Early morning: omelette for breakfast at a local café in Ivatsevichi. The grey haven still presides, giving off light drizzles from time to time. We have three great receptions today with warm, appreciative officials, and run with many enthusiastic and athletic kids. It is nice to run on the grass beside or in the middle of the highway, especially if one’s knees need some recuperating, after yesterday’s speed-work.

The highway takes us to Bereza, where we have the honour of meeting the Mayor and having a bunch of children running with us out of the city for a few kilometres.

At midday the long reign of grey skies is broken. Slowly but steadily the rays of the sun pierce the disintegrating cloud cover.

In Kobrin a team of local runners joins us for 12k into the centre, while an enthusiastic reporter takes a ride with us, interviewing Jarek in Russian and Dipavajan in fluent German. At the City Hall the city representatives receive us with bun-bread and invite us for lunch.

The highway gets more serious towards Brest. That is, it gets wider, with security fencing and more traffic.

Brest: a spacious city with solid architecture interspersed with the verdure of fresh trees. We run to the city border, to the sound of a military orchestra playing for us. As they play they pass the torch from hand to hand.

Here we also meet officials and receive a florally glazed bun-cake. Then a group of kids joins us for a very impressive continuous 14k run. First up is a long stretch of straight highway cutting through the city. We can see the end of it from the start, 10k away. Phew! But the journey is not finished there, for we continue along tree-lined alleyways until we traverse a large paved plaza, at the end of which stands a great black gate. The passageway is a soviet star.

We run through the star and a great park opens up before us, a huge black face looming in the distance behind the trees. This mountainous monument is the place of our ceremony, where the city representatives receive us, and the military orchestra plays for us again. Here we can also observe a very high obelisk and an orthodox church. To the sound of haunting music we respectfully walk up a series of steps to place a basket of roses at the city’s eternal flame.

The city provides us with accommodations and dinner. Thank you!

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Distance: 156km

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