One of the events that include some big marathons is a morning run the previous day, the so-called “breakfast run”.
When we ran the marathon in Paris, only our friend Serna attended that run. This time we went together and Luca and my brother Jaime waited for us at the end.
The run, a very easy run of almost 6 km, departed in front of the beautiful Palace of Charlottenburg and ended at the Olympia Stadion.
This stadium today hosts Hertha Berlin football matches, but it is better known as the stadium where the summer olympic games of 1936 were celebrated: the first ones televised, inaugurated by Adolf Hitler and the ones in which the athlete Jesse Owens won 4 gold medals.
See below some of the pictures we took during that morning run:
Hopefully the next time we’ll remember to bring either flags or a festive costume as many of the other runners typically do.
See the route we followed from the palace in Charlottenburg to the stadium as recorded by my Germin GPS:
Breakfast run route.
Finally, I found two interesting documents in relation to the stadium and the games:
- The stadium plan [PDF, 1.7 MB] from today’s stadium website. In it you can see the location of the Maifeld (used for Hitler’s government celebrations and during the olympics for the equestrian events), the Bell Tower, the stadium and the Olympischer Platz.
- The official report [PDF, 42.4 MB, 640 pages] of the games. It contains all kind of info about the International Olympic Committee at the time, hundreds of pictures of the Games and all of results of the different events.
The Blog by Javier 