Greetings from Chamonix, France – Follow My CCC Race!

Moinsen, everyone! 👋

It’s been a while since my last newsletter, but in the meantime a bunch of new subscribers have joined in – welcome to you! And welcome to all previously subscribed people as well, of course! 🙏

By the way, this past week I have been recognized in public for the first time (outside of a race event), which was crazy. A podcast listener approached me inside an airplane to Athens, Greece, and gave thanks for the hours of entertainment provided by yours truly. That made me very happy. ❤️

What a summer it’s been! Lots of races, lots of training, lots of fun trips with friends and family. Before I get into the things I usually share, here’s the main piece of this newsletter.

🇫🇷 I’m in Chamonix, About to Run the 100k CCC Race During UTMB Week!

The Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc (UTMB) is the biggest ultra trail race in the world and probably its most known, too. Similarly to my goal of one day running the oldest race of similar length to the UTMB, the Western States 100, it is super hard to get in. But there are several race options – a race distance for everyone, from the young people’s 2k to a whopping 305 kilometer race. I chose the CCC, which stands for Courmayeur → Champex-Lac → Chamonix. That’s basically the route of it. This race is about 100 kilometers long but has 6,100 meters of elevation gain and a bit more loss. Getting a slot was possible due to my prior qualifications of 7 so-called “Running Stones”, a sort of UTMB-specific currency you earn by running other races.

So now I’m here, nervously excited, about to find out what the magic of Chamonix is like.

The race will start on Friday, the 29th of August, at 9:00 AM Central European Summer Time.

📡 And there will be Live Tracking!

So if you’re interested in how I’m doing, you can have a look. Next to the live tracking of all the runners, there’s also a continuous live stream with expert moderators who will follow the full race and focus on the professionals. And almost all of the pros are here. The drone footage of runners steaming through the pretty French, Swiss, and Italian Alps is reason enough to have a look.

And a bunch of the aid stations I’ll come through have stationary live cameras, so you might even see me wobble my way to the next cold Coke.

Here’s the link leading directly to my personal race progress page and the live center:

My bib number is 3895.

I’m not sure how fast I’ll be able to navigate the trails here, and the weather does not look too promising unfortunately, but I might be able to sneak away with a Sub-20h finish – just to give you an idea. That’ll be 5 AM on Saturday. But since I’ll spend the largest part of daytime on Friday running, there will be plenty of chances to have look.

📋 In Other Running and Sports News

And now, here’s the classic content.

In chronological order, the sporty highlights of my summer were as follows:

1. During the end of May and beginning of June, I was part of the team creating two ultra runs: The 5th Munich Breweries Ultra (80k) and Bremen Sankt Pauli 100 (100m, 100km, 50km). Both were tough to put together and required lots of work, but we succeeded and the whole thing was very rewarding in both cases. Lots of happy runners created and positivity spread just because some friends and myself put in the effort. I’m halfway done with a blog post on it, but haven’t gotten around to finishing that one. It’ll happen.
2. My next personal goal was a new official half marathon best. A finishing time of less than 1:20 hours. I put in lots of effort and tough sessions and got through them okay. But unfortunately, a little sickness derailed me shortly before the selected race. I mostly recovered in time, but it was clear I couldn’t do it that day. Everything will have to align for me to break that 1:20h barrier. Came home with a solid 1:24h in the end, my third best half marathon effort ever. Not too bad, if I say so myself.
3. Summer also means triathlon season where I live, and Hamburg has a lot to offer in that regard. No long distances for me this year, but my wife and I have a tradition of doing the sprint distance of the WTCS Hamburg Triathlon every year on Saturday of the race weekend before I do the standard distance (formerly known as “Olympic Distance”) on the Sunday. It’s been great as always, and I even managed a big personal best of 2:20:13 total, placing 144th of 2,341 male finishers. With a 38:07min on the final 10k run segment I was more than elated, the 47th best male run time that day. Triathlons are cool! It has been my 36th triathlon race and I’m keen to add a bunch more to that list in the future.
4. Thus began my focussed training regiment for this big CCC race. Less speedy, but with lots of elevation and long runs. Eating kilometers left and right. I did three consecutive weeks of 100 kilometers each, followed by two peak weeks of 130 kilometers, before going down slightly into some tapering for race day. Many of those kilometers went into making progress with my “EverySingleStreet Hamburg” project. I’m now at 34.5% of all ~8,200 streets completed, ranking 13th on CityStrides.com. I find this to be very satisfying and am keen to find out how long it will keep on bringing me joy.
5. With summer ending and fall marathon season around the corner, I’m looking forward to being an official pacemaker yet again – booked for Flensburg Marathon and Bremen Marathon. In between, I’ll be running my own race at Berlin Marathon as well, and if all goes to plan (especially so my recovery after this CCC), I’ll hope for achieving my fourth Sub-3h race there. It’s shooting for the stars right now, but you can never know unless you try. Also, the application window for Tokyo Marathon 2026 has just opened up and that would be such a cool thing as well – finishing my Six World Marathon Majors there.

I think it’s a fair statement that running is more than just a hobby for me. But you knew that because you chose to follow this journey.

📚 The Books

I wasn’t as active as in the past few years, but still read nearly daily. Since sending out my most recent newsletter, I have added the hugely popular “Mistborn” series opener by Brandon Sanderson to my bookshelf section, a rare fiction book, and the German language immigration-specific autobiography of Tahsim Durgun, “Mama, bitte lern Deutsch” as well. Find out what I thought of them by clicking the links.

I also finished two more books, “You Are Not So Smart” by David McRaney, a book about all the fallacies our brains succumb to, and “UAE – Culture Smart” by John Walsh, which is an introduction about the history, culture, and customs of that unusual Middle Eastern country.

Those two bookshelf additions will follow soon. Right now I’m reading another UAE-centered book, dealing mostly with the history of Dubai, a fascinating city. I’m on a Derek Sivers inspired quest to clean up my negative prejudices on it and so far that’s working like a charm. Again proving that the less you know about a thing, the less your opinion matters.

At the same time I have recently started to read Nikola Tesla’s autobiography and plan on following that up with a longer, more thorough biography on him. My daughter #1 and I were stranded in Belgrade last weekend because of an airline hiccup on the way back from Athens. Belgrade was Tesla’s home and the airport is named after him. The city center has a museum about his life. People are proud that such a global genius is “theirs”. I was vaguely aware, but decided on the spot to deepen that knowledge. What an incredibly smart but also hilarious guy!

The book topics are all over the place, but who cares. “Read what you love until you love to read” has certainly worked out for me and I’ll just stay with it. How else would you do it.

In the coming weeks I’ll be deep into writing a blog post about the upcoming CCC race, that’s for sure – I hope it’ll be worth reading for you as well. Feel free to reply to this email newsletter, by the way. I receive those replies and would love to get in touch with you all and talk about these topics we care about.

All the best to you all,
– Teesche