Hello, I am Tim Teege. 👋
I live in Hamburg, Germany.
This is my personal website and blog. I mostly write about endurance sports and related topics. Why, I will explain here!
It has been a wild ride with many ups and downs. Founding and building a company is as stressful as it is rewarding, because you get to make up your own rules. I decided to pay everyone the same salary, gave out raises to employees as soon as the situation made it possible, prioritized part-time work to allow for well-balanced lifestyles for everyone, and gave away 25% of the profits to charity.
This came at a cost, obviously, and that was a very limited speed of growth. Also, I learned that this style of working isn’t perfectly suited for everyone. Some thrive, but some also hide and relax when there’s empathic leadership. Nearing the point when I sold the company I was feeling more and more exhausted and had the impression of pulling everyone along, so it was a good time to stop and see what the future brings.
We were partly responsible for what is now known as the company called Opinary winning the prestigious Grimme Online Award, other projects we worked on won several other awards, we built a tool to help measure the environmental impact of websites called Carbon Checkmate, a handful of awesome browser-based games for promotional purposes, and hundreds other websites and online shops starting in 2011.
For the next couple of years I thankfully have the opportunity to fully focus on raising my kids since selling the company gave me some financial freedom and my wife being able to move to working full-time as a doctor. I don’t know yet what other type of work I’m going to take up then, but I’m open to a lot of things and look forward to exploring options.
That’s when I was fortunate enough to be able to spend time on the first computer of the family, an Intel 486 DX2, running at 66 MHz and utilizing 4 MB of RAM. After playing around on it a lot and exploring all of the possibilities, the internet finally arrived in our household as well. A friend’s dad got Microsoft FrontPage 97, and that made it possible for me to understand there’s such a thing as HTML.
That, with the combination of the free website hosting service GeoCities, got me really started. I made a bunch of friends through sharing this hobby, some still lasting until today. I spent a few weeks of an internship during school at one of the Dot-com bubble companies just after the turn of the new millennium, learning PHP and MySQL.
I built a community website for our circle of friends – it was called fishmekk.de for some long forgotten reason, and I still own the domain –, which was highly similar to modern social media before all of that really existed. Sometimes I think about that time slightly regretfully, “if only I would have had the idea of building the befriending/following feature at the time, I’d be a billionaire now”. Still, I learned a lot and having the site frequented many times daily by all the people in my life sharing what they were doing and thinking was gratifying, too. It lasted for around ten years before the big companies won over the attention of all of us.
After school and some attempts at university studying civil engineering and economics, I found a job at an internet company called Netzpiloten AG in Hamburg. It was a fun few years working there, I did alright even though I didn’t have any formal training, and met a bunch of interesting people.
One of those interesting people at that job left a special impression on me. Kristian Schlüter. Not only was he the guy with whom I later started my own web design company, but he also got me into running. And triathlons.
Turns out, working long hours at a desk isn’t what our bodies need, so at age 25 I finally decided to take up the seemingly boring hobby of running. Of course, it was hard at first, but the learning curve and body adaptation rate went through the roof early on. Kristian convinced me to run a whole official marathon, and in 2010 we both ran-hiked through those 42.195 kilometers.
From then on, the fire was lit. I started a project to run all 28 EU member states’ capital city marathons a year later. When I told people about that, they laughed but also wanted to know more about the runs. So after the first three races of that project I started writing down what I experienced on a website I built for it at the time. I have since moved that website to teesche.com/eu, because the project is more of a biographical item to me than just any project. Runner’s World did a profile on it.
The amount of EU capital marathons I ran per year increased over time just like my finishing times decreased, and after seven years, in 2018, I crossed the finish line in Brussels, the last one of the 28.
People found the reports, read and liked them, wrote nice words, and a few even repeated the project after being inspired by me. I met a lot of interesting people through running and writing about it and made a lot of friends out of them. And because I never stopped loving marathon racing, I decided to continue writing about endurance sports.
And I compiled a book about the EU marathon runs which you can download or buy for your kindle.
During all of it, I finished four long distance IRONMAN length triathlons (1, 2, 3, 4), ran a bunch more marathons and got into ultramarathons, too, even won two of them and received a whopping 300 dollars of prize money for it once 🤑. I did some Swimruns, finished a 12 km swimming race, and created a few races for other runners, too.
I finally gave up smoking cigarettes on 3rd of November, 2015 (3,464 days ago), and I stopped eating meat on December 31st, 2015 (3,406 days ago). I haven’t looked back ever since. These days I’m putting mainly plants into my body, trying to reduce all of the environmental mess and horrors we’re doing to the animals just to have some cheese and eggs. I feel stronger than ever before and have become a better runner and athlete.
Since January 1st of 2022, I started a running streak, so I have been running on every single day for 1,214 days.
I was on a four-year quest to finally run a full marathon in less than three hours and achieved the goal on March 10th of 2024, finishing after 2:58:44 hours at Bienwald Marathon in southern Germany. I’d still like to qualify for and finish the spectacular Western States 100 Endurance Run in California.
We as a species are moving towards uncertain times. Although the average health and quality of living is up around the whole world, diseases are increasingly making the last years we have on Earth horrifying. Dementia and Alzheimers are on the rise, the chances of us getting cancer at some point converge towards 100%, and who knows what else will happen due to the climate crisis being in full swing.
That’s why I like to use my body while it’s still fully operational in order to do activities which make me feel empowered. There’s nothing like finishing a 108 kilometer ultramarathon through the Austrian alps, for example. And if I’m unlucky and my health in my later years won’t be great, I’ll have the memories. And if I don’t have those due to Alzheimers, I can read my own blog. 💡
In my early teens, I picked up learning to play the guitar and piano. The electric guitar was a bit more intriguing, later. A few friends and I started a funk band called “ka-dance” and played a bunch of gigs. We had a lot of fun. Later, we went separate ways, but I still play almost daily and love it. Guitars and electronic drums. My preferred genres are close to rock and metal and I am especially fond of bands and artists like Polyphia, Plini, Periphery, Thank You Scientist, Enter Shikari, The Fall of Troy, Protest the Hero, The Dear Hunter, or The Mars Volta.
For 12 years now, I am married to my wonderful wife Sophie who is a genius physician (think House, M.D. type of skill in my humble opinion), full of energy and resources, and inspires me to become a better person and do more every day.
Together, we have four wonderful daughters who are aged 13, 11, 9, and 6. They keep the noise level up high at home, but it’s the right kind of noise. They are all very different individuals and I love them more than anything.
If you have anything on your mind – maybe you’d like some tips on how to get started with running, or have a suggestion which you think I’d like, or you’d just like a chat: good news, I love reading and writing emails!
@teesche 🐦
@teesche 🐘
@teesche 📷
Or, find out what I’m up to lately on my /now page and what I’m eager to do at some point in the future on my bucket list.
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This was one of the best articles I've read so far in telling about a race. I couldn't put it down. Your details were so awesome. You made New York just come alive.
Great review, enjoyed reading it and recognize lots off related subjects and hurtles. I’m amazed by all your running and races well done.
Great article! I've read so many long blogs only to get bored in the middle as I suffer terribly from ADD and move on to other things. Yours has been one of few that held my attention all the way to the end.
Your good humor and ease in telling stories make this blog a really cool space. Nice review.
Amazing effort Tim, well done! Thank you for taking the time to write down your thoughts, feelings and memories from the event. There’s always something to learn from your posts and this one was no exception!! Another cracking read.
What a ride! Surely the race, but also reading about it. Thanks for taking the time to write up such a detailed report, almost feel like I was there.