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North Korea is one of the world’s most isolated and shuttered countries. But the curtain was pulled back a bit last Sunday when I joined 650 other international amateur runners, from about 30 nations, who were allowed in for the second year to run the Pyongyang Marathon.



I signed up through Koryo Tours, a British-run company based in Beijing that has taken tourists to North Korea since the early 1990s. Previously, I had reported sports stories from a number of countries with complicated relationships with the United States, including the former East Germany, Iran, Russia, China and Cuba. Now, as then, I wanted to distinguish the dignity of the North Korean people from the militarism and accused rights abuse of the government.

I was also interested in how Western preconceptions would color the view of what we saw in North Korea. Before the race, family and friends told me not to go. “Wear a Kevlar bib,” one friend said. But as a reporter I wanted to see the country with my own eyes.

A number of runners arrived with trepidation. One told me he had scrubbed the hard drive on his laptop. Another carried the phone number of the Swedish Embassy. Matt Crowe, 28, a runner from England, admitted that he was paranoid because he had dressed as the former Korean leader Kim Jong-il at a party two years ago.

He had put a photo on Facebook. Would the North Koreans know about this?

“Not unless you friended him,” one of our guides said wryly.



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We were allowed to bring in laptops, cellphones and tablets, but not religious materials or flags of the United States, Japan or South Korea. We were also admonished not to take in a mash-up video of Kim Jong-un, the Korean leader, engaged in martial-art combat with President Obama. Definitely off limits was “The Interview,” the assassination comedy that, the F.B.I. said, prompted North Korea to hack into the Sony Pictures computer system.

There were more sports facilities for locals, like basketball and volleyball courts and courses for in-line skating. Recently constructed high-rise apartment towers, our Korean guide told us, are known as the “new Dubai.”

Yet there is a movie-set feel to Pyongyang, the capital, home of North Korea’s elite. We saw wide streets with few cars and massive squares with few people; the Paradise department store with full shelves and a kind of empty opulence; the Pyongyang Golden Lane bowling alley with dim lighting and few bowlers; and the 105-story Ryugyong Hotel, under construction since 1987 and still not open for business.

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The cult of personality of the Kim family is so pervasive that an exhibition center features flowers named kimilsungia and kimjongilia. And the military-first attitude of North Korea is evident even at playgrounds, where miniature missile replicas stand near children’s slides.

The United States is called the imperialist aggressor at the site of the U.S.S. Pueblo, the Navy intelligence ship captured in 1968. At the nearby War Museum, a diorama of the Korean War shows a dead American soldier with a crow preying on his heart and a vulture lingering. But that is the official government position.

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Privately, our North Korean guides said they liked Americans, found them friendly.

The marathon gave us a chance to leave the scripted tour of Pyongyang and run through the streets for more impromptu engagement. A soldier high-fived several runners. Women waved flowers. Children slapped hands as we passed and said, “Nice to meet you.” When I struggled to open a packet of energy gel at a water stop, a woman came to my assistance, slicing off the top with a small knife.

“This type of human connection can’t help but break down something,” said Harrison Diamond Pollock, 24, a Canadian runner. “But you wonder, how true is that connection? How true can it ever be? How do you measure it?”