The Berlin marathon starts the coming sunday at 9AM. So when my iPod nano died about four weeks ago, there really was no reason to stop my preparations. I used the iPod for listening to music (obviously), keeping track of the distance I ran and competing in Nike+ challenges. I have no problems running without music, I have an additional Garmin Forerunner 301 to measure the distance, which I know anyway due to running the same tracks most of the time.

But the challenges … What happened was that I felt “cheated”. I was running, I gained miles, but they wouldn’t count. If they don’t count, I won’t run!

Of course I was aware that this was a pretty stupid approach. But my motivation was somewhat gone. After all attempts to repair the iPod had failed the only escape proved to be to wait for the arrival of the new versions that had been announced a couple of days after the demise of mine. I grabbed one as soon as I could from my local dealer and hit the road again, trying to catch up with the other runners. During the three gadget free weeks I only managed to do two short runs of about 12km each.

So it seems my main source of motivation for the marathon is neither achieving something nor health nor fun. It is other people I don’t even know.