In the morning we said goodbye to Ülkü, the lady who arranged for half of the team to stay for two days at her house. We sang a song for her and thanked her profusely. She was moved to tears and said: "No, No, we should be grateful for the message you are bringing to Turkey!"

At the local sports stadium we met this morning with 5 Turkish marathon runners. They were very enthusiastic about the World Harmony Run and ran with us for 15 kilometers despite the busy highway.

It was a nice crowd of people moving down the highway with the torch and the flags. Many cars were honking and many people were waving.

It took us a long time to get out of Istanbul. It is such a huge city! It has more than 10 million inhabitants, only a little less than New York.

The rest of the day there were no meetings scheduled. It was Sunday and the schools are closed, so the program was simple: running until the sun sets!

Martin had a little adventure with the police. He had three police cars escorting him, but for no reason they directed him quite confidently away from the main road, without having a clue where the rest of the team was. He got completely lost and the so police dropped him off the nearest police station. The Turkish police have been very kind to us, so we are more than willing to forgive one mistake! They suggested that he just ran off from the police station. They pointed vaguely in the direction that the rest of the team should be, but at that stage the rest of the team was at least 25 kilometers away! Martin, speaking with his hands and feet, managed to get the police to contact another police car that was with us and so they finally succeeded in getting him back to us.

As all of us are taking our holidays to make this running journey so we have to combine life on the road and the holiday-feeling as you can see on this picture. On the middle of the highway we are eating, reading and .... sunbathing!

We passed the city of Corlu and shortly afterwards met with Ronald Prokein and his friend. Ronald is from Germany and is running from Istanbul to the North Cape! He started just yesterday, and is running approximately 70 kilometer every day. Ouch! We definitely know how that feels. We exchanged some nice stories and took pictures.

Ronald and another friend of his actually hold the world record for riding a bike around the world without assistance- it took them 161 days. You can read more about their adventures on www.aufbrechen.de

Today we did the most kilometers we had ever done with this small team: 160. After yesterday's rest each of us was very eager to run, even though it was very hot. The landscape is slowly changing; we are leaving the hills and Mediterranean coasts and entering an area with grassy planes and a lot of farms called Thracia. Feels more like home in the Netherlands!

(Mark, Netherlands)

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Distance: 160km

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