I didn’t have concrete plans very often throughout this trip, but November 11th was one of those dates where I had to be in a specific place at a specific time.  I had signed up for the Athens Marathon and had to make sure I made it there to run it!  From Skopje I took the bus down to Thessaloniki where I stayed the night before jumping on a plane to Athens.  I didn’t really explore Thessaloniki at all.  Upon arriving in Athens, I checked into my hostel and headed right to the Expo to pick up my bib.  This is my first international marathon so was interested to see what the expo would be like.

I took the streetcar down to the Olympic park which is where the Olympics was held in 2004.  The expo was held in one of the gyms and was pretty much exactly the same as the ones I am used to except that instead of just being a giant hall full of vendors that you can go to at your leisure, this one had a specific track you needed to walk along which meant that you at least had to walk by every vendor before you could get out.  It was a neat design and despite not needing anything, I did enjoy looking at the international brands.

I got my bib and my shirt and was ready to run my 6th Marathon!  I was starting to get pretty excited since I wasn’t going to be racing this one and it was one of the coolest marathons in the world being where the race was conceived and all.

I opened couch surfing to see if there were any people looking to hang out and it turned out there were a few people looking to have a warm beverage at a cool restaurant on the top floor of a electronics store overlooking one of the many squares in the city.  We had a great conversation and enjoyed the view.  There was a sports bar underneath my hostel and they had a bunch of craft beer, so I had one and then went to sleep early.

The next morning I decided to take a free walking tour around the city despite knowing that they generally mean a lot of walking.  As I said before, I wasn’t really racing this one, so thought that it would be ok.

The thing that struck me most about Athens was that everything was so incredibly old.  I remember arriving in England and seeing old pubs that were a few hundred years old and being impressed.  In Athens, things were THOUSANDS of years old.  Everywhere you go there are archaeological digs and old ruins.

It was also really cool being able to see the Acropolis from most of the city.  I’m not sure why I loved that so much, but I just loved looking at the hill.  We saw the changing of the guard and explored the park.

So much history to see and explore.  Eventually it kind of all blends together, but was still incredible.

I really enjoyed exploring the city and learning a bit about the storied history of Greece and Athens.  After a full day of exploring, I was really excited to walk past a sign advertising the Athens Pinball museum.  Since the race was the next day, I figured I would lay low and just play a few hours of pinball as a way to relax and prep for the run.

The musuem was awesome and had a great selection of machines.  It was a pay at the door and then all the machines are on free play, so I played a lot and stayed there for several hours.

I didn’t stay too late though as the buses left around 6am the next morning and I wanted to make sure I got some sleep.  There were two other Marathon runners in my Hostel room which was nice because we could all go together in the morning.

The Marathon travels from Marathon 42km away, to the ancient stadium in Athens.  The bus drove along the route we would be running and the distance and elevation started to sink in.  You are always going to get nerves before running for over 3 hours.

I made sure to take advantage of the photo ops along the way.

There was a lot of watiing around before the race started but the weather was pretty good, so not a big deal.  The stadium they had us in was big and had plenty of space.

They had the olympic flame there as an opportunity for a photo op as well, but the lineup for that was ridiculous, so I just took a photo of others doing it.

Finally it was time to start.

Due to my estimated finishing time of just over 3 hours, I was in one of the first corrals and ended up near the very beginning, in the coral just behind the elites.

I usually don’t bring my phone on races, but like I said before, I was taking this one a bit easier and decided to bring my phone with me so I could take photos.  The run ended up going pretty well, but the middle was for sure much hillier than expected so I slowed down a lot on the hills.  Overall though I felt pretty good throughout the marathon.  One of the funny things though is that I almost got hit by a goat, who was loose on the course running upstream.  I had to kind of dodge it was it ran by me.  I ended up seeing it again as there was a small loop area on the course and so I ended up seeing the Goat again.

I ended up finishing in 3:13:50 which was my slowest since my first Marathon, but I was happy to have just run!  I ended up in 369th place out of 15,294 which I think is pretty good!

Finishing in the stadium was pretty cool too!  I went back in just to watch and take in the whole thing.

I carried a small Canadian flag with me so I could have it at the end!

After taking it all in and really enjoying the experience, I changed and went in search of my post race beer.  Since the place under the hostel had a decent craft selection, I just went there.

I then went to try and find food and ended up meeting a guy on the street who was super chatty and suggested going to this whole in the wall place for some authentic greek food.  Looking back at the whole thing, I am not sure if he was in cahoots with the restaurant because it was empty and he really wanted to split a bottle of wine and it was really expensive.  I’m not sure if it was a scam or if it was just exepsnive wine.  Either way, he was a good conversation and the food was good.  Even if it was a scam, I still had a great time talking to the man and the food was good.

A guy in my hostel room was saying that there was a Soccer match between the two Athens soccer teams and of course it is a huge rivalry.  I decided that this sounded like an awesome opportunity.  In order to buy tickets though, you need to be a member of the soccer club and there were only specific places you could get the card.  I ended up having to go to their team shop to get the card, so I could buy my ticket to the game.  I think you need the membership so you can sit in the home team section and it reduces fighting.

We got to the stadium on the light rail with no issues and found our seats, which were pretty good for 20 euros.  I had never been to a European soccer match before so there were a few crazy things.

One thing is that the opposing team section is physically separated from the home team by a fence.  You can see it behind us in the photo.

The other crazy thing was the hooligans at the end lit flairs just before the game and they were so smokey that they had to postpone the game for a little bit.  Kind of felt like a war zone for a little bit, but was also really cool.

After the game, we took the train back to the Hostel and called it a night.  It had been a pretty active day, although my legs were feeling decent.  I ended up with over 50,000 steps at the end of the day.

The next day a few of the people from our hostel room wanted to go check out the tallest point in the city which was a short cab ride away.  It was a great spot for a medal monday photo.

We explored the hill for a while and then headed back into the city.  You could see the entire city from the top of the hill!

We met up with the other guys who ran the Marathon for a beer and then headed to another hill for some photo opportunities of the acropolis at sunset.

Sunset was very nice!

Once the sun went down, we ended up at the bar under the hostel again and joined a group of people who were pretty fun!

The next day I joined Sulyman who was from Turkey and was in town for the Marathon as well for a trip to the acropolis museum and then the acropolis itself.  The museum was brand new and beautiful and the top floor had a reconstruction of the acropolis with the original marbles mounted where they are meant to be mounted.

When I wrote my post about the British museum in London, I mentioned that I was torn due to the fact that a lot of the stuff in that museum were more or less stolen or taken from the country of origin.  Egypt and Greece are both examples of this.  The Marbles are a really heated topic because half of the Parthenon marbles are in the British museum and half of them are in Greece in this museum.  Greece wants Britain to return their marbles and have included spaces in the museum for these pieces in case they are every returned.  Lord Elgin took them to Britain a long time ago and so they are known as the Elgin Marbles.  I was really confused the first time I heard about them because I thought they were really big stone balls, but now it makes a bit more sense.  I think the pieces should be in Greece.  We moved from the museum on to the hill itself and took a look through all of the various structures on the hill, including a few temples and an amphitheater.

Seems like everything was constantly in a state of repair, but it makes sense when everything is so old.  The acropolis was also destroyed partially in the past because they once stored gun powder in there and it accidentally ignited once.

After finihsing up exploring the acropolis, Suly found that there was a geocache nearby so we went in search of a few.

We found one in the park as well!

He even has his own stamp for the log.

That ended up being my last day in Athens.  I knew I had to get to Athens for the 11th but really didn’t have any plans afterwards.  I was kind of as far south as you can get and didn’t really know where to go.  Suly was from Istanbul and his flight ended up being pretty cheap, so i booked a seat on his flight and headed to Istanbul.  I really didn’t have a plan for the next 2 months but knew I would probably figure it out.  Greece was another country that I would like to visit again as I only really got to experience Athens.  I know there are some pretty famous Greek islands and other parts of the country that are beautiful.  I really enjoyed how old everything was and how they are working really hard to try and uncover and preserve the ancient artifacts.  Running the Marathon was supppper cool and I felt pretty emotional at various parts of the race.  Now I get to relax on the running a little bit and just enjoy myself.  However, I do really like my adventure runs and will continue to do those.