When I first decided to run a marathon on all seven continents, I had just completed running a marathon in all 50 states.  When people asked me the hardest part of running all of those marathons, I would without hesitation say “logistics”.  The hard part was getting to all the states.  So, without even thinking about it I started on the 7 Continents quest and never considered the “logistics”.  I knew I was going to have to go Antarctica – and wasn’t sure how to do that – but I knew others had to have done it so I thought, “how hard can it be?”  I thought that would be the only tough one to get done.

So, I started to check some off by combining other travel plans with marathons.  To save some logistics, I signed up for a marathon in Switzerland since I was going to be in the area (Italy) anyhow.  I mean, how hard can a marathon in Switzerland be??  I clearly was not thinking that I had never done a trail marathon, let alone one that went over some 9300 foot peaks.

South America (Rio in Brazil) was just a hop skip and a jump from Miami.  Just a little over 12 hours of flying to Panama and then to Rio.

I thought that Asia would end up being an extremely long trip, but, man was I excited to find out that Jerusalem was part of Asia and it was only 11 hours of flying!  I had always wanted to visit the “Holy Land” and I found that they had a marathon…so, I signed up.  Didn’t even look at the course profile.  Nope!  Just booked the flights and signed up for the marathon.

Have you ever heard anything about the “hills of Jerusalem”?  Well I did when I actually started to get some information from the race website and they described the course as “a beautiful, challenging marathon”.  The more I looked into it, it was obvious that the challenge was the hills.

We landed in Tel Aviv at 4:00 am after leaving New Hampshire at 4:00 am the day before and got to bed in the hotel just before sunrise.  When I woke up around 10:00 AM on Saturday morning I could see that the hotel was right on the Tel Aviv beach.  There were quite a few people walking the beach and the strand, but very few cars on the road which surprised me for a nice spring day.  Then, I remembered it was Shabbat.  The Jewish weekend is Friday and Saturday and starting on Friday afternoon at sundown until sundown on Saturday they do not use any electrical or mechanical devices.  It truly is a day of rest.  Almost all of the restaurants and stores are closed for Shabbat so they do not have to work and allows them to go to the synagogue and spend time with family and friends.  That night Maria and I ate at the pizza joint across the street.

The next day we went to Caesarea and saw the ruins of a fortress built by Harrod the Great and Nazareth and finished the day at the Sea of Galilea.  Having been to Europe and seeing buildings that were 400 to 500 years old was amazing.  To walk around places that were thousands of years old was simply amazing and really got you thinking about people who had walked through those buildings.

 

 

On Monday we went to the northern most point of Israel at the Lebanon border to a Town called Rosh Hanikra and went through the grottos formed by the waves.  Even Maria braved the cable car ride that took you down to the caves. We then took the coastal route south to Akko. Then back to Tel Aviv for the night before we left for Jerusalem.

 

Enjoy a few more photos, and stay tuned for Part II of this blog for details on marathon day in Jerusalem!