Hi, It's 1 AM in Belgium, and I'm just back home after my first (night) Marathon. I'm pretty sure you've read hundreds of races reports, so I won't do it too long. First of all I was expecting it to be some kind of mystic experience, but the first 30-35 km were quite uneventful. Normally I train 12-16 km at 5min/km, well today it started just as a long training. I believe at km 35 I was at 2h 56', but then we took a turn left, and then the real Marathon started. It wasn't a real bonk, or any specific pain anywhere, is just that the body tells you "isn't that enough for today?", and there you are running in the middle of nowhere, dark like hell and passing every now and then a "wise" guy who decided to stop running and start walking, and you can hear your body saying "you see, that's what you should do." But somehow, you know you can't stop, you know you haven't trained all those km, all those days, just to stop 5 km from the end, and you know, that regardless what the body says, you WON'T stop. You cheat yourself counting "positively" the missing minutes till the end, the missing kms (I'm pretty sure between the km 35 and the 40, there were at least 10 km, and all of them uphill and with head wind) Then you see the km 40 panel, and the city lights at the end, and you know that the worst is over, and that you're going to succeed. But you still have to run every single meter till the end, so you just keep running, no big emotions, just holding on there An then when you are 100-150m from the finish, you open your arms, look at the sky, and for 15-20 seconds you feel you are the King of the Universe and, as crazy as it may sound, everything starts making sense, those 15-20 second of Eternity justify everything, every single mile you've run, every day you had to wake up too early, or go to bed too late, because you had to run; the days you ran in the snow and the days you ran in the summer heat....and you know, that just that single instant, nobody in this whole planet is happier than yourself Have a good night Rafa 20/06/08 Nacht Van West Vlaanderen Marathon: 3h 37' 20 "

Wow, Rafa, that is WAY cool! And to have done your first in the dark...what a unique experience. I think I'd have a hard time with that--I'd want to lay down and go to sleep. You have to be super proud of yourself. What an accomplishment.

I got a little teary while reading...that's EXACTLY how it feels!

Yeah, Grandma's Marathon today, I still get that when seeing the finish line after 27 of them.

Amen to that. Hatfield-McCoy much more so than my first, actually. MTA: Just read your log entry after checking your time... Awesome to be able to stick with your friend for that run. I've found that 4 hours is the limit at which my mental endurance breaks down. Hatfield-McCoy *really* tested my interest in trying to finish.

Yeah, I did H&M last year, I really like the people and community but it's definitely a tough second half! BTW that was his 84th marathon, so it felt good to help him out.

Amazing. I ran the H-M for a bit with a guy from the UK who's run 100+ marathons... 48 stateside in 43 states.

I wanna do a night marathon now.

Congratulations! Thanks for the report too, very heartfelt and so, so true