CRIScom travel experience flow – The personal website of Christoph Potzinger

With each day closer to our departure to Boston, things were becoming busier and busier, even crazy. Today was the worst with a web project going online while I was lecturing at university.

There had been a series of miscommunication in the project team and problems with the website only began to surface when the old server was shut down and it was too late to fall back on the old site. My phone buzzing constantly, I stood there in front of my class analysing Bill Gates’ and Steve Jobs’ presesentations.

I am still wondering how I managed to handle both situations, solving the problems with the website during breaks and video casts while entertaining my students. The afternoon would be no different . Customers, I hadn’t heard from for a long, long time, started to call, and the web project still demanded my attention because the moment we solved a problem another would resurface. As soon as I thought I had everything under control an e-mail from Jean-Pierre arrived, informing me about the eruption of a volcano on Iceland whose smoke brought air travel all over Britain and large parts of Northern Europe to a halt. Suddenly, it seemed as if we weren’t even able to go on our long awaited holiday . It was, to say the least, chaotic.

Now things have fortunately calmed down – for now. I still have not packed and I am tired. But there is a hot, rich chicken soup, which Sylvia has cooked, waiting for me . And then there’s my suitcase to attend to and an 18 hour journey to complete, my BIB to pick up and then I should be all set for the Boston Marathon on Monday.

More updates on our progress to Boston and the Marathon soon here… (gotta pack now, you know…)

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 Read the rest of this entry »

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 Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »