No 10K

I had planned to take part in a 10K in the village of Neukirchen near Grevenbroich. This meant getting the S-Bahn from Cologne (where I was staying) to Neuss Süd and then a bus to Neukirchen. Bus frequency on Saturdays was one every hour, and I would have 8 minutes between train and bus. Rushed to the Hauptbahnhof forgetting my safety pins, gloves and sports drink only to discover that the S-Bahn was going to be 15 minutes late. It looked bad but I hoped the train might make up some time on the 40-minute journey and nipped back to the hotel for the safety pins, still forgetting about the gloves and sports drink. As it turned out, the train was still 15 minutes late when it got to Neuss Süd. There was of course no sign of the bus so I looked around for a taxi and also found a shop that sold sports drinks. No taxi turned up, so that was that. I should really have stayed on the train into Neuss and got one there.

I decided to head out to Neukirchen anyway to see what conditions were like (it had snowed overnight) and had walked about halfway there before the next bus turned up. There were some cross-country races on the schedule as well and I thought maybe if the conditions underfoot were reasonable I might give it a go. The 10K - four laps of an absolutely flat but windswept course in the bitter cold - had already been going for about 10 minutes by the time I got there, and various international cross-country teams were arriving for the other events. I had a look at the cross-country course and decided there was no chance of navigating it without spikes, and certainly not four hours later when the only other race I was eligible for was due to start. The organisation of the whole event was superb, though, and it had attracted teams from England, the Netherlands and Switzerland. Due to the weather, the road 10K apparently had a poorer turnout than in previous years. The winning time was 36:02 and even then the winner was a couple of minutes clear of second place.