Hi, my name is Tim Teege
and this is my blog. 👋

Have you been thinking about taking your running abilities to the next level? Maybe you’ve already tried a few training plans before, maybe not – but in any case, you’d like to make progress in order to get faster, stronger, or healthier? Best case scenario, all three of those things.

Will getting a personal coach make this process easier? And what’s the deal with that anyways? This post is about my experiment working with a coach and will answer some questions you might have.

First, a bit of my backstory. I have been on a quest to break the magical three hour barrier on the marathon distance for a few years now. Last year, I came very close once (3:00:40) and failed miserably the second time I tried. Both times, I trained myself using public training plans which I had modified to the best of my own knowledge about my body’s ability to improve.

After that fateful failed second try, I thought to myself: “I need help.”

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Boston Marathon Race Report

The Runner’s Race.

For the majority of people, entering this race takes serious commitment and an effort often spanning many years. For some, it’s a lifelong dream never achieved due to its difficulty. That’s because of the immense popularity of the race. Why is that, and is it justified? Find out here!

👉 Do You Plan to, or Have You Already Qualified for Boston Marathon?

Keep on reading, I have some helpful advice for you! And in case you’re not yet dreaming about running Boston some day, you might be going to want to after reading this post.

“Wait, ‘qualify’ for a marathon race?”

Yes, it’s not like you can just head to some website, enter your credit card details and book flights. Before doing that, you need to prove your worth to the Boston Athletic Association (B.A.A.), because there are many more amateur runners who want to run Boston than the maximum of about 30,000 participants allows for.

🎉 Why is the Boston Marathon so Popular?

The Boston Marathon is special in several regards. The main one which is often mentioned first is that it’s been the oldest continuously held marathon race. It’s been going on since 1897, for 127 editions at the time of writing.

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🧑‍🎓 The Season of Learning

Getting right into it, the upcoming winter season will be under the umbrella of learning for me. In the spirit of controlling what one can control and because your own skills and knowledge are the most powerful asset you have, putting a strong focus on it is generally helpful.

For me personally, during the last year and the last few months especially, my lack of knowledge in the field of Sales and [Online] Marketing became more and more apparent. While professionally, I have found strong new partners with skills in those areas, I want to have at least a basic understanding of what they’re doing so I can be a better ally to them.

The way I go about it is reading more specific books and asking knowledgeable people in my social bubbles lots of questions.

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What am I doing here? Why am I doing this?

What makes an activity worthwhile? It can be plain fun, I can be an interesting challenge with which to test yourself and come out the other side stronger, it can be leading to something bigger, a delayed gratification of sorts, but ultimately, it should have a clear purpose which makes it enjoyable.

Since watching the documentary “Unbreakable”, a loving ode to the sport of ultra trail running, the desire in me to one day run the pictured race, the Western States 100 Endurance Run, sparked. At the beginning of 2020, I put it down as one of my goals for the decade.

It’s tough to qualify for the race because it’s so sought after, it takes around 5-8 years on average from starting the qualification process until you are allowed to stand there at the starting line. The annual race lottery can only be entered by proving you have completed an officially sanctioned qualification race in that year. Every year you do so, your chances grow.

To me, this sounded like a fun task. Do one qualifier race per year, sign up for the lottery, cross fingers, lose at the lottery, repeat next year. The races will be great, surely! But I was wrong. Also, I need to rewatch Unbreakable.

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My favorite season of the year is history, the colder days are fast approaching. What a summer it’s been! Not only have us Hamburgers been lucky and enjoyed lots of great weather days, but for me personally, things have gone quite well, too.

Time to take a minute, think about the highs and lows, and make new plans! My next theme for this upcoming fall season has been decided.

🦁 Fall of 2022: The Season of Courage

Coming out of the Summer of Reflection, I was first thinking that reflection should actually be a theme which is worthy of becoming permanent. It’s something I have to remind myself of because the high-stress days just don’t allow for lots of reflection.

For fall, I’m staying with reflection and adding another new value to it, courage. It might not be obvious, but I feel I lack courage in daily life – mostly in the business area. I’ve been running my company for more than 11 years now, but changes have taken a long way to manifest, mainly due to my own restraint and caution. Over the last few years especially, my daily work-life has increased in stressfulness, but decreased in personal fulfillment for me.

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At some point between the start and end of the 2020s, I would like to run a marathon in less than three hours. It’s the next magic barrier which separates the ambitious amateurs from the really ambitious amateur runners. At many big races, you’ll be in the Top 5 percent of the field with such a finishing time. Many smaller races can even be won with a 2:59h.

It’s a fun goal to chase, mainly because it just is quite hard to do.

My first shot at it happened earlier this year at Hamburg Marathon in April, and I almost cracked it. 3:00:40 was my finishing time then, so close and yet so far. I wrote about it here.

Obviously, the story wasn’t over then. The quest continues.

I chose Cologne Marathon because it was conveniently located at the beginning of October, is known to be rather fast, and is easily reachable. Practicability needs to play a role, too!

After Hamburg, a summer of non-focused fun runs transpired. I enjoyed not being bound to a training plan, which is not to say that training plans are not enjoyable. It’s the healthy mix of both that works best.

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New York City. Arguably the greatest city in the world, the center, maybe even the capital of Earth, if there was one.

This is the story about my run around the coast of its central island, Manhattan.

I decided to fly to New York City about five months ahead of the trip, because I needed a break from daily life. Too much of the same, no space to think. Most people would then head to a quiet place, maybe somewhere in the mountains or by the sea, but my preferred change of pace leads me to the United States of America. I have seen the city in person twice before and loved it. New York City has so much to offer, so much convenience, so many possibilities.

One of those is running. While most runners in Manhattan prefer Central Park or a stretch along the Hudson river for a short fitness-boosting run, I was immediately thinking about Manhattan’s perimeter. Along the coast, around the whole main island, is that possible? Turns out, yes. Some people have done it before and there’s an impressive Fastest Known Time set on that route.

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The island of Fehmarn is Germany’s third largest one with an area of 185 km². It’s known for having a sunny sub-climate and therefore it’s a popular holiday destination for Germans in the Baltic Sea, easily reachable via a bridge.

During the summer of 2021, the extended family and I were fortunate to spend a week’s holiday on Fehmarn, enjoying the peace and quiet of the place and the noise of our kids at the same time. We liked it so much we decided to do it again this year, in 2022.

In the meantime, I got the idea of running the perimeter of the island. Around the whole of Fehmarn on the outer most accessible routes, which is about 68 kilometers. Many people have certainly already done this, but according to the fastestknowntime.com stats, the current best is at just 6:33 hours, which I thought would be possible for me to beat.

Then, a few weeks before the holiday, another thing happened. Unfortunately, my father-in-law Peter Huggett died at the age of just 75 after battling the terrible disease of ALS for about two years.

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Half the year is over! Or, in my way of measuring time these days, two quarters of the year are over!

91 days lay between April 1st and June 30th. That’s a timespan long enough to make it possible to see some changes. But first, here are a few of my highlights of these past three months!

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In order to improve anything, you first have to take measure of it.

I’ve long been interested in measuring parts of my life in order to gain knowledge about what works and what doesn’t, but also just out of basic curiosity without any specific goal in mind. One early example I came across was the mathematician Stephen Wolfram, who took this to new extremes. In addition to the basics like weight and sleep, he measures things like how many keystrokes he types in his life, or the time of day he’s most likely to be on the phone.

This type of collecting data is all good fun, but the interesting part is correlating it. That’s the part many of the so-called Big Data companies still don’t get quite right, apart from building the foundation for how their advertising clients could target their audiences. But that’s a different topic.

I’m talking about gaining insight into one’s own habits from these measured data points for one’s own benefit.

Our devices and apps already track so much information about us, but making it truly accessible to us is something that’s seemingly not worth developing for the companies who created the hardware and software.

So, how can we liberate our data?

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The story of the moving goalpost. You should know when to say “enough is enough” and be content with what you have achieved. On the other hand, as Elvis Presley famously said:

Ambition is a dream with a Tesla Model S Plaid engine.

(I might have slightly changed that quote to fit better into today’s era.)

I’ve been running for about 10-12 years by now, 95 percent of the time without any ambition to get any faster. I’m just enjoying running for what it is. The great variety you can have just by changing distance, scenery, or company, is enough usually. But speed, of course, is another aspect of running. Mostly unexplored by me.

Am I able to run a marathon in less than three hours?

Seven years ago, in March of 2015, I did a professional performance diagnostics session at the Asics Running Lab, just for fun. After testing and analyzing every aspect of my body in relation to my current and theoretical running abilities, Doctor Joachim Schwarzer told me I could currently run a marathon in 3:40 hours, and the best possible result I can ever expect in a marathon race would be around 3:15 hours.

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There and Back Again.

As with many races in the COVID era, it’s been a while between coming up with the idea and the race actually taking place. Our first planned edition was supposed to happen in Spring of 2021, but not enough people were vaccinated at the time. So we postponed it until now.

We, that is Michael Mankus and me, again. As with Hamburg Everest in 2019 and Binnenalsterultra 2022, and also 42_16, it is the two of us initiating and making these unusual and exciting running events happen. Full disclosure, Micha is the one who has the ideas first and comes to me with them, so we can pull them off together. Sharing tasks and the responsibility makes it easier.

200 Kilometers of Running – Wait, but why?!

Certainly, pushing the limits is one aspect. Another would be that there’s not a huge amount of races offered publicly which have a length of this kind, and one of our goals is to provide people with the possibility to run more. Because running rocks!

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After these first 90 days of 2022 it’s time for a short review and an outlook into the future. First off, the new rhythm of quarterly moments of reflections seems to be working out for me and feels right. I managed to complete a lot of the set goals and aim to continue earning my title of King of New Year’s Resolutions which someone recently gave me. 😉

🪞Theme Reflection and Search For a New Theme

🗺️ The Season of Exploration did exactly what I hoped it would. After the almost static 2021 it made me come out of my shell and experience new things. Here are the to me most impactful of them:

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📹 Video vs. 🎙 Podcast vs. ✍️ Writing

Ever since I’ve read the brilliant book The Making of a Manager by Julie Zhou, I felt the urge to share her wisdom about being a better manager somehow. The format of a Youtube video showing a guy explaining something seemed to be a fitting way to do so, although I have next to no experience with creating something like that. 

In the spirit of Exploration, which is the theme I chose for this current season, I decided to give it a try. I went through my notes about the book, translated them into German, created a coherent script, learned to do basic video cut using the free software called Davinci Resolve, and recorded myself talking in a semi-coherent way about the lessons in the book. Looks simple, sounds simple. But it’s not, at least for me. I felt reminded of the quote:

Everyone’s job looks simple until you’re the one doing it.

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You can now buy an eBook written by me and it’s called "Running in the EU". 

As the title says, this is a compendium of the blog posts I wrote during the time I ran all the EU’s capital city marathon races from 2011 to 2018. It’s been a wild ride and to me it’s especially interesting how my style of writing and experiencing these trips slowly changed over the course of those seven years. Compare that first to my last marathon report, Amsterdam vs Nicosia – they’re worlds apart. 

Here’s the Amazon link to buy for your kindle, but if you’re more into reading for free or on Apple’s Books among others, you can also download the EPUB file format version on my website www.teesches-marathons.eu.

Since I’ve self-published the book, I arbitrarily set the price on Amazon to 4,99 €, but I will give any money I get paid 100% to Doctors without Borders. That’s just in case Amazon doesn’t decide to keep it all for themselves, which I sort of suspect. Gotta pay for Bezos’ rockets! 

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💡 Living with Intent

It’s time to look ahead. A few days ago, I posted my personal review of 2021 and received lots of positive feedback for it. Thanks! It didn’t expect that, because the year felt more like a transition year to me, full of compromise. Probably I’m not the only one there, as this whole pandemic era seems to be a global transition. Many people are confused, unsure about the future, more careful to be optimistic. This might be why some replies to my review stressed how it was a refreshing read during that particular time. The most used word was a variation of “inspiring”, and that made me very happy. Now I have already answered part of the next question.

🎯 Why Goals?

Or, more general, just Why with a capital W. The nominalization of that word has become popular and is now often used as in “But what’s your Why?” Some also refer to it as their North Star.

In this last year in particular, it occurred to me that my Why is changing. When I started setting public goals at the beginning of 2017, now five years ago, it was solely an end to itself. A bit of curious experimentation, but mostly a way of motivating myself and holding myself accountable for things I wanted to do but feared I wouldn’t follow through on otherwise.

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One of my favorite parts of the end of the year is taking some time to reflect on how it’s been going. What went well, what not so much, what can I improve for next year? Have I reached the goals I set for 2021, were they the right ones? What were the highs and the lows?

This is the sixth year in a row I’m doing it publicly. If you want to see the development, read Review 2016, Review 2017, Review 2018, Review 2019, Review 2020.

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These days it doesn’t happen often that a race I’m doing breaks not just one but several personal records. I think that’s great, because for me it’s still important to sometimes push myself to new levels and see what I can do.

🏆 For The Record! 

The first record is one that was completely out of my hands, though. Longest time between race signup and the race actually taking place. This, obviously, is due to the COVID-19 pandemic which had the world in its hands since the beginning of 2020. I signed up on October 1st, 2019 for the 2020 edition which was supposed to take place in June. The race got postponed, then cancelled. I was presented with the option to use my registration to do the race in 2021 instead, June again, but it got postponed again – to September 4th. By now, most of us are vaccinated and it seems like it’s rather safe to do such an event. Between registration and race, that’s almost a full two years.

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Finally I have something running related to write about! One and a half years into this pandemic, most interesting races are still being cancelled or are happening under circumstances which take the fun out of it, so we have to keep taking matters into our own hands until further notice. 

Munich. A few years ago I reconnected with an old friend from school, Nico, because he suddenly appeared on Strava as he had taken up running. He had been living in Munich for the past ten years, but was visiting Hamburg regularly due to his parents being here. We had a few runs together, kept in touch, and he then came up with the idea of planning a route through Munich we could run together which would connect all seven official Munich breweries. 

The Seven Official Munich Breweries

Just seven? Of course, there are plenty more breweries in the city serving a million inhabitants. But in order to be legally allowed to define your brewery as a genuine Munich brewery, you have to fulfil two criteria. You have to have your brewery located on Munich’s turf and you have to draw your own water for it using a well which is also within the city’s bounds. Preferably near your brewery, for obvious reasons. For a long time, there have been six breweries which were accepted, but a seventh one made it into the list recently.

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Making plans is one thing, following through with them another. Now, after the mid point of 2021, it seems like a good time to pause and reflect, and maybe, course correct.

The Year of Stability

In contrast to making hard goals, a good additional method to utilize seemed to be setting a theme for the year. I went with Stability, because I would like the sometimes chaotic growth of previous years to relax and plateau for a while. This is connected to more reflective thought processes as well. Asking myself questions like “will this decision lead to more stability or more upheaval, likely?” or “how is this decision going to help me further my efforts in regards to stability?” has for sure been helpful.

I have to remind myself of it from time to time, but because I can see how it helps, I’m keeping the theme.

12 & 12

Part of my stability plan is to keep going with 12 marathons and 12 books per year. Something for the body, something for the mind. Halfway through, I’m quite on point with 6 full marathons and 7 books.

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