the terrorist attack on it last year, but we queued up in a narrow alleyway and after 5 minutes wait or so, we were admitted into the Museum through a back door, went down some steps into a basement, and then wound ourselves up and down more flights of stairs all through the building, only to come out again through the front door and past the soldiers with machine guns guarding it. This was probably the most memorable stop on the entire course!
We continued on, running past more landmarks, parks, hidden parts of Brussels I had never seen, up hills, down hills, up stairs, down stairs, through an inner city school where they had us run through the gymnasium where a boxing club was training as we passed, through the back door of the Marriot Hotel, up stairs to the grand ballroom where a DJ was playing a set in fluorescent disco lights and back out the main entrance. We ran past all the major tourist sights, including Manneke Pis and the Grand Place, and surprised tourists as we dashed past the posh shops in the St Hubert Gallery. We ascended all the stairs leading to the beautiful art deco cinema hall El Greco, went past the cathedral, through the park at the Royal Palace (more steep stairs to get up there), and the Bozar art museum, through more galleries, down more cobbled streets...it was actually an amazing course, unbelievable that they could make this happen. And so despite how badly my hip and my hamstrings were killing me at the end, I was really glad we did it. It was a lot of fun running through all these unexpected places and the volunteers did a great job making sure no one got lost.
The course was not timed, because the whole idea is to have fun, not run your fastest 10K. But we had the Garmin with us, just to keep an eye on how we were doing pace-wise, and in the end it took us 90 minutes to finish the course. Originally we had figured we'd need 75 minutes, but that was not taking all the stairs and the hold up at the Jewish Museum into account. So we were pretty pleased with our time.
Not having really trained for this, I was very pleased to have been able to finish strong, although I was pretty sore the next day - strangely enough, a lot of back pain, but I put that down to the pounding on the cobblestones and all the stairs. Oh, those killer stairs...I will never forget all those flights of stairs...
And if you've actually made it this far into my very long winded post, I will reward you with a short (40 second) video with some of the highlights of the course:
