CRIScom travel experience flow – The personal website of Christoph Potzinger

It’s been a busy autumn with lots of interesting projects, some nice trips with Sylvia and a lot of running. I am aware that I have been neglecting my blog and as a kind of new year’s resolution I have taken up blogging again.

I will take up the thread in September when I attended the biggest sport event I had ever been to. After partaking at the Austrian marathon championships in Salzburg in May, Jörg, my friend from our Running Team, and I decided to tread ourselves to a really big event and run the Berlin marathon, second biggest marathon in the world.
I trained hard during the hot days of summer assisted by (more…)

Holidays with “the boys” used to have a different flavour. Also our destinations differed significantly from the current one. Instead of flying to Greece for a beer-induced summer holiday, this time we embarked on a different mission. With Hannes having opted out because of lack of training (and courage), four of us met at Pritschitz approximately at half-distance between Klagenfurt and Velden at the Wörthersee. Gernot had been responsible for organisation and accomodation and thus Stefan, Herbert, myself and Cedrick (my father’s Retriever) found ourselves in the beautiful backyard of a traditional Carinthian farm, run by Martin’s mother, one of Gernot’s best friends (Martin, not the mother), in warm sunshine on a Saturday afternoon. We were there not for drinking beer but wanting to cover a distance of 21’095 meters as fast as possible at one of Austria’s best run events, Kärnten Läuft Half-marathon. Of course, we had a taste of our favorite drink but just a small one.

Our preparation for the run couldn’t have been (more…)

Time passes too quickly. We are now looking back at a memorable weekend which is already more than a week ago. But let me go much further back in order to explain. It was in autumn 1996 when I first met Ben and Rich, sitting in the Cafeteria of a football club close to Manchester City’s Maine Road stadium. That we had a terrible football inclination in common was obvious from the very start. But this was not the only thing we had in common. We also shared the same accommodation, grand Arosa Hotel, and played for the same university team, Manchester Metropolitan University. Thus we met more often on the football pitch than we did at university, Rich and I playing for the first team, Ben in the third. I would quit the team after a few games but soon we should catch up again in the common room of Arosa hotel or in Flea & Firkin, a pub just across the street from the Humanities Department where I studied. (more…)

Despite the confusion that was caused by the marathon organisers, as a team we can be very satisfied with our first Austrian championships race. On Sunday, after Chris, Vinz and Jörg had already left, I was summoned upon the podium to take the medals for Vice Champions at the Austrian Marathon Championships in the team race. Because I was the fourth fastest (or slowest) runner in our team, I was not classified but, to be frank, I quite enjoyed it up there with the champs.

Being the second fastest marathon team in Austria (more…)

I knew it after 3 ks: this was going to be a tough race. Whenever on such occasions my feet aren’t running by themselves, I know that it is going to be a hard and long, long way to the finish line. I hadn’t felt well all through the week before the marathon and never really managed to translate my planned marathon speed into one of my training runs before the event. Thus, I didn’t have high expectations for the run but little did I know how difficult it was going to be.
I had planned for a speed of 4:00 min/km but too soon I realized that this was just a dream. Still the first half marathon went quite well with 1:25:39 hrs (4:04 min/km) but with the temperatures rising, my speed declined very soon into the second half, clocking in at about 4:10 after 23 ks and deteriorating to 4:15 at 25 ks. With 17 ks still to run, my stomach started to churn and I had to stop and seek the bushes: diarrhea. It was terrible and a very difficult situation. My feet started to cramp and I found it very hard to gather speed again. It turned out, however, that it was a good decision to stop and get the bad stuff out of my body. At least, I could keep up my former speed and thus I continued, still struggling, though, along. Every kilometer seemed to be too long and the heat didn’t make things better. It was a tough run, a real struggle, and all I was running for was to see the finish line. Little did I care about the time anymore, just trying hard to set one foot in front of the other, doing my best to get enough fluid into my body, hoping that it would keep it. (more…)