It's Wednesday noon, and the streets of Copenhagen are busy in the way they always are; commuters, cyclists, the ordinary rhythm of a city going about its day.
In four days, these same streets will be lined ten deep with people screaming.
This is where we meet Jacob Simonsen. Not on a start line, not in a race bib, but out here on the course itself, walking us through it. Denmark's fastest marathon runner. 2 hours, 7 minutes, and 51 seconds. An average of 3:01 per kilometre, a speed most people cannot sustain for a single minute, let alone 42 of them.
He's not running Copenhagen this year. But if you are, there is nobody better to ask. This is his city, his course, and he knows exactly what it will ask of you on Sunday. So we asked him: how to run it perfectly?
The morning of a race starts earlier than most people's nights end.
Four to five hours before the gun goes off, Jacob is awake. The hotel room is quiet. The city outside is dark. He's sitting alone eating cold rice with honey - or yoghurt, or bread, depending on the day, two cups of slowly brewed coffee, and aioss to get the system moving.
"It's quite interesting," he says. "Eating cold rice and honey, alone, at 4am in a hotel room in a random city."
He pauses. Smiles.
"To make up for it, I always bring my own coffee grinder, beans, and AeroPress. It makes it feel a little more like home."
Being a professional doesn't make the nerves go away. If anything, it makes them more complicated.
Jacob struggles with them genuinely. Enough that they disturb his sleep the night before. Enough that he's built an entire pre-race system around managing them.
"My nerves are a blessing and a curse. It's great to have adrenaline rushing through my body, but too much of it ruins your performance. You need just the right amount, and I constantly work at finding that for myself."
When the nerves arrive they settle in his chest, tightening around his pecs. He stretches them out deliberately before they take hold. Then headphones on, lying down, working through a visualisation, tuning into the feelings he wants during the race, pairing it with breathwork, building the version of himself that needs to show up at the start line.
Light. Positive. Present.
"It can be so hard to actually enjoy a marathon. But that is exactly what I train my brain to do."
We're standing on Dronning Louises Bro. On race day this bridge becomes something else entirely - a wall of noise, hundreds of people pressed together, the kind of energy that hits a runner like a wave. Jacob knows exactly what it does to him. He plans for it.
The race, in his mind, is never 42 kilometres. It's a series of smaller distances, each with its own point of focus. The next water station. The crowd on this bridge. The turn he knows is coming. He never thinks about the finish line until it's almost there.
"I think many people overthink their race, especially in the days leading up to it. That's when I try to shut my brain off. Watch a movie. Have a great coffee. Trust the work I've put in. Overthinking it at that point only makes you more nervous."
And when the dark thoughts arrive mid-race - which they do, always before the physical pain - he returns to the present. How the body feels right now. How his feet feel hitting the ground. What's the next checkpoint.
And then there's the water bottle.
"The pictures of my family are one of those little reminders that keep me smiling when things are challenging. I know who's standing at the finish line. I know what truly matters to me. It makes the struggle easier to face, somehow."
We end where the finish line will be. In four days, thousands of people will cross it, legs empty, hearts full, having learned something about themselves they couldn't have learned any other way.
Jacob won't be among them this year. But in a sense he'll be out there anyway - in every runner who manages their nerves properly, trusts their preparation, breaks the course into pieces, and remembers on the hardest kilometre why they started.
"A marathon is a journey you learn from every single time," he says, looking down the finishing straight. "Not just physically, personally. I think that's why so many people are drawn to it. To get to know themselves better."
He knows these streets better than anyone. On Sunday, they're all yours.
