By Harry Minium

BERLIN, Germany – Around mile three or so of the BMW Berlin Marathon I first heard it.

“Run for Ginny, Harry.”

I pressed on for 23.2 more miles, and heard similar words at least 100 more times. Each time, I struggled to control my emotions. People touched their hearts as I passed them. Young mothers with children gazed at me with knowing looks.

And I ran and cried buckets.

When you lose a daughter, you want her to be remembered. And on Sept. 24, 2023, Mary Virginia Minium was remembered by thousands of Berliners. 

Ginny, as we called her, was a 20-year-old Old Dominion University student who died of a drug overdose 23 years ago. In the early morning of June 4, 2000, a long-time drug addict came into our house, injected her with heroin, then panicked and ran when she passed out.

My then wife, Gail, and I performed CPR on Ginny when we found her the next day, but it was far too late. The man who killed our daughter was never brought to justice. 

I wore a shirt in the marathon that said, “I Run for Ginny,” with her senior picture from Cox High School on the front and her birth and death dates on the back.

The night before the race, my dear German friend, Kerstin, sewed American and German flags on my sleeves with a needle and thread from my mother’s old sewing table. My mother so adored her grandchild and besides showing my love for Germany and America, I wanted to take a bit of Mom into the race with me.

I’ve worn the same shirt in other races. It never generated much feedback.

But this is Berlin, where people have big hearts and aren’t afraid to express themselves. It’s called the City of Freedom, where you can do virtually anything you want to as long as you don’t hurt anyone, and where people overwhelm you with kindness.

I was stopped at about mile 18 by a race announcer, Peter, who pulled me aside. I was annoyed until I saw he was choked up. “You lost your child,” he said. “I have four children. I can’t imagine losing one.”

I was dripping with sweat, but he hugged me and held on. I hugged him back.

Ginny’s death was neither the beginning nor the end of the many haymakers that life laid on me.

In 1999, I was mugged in Norfolk by four men who hit me in the back of the head with a hammer and tossed me through a privacy fence. I was knocked out and woke up to the sound and feel of being beaten with wooden clubs. Please don’t kill me, I begged. I have two daughters.

They didn’t stop until some people nearby screamed that they had called the police.

I saw my parents die when I was young. My brother died six days after my mom and 10 months after we lost our daughter. Ginny was sexually assaulted on a school bus in middle school and Gail and I believe the depression that followed led to her drug abuse.

My youngest daughter, Amy, was in a coma for much of two weeks when she was 10 and nearly died. Unconscious but somehow aware, she heard doctors say they didn’t think she would live. It took years, but she managed to recover physically. Emotionally, she still struggles.

A parent deals with the death of a child for a lifetime, and I have been consumed with grief and anger at so many people for so many years.

I first came to Berlin in the summer of 2022 to try to process those feelings, as well as an impending divorce. 

At that time, I was among nearly 2,000 Germans and a handful of people from other countries who volunteered to feed Ukrainian refugees fleeing the Russian invasion.

I was there a month, and it was where I met my German friends, Kerstin and Nancy, two people who have had an enormous impact on my life.

Nancy was the beating heart of the feeding effort sponsored by the city of Berlin and Berliner Stadtmission, a Christian charity that cares for the downtrodden in this diverse city of four million people. 

A Muslim woman who you can see from a mile away because of her colorful hijabs, Nancy was beloved by everyone under the tent, as we called the feeding area. She was loved because of her work ethic and ability to weather the heartbreak we saw every day, because she is always positive, upbeat and faithful.

Her smile melts the hardest heart.

She’s a bit of a tomboy as well as a workaholic. And she became my close friend. The odd couple – a Christian from America and Muslim from Germany. We often compared bruises from carrying boxes of bananas from a storage area to the feeding area.

She tips the scales at just over 100 pounds, yet hefted 50-pound boxes of fruit.

She had lost her father not too long before she began to volunteer in the tent and was devastated by the wars and atrocities occurring around the globe. Her words then ring so true today given the tragedies occurring in Israel and Gaza. 

“There’s so much hatred out there,” she said. “It’s so ugly all over the world.

“But here, in the tent, every day, every single day, restores my faith in humanity.

“You see so many people here from so many different backgrounds, people who are beautiful on the inside, people who’ve shown so much kindness that it gives me hope.”

The tent closed more than a year ago, but she continues to feed the hungry at a Stadtmission homeless shelter on her days off from work. She is an angel.

Kerstin is a native of East Berlin, but was raised partly in Bulgaria, where she went to a Russian-speaking school. Because of her language skills, she volunteered to interpret for the Ukrainian refugees, nearly all of whom spoke Russian.

Translators had the most difficult job under the tent. Refugees often boarded a train in Ukraine and unloaded in Berlin and thus the pain of what they experienced was still raw.

Most of the translators I’m still in touch with are dealing with PTSD-like symptoms because they can’t quite process the awfulness revealed to them.

When Kerstin counseled Ukrainians – and “counseled” is the right word, because the refugees needed more than just a sympathetic ear – she heard stories of rape, torture and murder, not unlike stories we’re hearing from Israel. So many she counseled sat in underground shelters for months as Russians bombs and artillery shells fell around them.

Holding crying women and grandmothers was difficult,  she said, but children were the most heart-wrenching to care for. Some had seen so much death and destruction that they were unresponsive.

She remembers one autistic girl who would not play with other kids, but often spoke with Kerstin. When she walked the girl to the bus heading to a registration center for refugees, Kerstin said “she hugged me and wouldn’t let go.”

Kerstin left, then sprinted back with a teddy bear. A bear - part of so many Russian and Ukrainian fairy tales and stories - is a comforting figure for Russian and Ukrainian kids.

“She was beaming all over when I gave it to her,” Kerstin said. “I told her that it would take care of her.”

Kerstin and others from her government office gathered hundreds of toys, dolls, stuffed animals and games for kids, in addition to medical supplies for the refugees. 

On the evening of Sept. 20, 2022, the feeding center closed permanently at midnight. A Ukrainian stood up and thanked the Germans for all of their help. They drank champagne. Many cried.

Then a Ukrainian woman walked in half an hour later. The mission was over. But she had missed her bus and was all alone in Berlin. She broke down crying because she thought, in the tent, that she would be cared for.

And she was, even if it meant breaking the rules. Kerstin comforted her while another staff member arranged temporary housing. Then, they put her on the last bus to Tegel Airport, where a refugee registration was located. 

“We knew she would have a safe place to stay,” said Kerstin.

We texted that night until nearly 2 a.m. while Kerstin was on the S-Bahn train headed to her apartment. She cried most of the way home. Kerstin knew grief. She lost her father and best friend, a former high school classmate, not long before the tent opened.

Today, she continues to give of herself, working with refugees from Ukraine, Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Moldova.

She has also befriended Inna, who helped her pick out the bear. Inna had lost her husband to cancer and fled Kyiv when the war started with her young daughter.

Kerstin has helped Inna with social benefits and employment and helped get her daughter enrolled in a school where her musical talent is blossoming. And they’ve become close friends.

A day after the tent closed, at a commemoration ceremony, a young man called the 2,000 volunteers “superheroes.”

It’s because of a couple of superheroes named Kerstin and Nancy that I chose their city for my first marathon.

On race day, Kerstin and I met Nancy just outside the Berlin Central Train Station, where the Stadtmission tent had been located a year ago. It felt right to meet at a place that meant so much to all of us.

Just before heading to the starting line, I impulsively told them a little about my deceased family members.

My mom, Sadie, grew up in dire poverty, raised four sons and after my father died, got her teaching degree from ODU and taught the rest of her life. She died in 2001 because of a medical mistake.

My brother, Mike, sports editor of The Daily Press, was a wonderful husband and father of four with a kind heart, a ribald sense of humor and a brilliant mind. He was 43 when he died of esophageal cancer.

My dad, Harry Sr., was born in 1907 and became a father when he was 54. He had a stroke when I was in my early 20s and died not too many years later. I didn’t get to know him as well as I would have liked, but it was from my Daddy that I acquired my work ethic and my love of Germany.

Ginny was a rambunctious kid who was at times raw and uncouth – she would belch if conversations got too serious. She was equal parts daredevil and fragile little girl with a very kind heart. And she was beautiful, inside and out. I still have nightmares about the day I gave her CPR. 

Kerstin and Nancy hugged me and I sprinted through the Tiergarten toward the runners.

It was 10:30 a.m. when I crossed the starting line.

I had doubts about finishing the race. To start with, I’m 70 and had never run a marathon.

“You gotta be freaking kidding me,” said Dr. Bradley Butkovich, an orthopedic surgeon and the ODU football team doctor, when I told him I was running in Berlin.

“Promise me this is your last marathon.”

Let’s see if I live through this one first, I replied.

Dr. Brad kept me going with a cortisone shot in one knee and two doses of steroids to reduce the swelling in my knees and ankles.

I was treated for plantar fasciitis and a strained thigh muscle at ODU Monarch Physical Therapy by Lisa Koperna, clinical director there, who gave me sage advice. Give yourself a full year to train and include a ton of cross training. Spend more time in the gym on the elliptical and bike than you do running.

I also had to wrangle a place in the marathon. You don’t simply enter the Berlin Marathon – there is a lottery for the coveted 48,000 places in the race. 

I found a back door: I raised more than $3,000 for the American Cancer Society, thanks to dozens of very generous friends on Facebook, and it guaranteed me entry. And in August of 2022, I began my training.

Websites I consulted said that I needed to run 22 miles at least once before the 26.2-mile marathon, but 17 miles was the longest I managed. I was so exhausted at the end of that workout that I could not run another mile, much less nine. 

So, with doubts about whether I could finish the race, I packed my bags and headed to Germany’s capital.

When I confided to Kerstin that I had doubts, she smiled. “The people of Berlin will turn out by the tens of thousands and cheer you on,” she said. “That will give you the motivation to finish.” 

I was skeptical.

The crowd cheered as we took off running through the Tiergarten. It is an awesome feeling to begin a road race through a city filled with so much history. A young woman from South Africa hugged me, and I bumped fists with so many others. The camaraderie was amazing.

My early pace of 7.79 kilometers per hour was slow for most, but incredibly fast for me. I calmed down and slowed down and focused, ignoring the pain in my legs. It would be a long slog.

The circular course gave us all a taste of the diversity of the city, from the posh neighborhoods of West Berlin to the more Bohemian Kreuzberg and the Arab and Turkish communities in Neukölln. Berlin is far more international than most of Germany and techno and alternative music and the alternative lifestyle run in the city’s DNA.

No matter where you look in Berlin, you see graffiti.

I choked up as we ran past the Kaiser-Wilhelm Memorial Church, bombed during World War II and left in that condition as a monument for peace. It is a stirring memorial to the madness of war.

We meandered across the Spree River several times and through Berlin neighborhoods where techno clubs stand a block away from luxury stores and high-rise apartments. 

Along the way, bands played, clowns danced, thousands sat drinking cold beer and even a few American-style cheerleaders urged us all on. Hundreds of children held out their hands to slap the hands of runners. 

Training for a marathon can be a lonely endeavor. Running alone with your thoughts, and whatever music you’re listening to, for four or five hours.

But not so here. I chatted with runners along the way, including a guy from Chicago. I told him I was from Virginia. His sister, Gabby, he said, lives in Norfolk and works at ODU. 

What a coincidence, I replied. I live in the Norfolk area and work at ODU, too.

The leg cramps and sore knees hit me at mile 18, the longest I’d ever run, and I slowed down. I had hoped to finish in less than five hours but knew then it would take more than six. “The course will be shutting down soon,” warned a guy with a loudspeaker at mile 22.
But quitting wasn’t an option. Not with my Berliner Stadtmission family urging me on.

Verena Hoffmann, who had been a supervisor under the tent, stepped onto the course and popped a balloon in my face at about mile five. I was shocked but so moved that I turned after running past her and kissed her cheek. 

Knowing my tortoise-like pace, I had joked with Nancy and Kerstin that they could tour a museum, have lunch and watch a movie before meeting me at the finish line.

Nancy had other ideas. After stopping for a quick coffee, they walked their own marathon, 8.7 miles over six hours, catching the S-Bahn to seven different parts of the course where they stopped and cheered me on. Each time they brought me fresh water, a hug and even a few Mars Bars. 

How could I not finish?

At mile 25, I turned down the Unter den Linden, the historic road where the Brandenburg Gate is located for the stretch run. I kissed the Brandenburg Gate as I passed underneath and then heard hundreds of people cheering as I headed back into the Tiergarten.

“Harry, you run for Ginny.” “Ginny would be so proud.” “We love you Harry.”

I was floored. How did these people know who I was before I got there? I looked up and saw I was on the Jumbo Tron.

I can’t begin to describe the emotions of that moment.

These people had been there for eight hours – the race began 90 minutes before the slow runners were allowed to hit the course – and yet they stayed to cheer on even those who dragged themselves across the finish line.

I was all cried out when I saw Kerstin taking a video of me near the finish line. I hugged her and said, “You were right.”

I finished in six hours, 32 minutes and 48 seconds. A terrible time, but who cares? I finished.

I knelt for a quick prayer and then screamed, Ich liebe Berlin (I love Berlin). 

As I walked away the announcer said over the loudspeaker, “Harry, you ran for Ginny.” I thought of Gail, my ex-wife, and all the pain she’s been through and wished she’d been able to hear Ginny’s name being shouted.

My other daughter, Amy, was back in Virginia Beach. She could not get the marathon App to work to track me, so she texted and asked, “Where are you dad?” Just then, the App clicked. “I fixed it!! I see you running!! You’re almost there!!! Go dad!!! You can do it.”

She had been worried about me taking on 26.2 miles and was relieved I’d crossed the finish line in one piece.

She worries about her father a lot. Interestingly, it was her concern about me that first led me to Berlin.

I intended to go to Poland and Lithuania in 2022 to feed refugees with a church group. But when she expressed fears about my safety, I reluctantly decided to choose a city farther from the front lines.

Then a friend, Leslie Spruance, and I were hiking through First Landing State Park when she told me she had relatives feeding refugees in Berlin. I got in touch and bought a plane ticket.

Had Amy not worried about me, I would not have met my friends in Berlin.

I didn’t quite know all the reasons I signed up for the race until Kerstin asked me in late August, “Harry, why are you running a marathon?”

Good question.

It was to honor Ginny, I replied, but Kerstin’s question made me question myself.

I realized that I wanted to show everyone, including myself, that at age 70 I was still alive after all I’d been through. Thanks to God’s grace, I survived.

I made it through all of the crap life dished out and was still standing, able to run a marathon and honor my daughter all these years after she died.

Some of the hate in my heart vanished in Berlin. Jesus often said that unless you forgive others, God will not forgive your sins. Easier said than done, of course. Hate has lived in my heart so long.

Berlin helped me to forgive.

As Nancy, Kerstin and I ate dinner that evening, I remembered something Kerstin told me earlier that week.

“You’ll never forget your daughter. You’ll always love her and miss her,” she said.

“But life is short. Try not to focus on the pain of the past. Look forward to the good times you will experience in the future. Look ahead to the rest of your life.”

I have been looking forward ever since.

A Norfolk native and resident of Virginia Beach, Minium is a former Virginian-Pilot reporter and columnist who is senior executive writer for athletics at Old Dominion University. Contact him at hminium@odu.edu