Hello, my name is Tim Teege
and this is my blog.

Explanation: This post is inspired by a challenge created by Tim Hein and Brady Haran in an episode of their Unmade podcast. The task is to take any picture you took and describe it in exactly a thousand words. I chose one of my favorite moments of the recent few years, just before my win at the Te Houtaewa ultramarathon. At the time I also wrote a more detailed blog post about this race.

And as it’s a podcast, I recorded myself reading this post and sent it to Tim and Brady, maybe it’s interesting enough for them. Here’s the audio.

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At the start of the previous four years, I have set personal goals to reach during those years. For 2020 as well. This particularly weird year is now more than halfway done (and many people hope it will end rather sooner than later). Still, I followed through with my goals as far as I could and will give my halfway point results here.

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There are a few standard distances many endurance runners have on their mind.

• 21.1k half marathon
• 42.2k full marathon
• 50k
• 50 miles (80.5k)
• 100k
• 100 miles (160.9k)

In addition, there are established time-based challenges like a 6-hour run, a 12-hour run, and a 24-hour run.

Above those distances and times, crazier things exist, but I would regard those as unusual. Just a tiny fraction of us ultra runners are up for those, while most of us are mainly interested in these mentioned categories, which also are used to hold national and international championship races. 

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Currently I’m starting my training for the Endurance Trail des Templiers race, which takes place in October in southern France and will feature 106 kilometers in length and 5,125 meters of vertical gain.

Needless to say, it’s going to be tough and I will need to prepare for that quite a bit.

But how to prepare for something like that?

I am also not entirely sure, but from talking to friends who have done similar races I got some helpful tips. Those are not surprising: run a lot, and run up and down some hills a lot.

Also, as I’m guessing the race will take somewhere between 15 and 20 hours for me, I think I should prepare to be able to stay on my feet for a long time.

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I like to shake things up with doing little challenges during the year that are usually supposed to last for a month. It’s fun to follow through with difficult tasks I wouldn’t otherwise manage to complete.

In the past, I have done things like a month of daily planking exercises, a month of eating entirely vegan food, a month of avoiding products with more than 5 percent of sugar, a month of daily 7 minute workouts, and a few other challenges, mostly about nutrition or health.

Because nutrition and exercise are difficult areas to get right.

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One of my annual quests is to do one marathon length run per month. As most of the races are still getting canceled, I need to do this on my own. The only problem is finding routes – a task which is usually done by the race staff of the races I sign up for. But during COVID-19 times, I have to do this myself and get creative.

To be honest, I think it’s a bit annoying. I’m certainly no navigational expert and I have not much of an interest to become one. It’s great that smartphones and tracking watches do most of the work these days, but I still find it distracting to re-orient myself every few hundred meters of a long run in an unknown area, losing the flow of running, and, in the worst of circumstances, having to track back to the route when I get lost.

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From the time I was a little school boy and up until just a few years ago, I had a weird morning habit. Drinking one liter of cold 3.5 percent milk, enriched with a significant amount of Caotina cocoa powder. Every morning, this got me going. People laughed at me, I didn’t care. Never change a running system, right?

No, actually not right.

It makes sense to sometimes question habits and rethink or reorganize aspects of life. So, some time in 2016, a few months into my vegetarian experiment, I developed stronger active thoughts about this chocolate milk routine. Does it make sense? Is there a better way?

Switching to smoothies seemed to make the most sense. When they became popular I was intrigued. Putting plants into my body instead of a cow’s breast milk sounds like a good idea. But it’s not that simple. 

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Some might know that I’ve been trying to run at least one marathon per month for a few years now. In 2020, the plan so far looked like this:

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This is a short encore of my post from two weeks ago. Then, I ran the Hamburg Marathon course on the former official date of April 19th, 2020. I liked it, so I did it again, but this time going in the other direction after being inspired by Strava buddy Karsten. It’s funny how different of an experience that is!

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