I ran a 10k!

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When I arrived in Bochum, I saw tons of posters for something called the Bochum Urban Trail, which is a 10k race that was held yesterday! I convinced Megan to do it with me, and we've been training for pretty much all of June. I have to say, it exceeded my expectations!

We took most of our photos before getting all sweaty :)

I knew that it was an urban race, but I wasn't prepared to actually run through the buildings! We saw so many cool places, like the Planetarium, the Ruhr Congress, an art museum, a petting zoo, and a bunch of local companies. We also got to run backstage through the Starlight Express, which is a roller skating show that's super popular here. It's sort of like Disney on Ice, except with roller skates and a different play to go along with it.

We ran through a church! This photo is so blurry because I was still running ðŸ˜‚

There was also live music in a lot of the buildings, and some people even paused their run to start a dance party! The whole community was super supportive, whether they were just spectating, holding out their garden hose to give us a mist, cheering us on with pom poms, or volunteering with logistics.

We even got to run through the Bochum soccer stadium and take a picture with the mascot! I'm not totally sure what he is though... Also all the water hoses felt amazing but it was so hard to see out of my glasses after!

Another very cool aspect was that when we were running through the "party" part of town, they served nonalcoholic beer at the water station! It was inside one of the bars, and was actually a mix of 0.0% beer and sprite (called a Radler). It made the rest of the race a little uncomfortable because of all the carbonation sloshing around, but I couldn't get that experience anywhere else so I'm glad we took it!

Post race! Everyone on the train was so sweaty and gross, but the mood was so celebratory that it was actually really fun :)

Definitely a great experience, even though my GPS said it was closer to 13 kilometers (8 miles) than 10! Maybe when I get back to Colorado I'll feel adventurous to try a half marathon ;)

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