In Berlin, the administration of the event was so efficient, that it was no problem changing my entry from "power walker" to "laufer" runner. It was a little more difficult once inside the entrant's area to work out where the change rooms, bag drops, etc were in German but that's a different story.
However changing my Istanbul Marathon entry from marathon to 15km run proved more difficult. I can fortunately read a bit of Turkish: enough to say quite İngilizce biliyor musunuz convincingly quickly followed by Burada İngilizce konuşan birisi var mı?. Both those phrases are quite useless when someone answers "hayir" (no) and I end up saying "bye bye" as I hang up the phone to someone gabbling away in Turkish.
Fortunately the cafes outside my office are run by Turks so I was off to The Grubberie for a helping hand. It turns out at some point I had been running some factory but they eventually got through and after a bit of chat and a lot of me confirming "on beş" it was all sorted. In that it can't be sorted, so on paper I am still a marathon entrant I must just make sure I follow the correct signs to the finish.
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