Moinsen, everyone! 👋

I’ve got a big new blog post (and podcast episode) for you and it centers around my completed quest to run a marathon race in each of the 16 federal states of Germany. It turned out to be a recommendational blog post first and foremost, and hopefully you readers will be inspired to sign up for a few after learning about them here! 

But before I’ll throw in the link to the new post, I’d like to share some thoughts about current developments in non-fiction writing and Artificial Intelligence, by which I mean large language models like ChatGPT and Claude or Gemini. Successful writer and podcaster Tim Ferriss, author of the tremendously well-selling “The 4-Hour Workweek” and other advice-type books, recently shared his book sales numbers in this interesting blog post here.

His point, after careful consideration of all the probable causes: The advent of the chatbots is measurably destroying the market for that specific media category that focuses on sharing advice. I’ve written about how I utilized ChatGPT in moving my run training to the next level quite positively, and in my /ai statement on my blog I tell everyone that I’m in favor of the models taking my content in order to provide answers for people. 

🖼️ What’s the Big Picture Here?

The world is changing rapidly because of the advent of large language models. At a recent group run it was the topic of the day. Everyone seemed to have a story about how there were lay-offs due to AI automation at a company they were personally familiar with or worked at. While most people I talked to were frightened about their future, I see the opportunity to provide global knowledge to so many more people around the world as a giant advantage. I’m happy that my blog gets scraped by the bots and the insights multiplying the reach and therefore usefulness of what I do. Sure, I’m at the comfortable position that I don’t have to earn money with my blog, so it’s easy for me to say. More people coming directly to my website instead of indirectly learning from what I’ve shared would only serve my ego and not those people.

This is a harsh reality for many creators, because so much of it revolves around egos right now. Social Media is basically only about egos. But of course that’s a completely different thing, very much to be separated from the advice-type content and AI-fueled change of it.

The interesting question is: Where will this lead, exactly? Will advice-type book authors cease to write or significantly change how they write? Will new media emerge in a way that’s not as easy to scrape? Will AI start to create its own new type of advice and move forward in ways we can’t yet foresee in order to best answer those questions we have it won’t be able to find any answers in future books for? I’m very keen to find out because it certainly won’t stay the same. 

🚴‍♂️ Back to Sports!

Summer is fully here and with it the triathlon season, finally! I’m so happy about that. Every weekend there’s an exciting race to follow, some friends taking place in a trackable event somewhere, or I myself standing at starting lines. Yesterday, June 21, I did a middle distance triathlon race called Vierlanden Triathlon to do a final test of my equipment and training status for my big goal of 2025, completing Challenge Roth long distance triathlon in under 10 hours. That race is just two weeks away! Race day is July 5th. 

Vierlanden Triathlon was just under half of the distance of Roth, with a 2,000-meter swim, an 80-kilometer bike ride, and a 20-kilometer run at the end. Roth has 3.86 km of swimming, 180 km of cycling, and a 42.2 km marathon to offer.

While bike and run were super fast and on point for Roth, the swim is a big question mark right now. I’ve had troubles with calf cramping in training recently and don’t think I’ll be able to completely remove the risk in time. My usual 2,000 meters competitive swim used to be at around 35 minutes, but yesterday I had to play it super safe in order not to jeopardize the rest of my race, so it took me a full 10 minutes longer. Frustrating. In the end the bike and run matter much more than the swim, so I’m still optimistic about reaching my goals. Especially my 20k run was great yesterday, it was the 7th fastest run split of everyone there – about 170 male finishers.

🫠 What Does That Mean for Roth?

I’m pretty confident now I can pull off a 5:20h bike split and a 3:10h marathon afterwards. My equipment is where I want it to be and my fueling strategy proved to work really well, too. If only that swim would just be normal… from a fitness point of view I’m easily able to do a 1:10–1:15h split there, but given the cramp situation I’m nervous. My nutrition is not the problem – I currently assume it has to do with too much stress, both in the physical and psychological realms, the latter unrelated to sports. Not easy to solve, but I’m giving it a try with a physiotherapy specialist I’m seeing this week. Fingers crossed.

Following the live tracking might be fun to you:

Challenge Roth will kick off for me on July 5th (Sunday), 7:10 AM CEST, and my bib number will be 914.

The plan is to 🏊‍♂️ swim 1:15h, do T1 in 5:00min, 🚴‍♂️ cycle 5:20h, do T2 in 5:00min, and 🏃‍♂️ run for 3:10h. In theory, that’s less than ten hours, but we’ll have to see! 

🥇 Richard Ringer’s Book: Journey to European Marathon Champion

I’ve put a new (German-language) book on the shelf after reading it recently, and it’s the biography of one of Germany’s best current marathon runners. I’ve personally met him a couple of times, a great and very inspiring guy. Totally focused, no nonsense, still very fun to be around. His book spares no details and was written by his wife with additional help by Sonja von Opel. I enjoyed it thoroughly and summarized my thoughts here.

And now, the big new blog post.

🇩🇪 Running a Marathon Race in all 16 German States

When I finished that marathon in state 16 of 16, coincidentally about 16 years after running my first marathon in the first of the 16 states, Hamburg, a big project came to an end. I’ve learned so much about my home country by doing all these trips and put together the list of all marathons in Germany I ran up to this point. Maybe, hopefully, some will sound good to you and make you sign up. 

And the information I provided there will surely also get fed into the global knowledge base, made accessible to everyone via chatbot by the four biggest companies in the world. You can click on the link and maybe be among the last few actual humans to visit a website! And you would also feed my ego a little bit by doing so. Isn’t that great? 😂

What fun times we’re living in. I hope you’re doing well. See you next time, probably with a blog post about my day at Challenge Roth 😉

All the best to you,
— Teesche