Budapest Marathon

The Budapest Marathon is very popular as it has a beautiful route along both banks of the Danube and across several of the beautiful bridges. This year there were supposedly 16,000 people taking part, more than 4,000 running the entire distance. The start lasted more than 9 minutes!

You can run the whole marathon, run it in a relay of 3 or 5, choose the 30K or the 7.5K distance. As I’m not fit enough to run the whole distance alone – and I would never have the time to prepare either – I had the idea to run the relay. To have a family team. So we decided with Jenna and Gabor to enter as a team of 3.

The first distance was 11.4K and Jenna did it in 1:06. Here you can see Jenna and Gabor before the start.

And here’s Jenna coming in to the first relay place. She is just emerging from under the Chain Bridge.

After she had given the chip to Gabor he shot off to his 21.4K distance. I ran it 2 years ago and this is the nicest part as you run on both sides of the river and you cross 2 of the beautiful bridges.

While waiting for Gabor to return we took pictures of each other with the Buda Castle and the Chain Bridge as background.

Gabor came in after 2 hours and 18 minutes and gave me the chip so I could start the last part which was the shortest, 9.4K. For a while we ran along the river then took it into the city towards the start/finish. It took me 58 minutes so we did a 4:24 Marathon.

The kids loved the race, the atmosphere was just superb. There were street musicians setting the pace, here you can see a percussion band:

And there were a lot of people supporting, some of them were distributing refreshments like orange slices. I took this picture of English supporters for the blog.

Maybe one day I will run the whole distance alone, it’s never too late to start. I think this year the oldest runner (who ran the entire distance) was 77!