Outdoors

It’s our fourth day in Malta and I’ve yet to hit the trails. Excuses kept conveniently presenting themselves.

“What if the weather turns and I get caught in a storm on the coast?”

“Running doesn’t seem particularly popular here. I don’t want to stick out like a sore thumb with my red running vest.”

“I just don’t feel like it.”

My excuses are fruitless this Wednesday morning. There’s nothing more than a gentle breeze in the air and the sun is shooting through a clear sky like a tractor beam pulling me outside. I decide to just pick a route off Komoot and get my ass out the door.

Welcome to Hydra, a Greek island a couple of hours off the coast of Athens. This is a place that holds a special place in my heart for two reasons.

1. It’s car-free. So no douchebags speeding around with their crotch rockets or in their military-sized vehicles as if their fragile masculinity gives license to pollute our air and clog up our streets! (I have thoughts about this, if you couldn’t tell.)
   
2. It’s the last place we visited before the COVID lockdown began, so memories of that trip kept us going at a time when it seemed like every cough was a deathly omen.

While on Hydra, we saw an advertisement for a trail race. We thought “Hey! We loved it so much, let’s come back next year for the race!”

Next year didn’t happen. But in the year of our pandemic, 2022, Hydral’s Trail Event, as it’s very literally called, was a go.

Last Fall, just days before the big shutdown started, I went on one last trip to run the Märkischer Landweg trail from Templin to Angermünde across the state of Brandenburg. I had vacation days to kill and itchy feet that wouldn’t do well sitting at home all day. There was plenty of that to come anyway.

So I hopped on the train in Berlin for an hour ride north to Templin––a gateway of sorts to Brandenburg’s Uckermark region, a vast chunk of land left remarkably untouched considering its proximity to Berlin. This land has seen glaciers from the Ice Age, Slavic tribes, the Holy Roman Empire, and Prussia before turning into a battleground during World War II, leaving many of its towns severely damaged.

On the day I was out there, it was blissfully quiet and I couldn’t think of any other place I’d rather be than Templin where I set off on a 30-kilometer run to Ringenwalde. You know. For fun.

Disclosure: I traveled in part as a guest of Reiseland Brandenburg. As always, all opinions are my own.

What’s in your backyard?

A silver lining in this pandemic has been the opportunity to explore my new backyard around Berlin. Just east of Berlin sits the town of Buckow surrounded by Nature Park Märkische Schweiz.

Disclosure: I traveled in part as a guest of Thüringen Entdecken. As always, all opinions are my own.

The Thuringer Forest, like any forest, has two stories––one with people and one without people.

Without people, it developed naturally for thousands of years. But the forest has changed over the past 1,000 years since humans started penetrating the forest for its timber and ore.