Since I heard about the launch of parkrun Germany on the marathon talk podcast in 2017, and then Berlin parkrun (called Hasenheide parkrun) the following June, I have been itching for a work trip to Berlin that would see me there on a Saturday morning. In January this year I had a friday meeting in Berlin, with the following week working near Düsseldorf, the only sensible solution was that I spent the weekend in the capital! Perfect for a spot of parkrun tourism..
My hotel was in Alexanderplatz and the parkrun was around 5km away in Hasenheide park. I ruled out the needless expense of a taxi, and decided trying to figure out how to use one of the electric scooters on the city roads was too much work for a Saturday morning, especially if I didn't want to get lost. So for reasons unknown, I decided to run there. I can only assume that the fact that Berlin has a perfectly good underground system must have momentarily slipped my mind! For anyone interested the U-bahn would have got me to the nearby station of Boddinstraße in about 20 minutes for less than €3! I had even been using the BVG app to easily get around Berlin on public transport for the previous 2 days. Can I blame jet lag when the time difference is only an hour?
I allowed myself 45 minutes from leaving the hotel to arriving for parkrun and went down for breakfast soon after it opened at seven. By 7:50 I was back in my room, changed, armed with my barcode wristband and doing my best to wear a hole in the carpet. I didn’t want to get there too early, winter is cold in Berlin. I was holding myself rigidly to the quarter past departure time.
At 10 past I broke and put my running shoes on and left my room. I’ll just take it a little easier on the run there. That’s when it started to go wrong. In the hour since I had breakfast the lifts had gone through some sort of crisis of confidence. I could hear them stopping at floors above and below me, but no doors opened to the 14th floor. I tried the stairs, thinking I would go down a floor and catch one there. In an effort to stop access to the upper floors without a key though, and assuming nobody would ever want to take the stairs from that high, the door handles only worked on one side. Access out of the stairwell was only possible on the ground floor! Thankfully I noticed and darted back through the door before it closed. But now I was back staring at four sets of stubbornly still closed lift doors and the taunting illuminated down button. There was only one option..I pressed the up button. Seconds ticking past like minutes, a lift car arrived and I hopped in next to a german gentleman rolling his eyes at the fool who got in a lift that was going six floors in the wrong direction.
As I finally got my ride a couple had turned up waiting to go down. By now it was after 8:20 and I was starting to stress but decided to angrily jab the button for floor 14. For the few seconds it would take to stop, I would save them a long wait for breakfast. Speaking of breakfast, that was where half the hotel seemed to be going. After reaching the top we stopped twice to pick up guests before reaching my floor again. To my horror, nobody got in! I will never know if they had jumped in a different one going up, or if the down lift was mere seconds from finally arriving when I gave up. Needless to say there was another german eye roll at the lift stopping for no reason. In fact, this guy managed at least 4 more eye rolls or tuts before we got to the ground floor as more hungry holidaymakers joined us.
The cold Berlin air hit me at almost half past 8 and I got my Garmin set to the route I had programmed the night before. I was late, but I should still get there on time without turning myself inside out. Just as long as I don't get lost...
So at the second junction I got lost. In short, my head and eyes told me straight on, my watch said I was in the wrong place so, naturally, I listened to my watch and ended up with a needless detour involving a dead end at the river and a few of my best German swear words. Lesson learnt, don’t trust the GPS when surrounded by tall, GDR era, concrete buildings.
Thankfully the rest of the journey was uneventful. I met a Brit at the pedestrian crossing by the park who was now living near Alexanderplatz. He has spotted me and my parkrun apricot T and seen me go the wrong way. If one more person had got in that stupid lift he might have caught me and stopped me making a wrong turn!
When we got to the disused Cafe in the park the run briefing was already underway. For anyone not familiar with Berlin, being able to speak german isn’t a requirement for survival. In the more tourist areas you hear more american, english and spanish accents than you do german and there seems to be a huge number of international residents in the city. I shouldn’t have been surprised to hear the run brief being given in german and english. Each line spoken first in german, then in lightly accented english. It was quite handy actually, I tested myself as I listened. Combining my beginner german with what I expect to hear in a parkrun brief got me fairly close!
Next, even more impressively were two separate new starter/visitors briefs, one in german and one in english (I was a little disappointed not to continue working on my ear for german but I probably was too tired for that anyway). The route started and finished fairly centrally and joined the perimeter path clockwise for about a lap and a half before turning back into the middle and coming into the start/finish the same direction we had set off. To make up the 5km there was a small loop done on the second lap only which meant you had a short section of path that you actually ran on three times. Apparently this loop had the courses big hill as well.
Hasenheide (google tells me this means Hare heath) park is known as the place where the German gymnastic movement began in the early 1800’s with Prussia’s first gymnasium. The park was also rebuilt for the 1936 Olympics. I think it is quite fitting, and feels typical of Berlin, that it’s only parkrun is in an unassuming patch of greenery, away from the city centre that has a long connection with sport and is also touched by the stain on the nations history. The hill itself, to be summited on lap two, was made from a 69 meter high pile of rubble from world war II with a memorial to the "debris women'' who were primarily responsible for the clean up located at the park entrance.
Enough history, back to the run! Strava shows that my easy jog to the start had actually been sub 7 minute mile pace as I panicked to get there on time. Let’s call that “well warmed up”. Nevertheless I put myself optimistically on the third row behind what seemed like a full squad of ex-pat brits. There was a head to head brewing between an experienced hand and a young upstart. Unfortunately they were both dressed in the same shirt so keeping track of the battle from afar proved almost impossible.
I was expecting to hear "drei, zwei, eins, Gehen!", but no, with the standard issue parkrun "three, two, one, GO!" We were away. It looked like it was going to be a sharp battle at the front!
The paths in the park were mostly hard packed earth with the occasional section of small, but smoothly laid cobbles. With the cold but dry conditions of late January my road shoes were fine (thankfully, as I hadn't even considered I might need something else!). I think it would take a long period of sustained heavy rain, or some of Berlin's infamous snow before anything resembling trail shoes was called for.
The whole route was easy to follow. A fork left then a right turn had us on the perimeter loop. Both turns were signposted and there were plenty of regulars around to follow, even if few of them seemed to be speaking german. The route was pretty clear to follow all the way, even when it came to negotiating the area around the “lap two only loop”. I saw the marshall stood waving the sign to say lap 1 straight on (well, it actually had an arrow pointing up and the word “eins”), propped up next to him were two more signs which must have been for lap two to direct us up the hill then onwards to finish the course. What was missing was the turn off for the loop. All I could see was a brick wall next to him, a very tall, short wall made of small cobblestone like bricks. You have probably seen where this is going...yup, that was the impossibly steep looking path for lap two! Luckily that was Future Matt's problem.
The first lap itself is almost completely flat. There is a small dip through what looks like a wide, and now permanently empty, riverbed or long narrow lake (I am probably wrong about that. In Berlin, there seems to be a great story about almost every building or feature waiting to be discovered). Just after the quick up and down, the runners are taken past the zoo. This park really is full or surprises, so if goats and fallow deer are your thing make sure you swing by after your run, but maybe stay downwind of the animals if you can, for their sake.
The bulk of the loop is on wide tree lined paths so there is no need to worry about colliding with dog walkers or prams, plenty of room for everyone. The southernmost stretch of the route runs parallel to Columbiadamm; a wide road separating Hasenheide from Tempelhorfer Feld. Once an airport, particularly important to Berlin during the 1948/9 blockade, the planes finally stopped in 2008 and it is now a large public space (just don't mention the replacement airport to any of the locals!)
Turning away from Columbiadamm the route quickly reaches familiar territory as lap two starts, and this means the hill is coming. I saw some flashes of colour through the trees to my right that could have been the battle at the front. I was then in the most congested part of the course. For perhaps 50m there is an overlap with the route to the bottom of the hill and the way off the other side. Coming through the first time was no problem and I was duly directed up the brick wall to begin my climb. The hill turned out to be good fun. Brutally steep but just short enough that it doesn't stop being funny. Then of course you get to come down the other side!
There was a little bit of zig-zagging on the overlap stretch but nothing that hindered anyone, clearly the regulars had this down to a fine art! From here out it was a simple case of following the same route as before until hitting the arrow pointing right that said “zwei”. Apart from the breathless wheeze of “danke” that I, and a few around me, had been calling to the marshalls these signs were the only German I had come across since the briefing. Luckily, combining my rudimentary grasp of the language with the excellent first timers brief I was able to work out that it meant turn right on lap two!
I dug in for the final stretch, delighted to finish. Thanks to the well placed cones the tokens and finish funnel was a breeze and before I knew it I was standing chatting to all manner of Brits (couldn't seem to find a German) and contemplating my 5km run back to hotel and my odds of getting lost.
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