Fran and Dave have been permanent fixtures of The Great Wall Marathon since 2002. The first year, Thomas Thomsen from the Danish Athletic Association was responsible for presentation and execution of the technical meeting two days before the marathon. In those days, the marathon was a purely Danish affair, and Thomas was able to do […]

Preparations not ideal   Training conditions were not ideal for this year’s run. My kind of work is always hectic at this time of year, but that wasn’t all. Emil had been confirmed in April, which required a good deal of preparation. At the same time, the boys had returned from another short trip just […]

I didn’t run that many marathons in the last couple of years of the decade. The annual trip to The Great Wall Marathon was obligatory, of course, but there were other priorities in life, although I did go on training runs.   Particularly radical changes in 2007 caused me to focus less on marathon running […]

Big surprise   My eighth trip to China began with departure on Tuesday 15th May. The group consisted of just nine people, so we quickly got to know each other. As so often before, I flew out with Peter Fredberg, who, most unusually, was travelling without his wife this time. But this was not the […]

Bonus points at play again   During The Great Cruise Marathon in 2004, we met Maria and Robert from Tórshavn. They told me about the Tórshavn Marathon and it attracted my interest already then.   In March 2006, it dawned on me that I had a load of SAS bonus points that were about to […]

Much-needed recovery   More than seven months would pass between my third run in Greenland and my seventh in China. The break was a welcome one, although, throughout the period, I kept on doing light training. This was, of course, stepped up in preparation for the next.     This year I left home on […]

“Official”   I wasn’t actually going to run this marathon, although I had been on the previous incarnations organised by Adventure Marathon. But as time went by, there were so many new initiatives, most of which were repeated year after year. There was no discussion about my running in China every year, but taking part […]

I completed the communicator course of my NLP training in the autumn of 2005. The course is for people who want to acquire the skills required to communicate ideas to large and small groups of people. Just a few years before, it would have been surreal for me to take a course like this. Back […]

The glass was overflowing   The spring of 2005 was a busy and stressful period for me. Our family firm was challenged and faced a battle for survival, and at the same time it was the season for ending the annual accounts and tax returns for clients of my own accountancy firm.   I also […]

New date   All The Great Wall Marathons have been run in May. The first two years, they were on the fourth Wednesday of the month, and the next three years on the fourth Saturday. From 2005, The Great Wall Marathon was run on the third Saturday of May. That was the way it was […]