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!
What I enjoy most of it is that I’m able to make up my own rules for this company. We’re paying everyone the same salary, giving out raises to everyone as soon as the situation makes that possible, prioritizing part-time work to allow for a well-balanced lifestyle for everyone, and giving away 25% of our profits to charity.
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 two great SaaS tools (Speechbox and inSites.app), a handful of awesome browser-based games for promotional purposes, and countless other websites and online shops since 2011. For 12 years now 🤯. Right now, starting at September 2023, I have stepped back from my daily CEO tasks and let my colleague run the company, so I can focus more on my kids. I’m still owner and board member. The plan is to do this for a year, ending on August 31st of 2024.
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 spend a few weeks 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”. 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.
After school and some failed attempts at university, 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 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 I wrote down what I experienced on a website I built for it at the time. I have 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. So 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 (2,887 days ago), and I stopped eating meat on December 31st, 2015 (2,829 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 637 days.
I am on a multi-year quest to finally run a full marathon in less than three hours (got close once with 3:00:40) and 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.
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, 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.
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 11, 9, 7, and 5. 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 📷
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.