CRIScom travel experience flow – The personal website of Christoph Potzinger

Quick entry for now
. The 114th Boston marathon has been successfully completed, again under 3 hrs, the 5th consecutive time. While this marathon was one of the hardest because of ugly head-wind gusts starting after 5 ks and a hilly course with quite a few of 300 – 1.000 m climbs, the atmosphere was just outstanding – the Americans can get really crazy when it comes to sports. Sometimes the noise was deafening.

The second half was especially tough with the wind getting stronger and more climbs coming up, especially Heartbreak Hill, a hilly section in the suburb of Newton between miles 17 and 21. My feet worsened as soon as kilometer 15 and I had to run very carefully in order to avoid early cramps .

After Heartbreak Hill it is mostly downhill. But with sore legs this is quite a task to accomplish, especially when time is against you. I almost sped up too early but managed to overcome a cramp problem with just 1 mile to go soon enough in order to finish in 2:59:31 hrs: mission accomplished.

Then it was another long walk to gather my changing clothes and meet up with Sylvia, Jean-Pierre, Susi, Stefan and Julian and celebrate the successful run. We went to Jakobs Wirth, a Bavarian beer house in Boston city, and relished on Fish and Chips, Paulaner Hefeweizen and a Guiness. Spiro, a friend from Melbourne, joined us, putting a perfect end to a breath-taking day.

More on the marathon soon…

Sunday afternoon here at the Kallanian’s, waiting for lunch with just 18 hours to go for my 7th marathon. When I will take the first step into my 2nd marathon in the masters series at the oldest martahon of the world, I am already a winner since I was lucky enough to even have made it to Boston.
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With the last day of March, my 7th marathon is almost on the threshold. Today I received my Number Pick-Up Card and Welcome Booklet for my second marathon in the Masters series – the Grand Slam of marathon running.

With only 18 days to go, I have completed the major part of my preparation for the marathon. I started my training in late January and have completed 954 kilometers in 2 months.I should be in perfect condition and on the one hand I am feeling very confident, on the other I am struggling with rising temperatues and humid weather . My heart rate has increased tremendously (often 10 to 15 beats higher than usual) and the warmer conditions have also affected my achilles tendons.
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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 here 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…)