You know, it’s hard to get me to go visit even my dear friends without some sort of hook. It’s a character flaw and I’m working on it. But so it was clever of Matt Martin, currently working in Turkey, to send Shaun and I an invite to come run the Istanbul 15K with him.

The visit was something of a whirlwind: we flew into Turkey on Friday and left Monday morning. That is not enough time to adjust to the 8-hour time difference, and so the whole trip we were in something of a haze. And even though we were staying right in the oldest part of town (8,000 years old) we didn’t do as much historical-site visiting nor informational-plaque reading as I would normally do. But we did eat plenty of good food, visit the Grand Bazaar, and run from Asia to Europe.

And then our trip back was completely uneventful, except the part where one of the jet engines on our plane failed and so we landed in Gander, Newfoundland and spent the night there…

My photos from the trip.

Our podcast about the race.

Official Results:

Time: 1:34:21
Place: 2346 / 4188
Place in Sex: 1976 / 3075