I’m not going to whinge on too much about how I’m not fit and have low iron etc, so this will be an attempt at a more positive race review!
The annual Firmenlauf is early in September, last year I ran 17:08, 1 second slower than 2 years ago I believe. This year I had 18:25 in my head as a reasonable time for me, that would be about par.
We met up for the team photo as is customary, but we didn’t have any fans to look after our bags this time. We all trotted off to Thomas’s car to put them in there, but he had parked miles away! By the time we got there, it was 15 minutes before the race start, so I jogged back to the start area to go to the toilet and try to get a decent start place.
Last year I waled into the starting pen from the front and could run freely from the start. This year they wouldn’t allow that so I was stuck trying to find a way to the front. I saw a few TCEClers who invited me to jump the fence and start with them, but the steward wasn’t having it. I walked a bit further back and saw a gap, so asked the person next to the gap if I could jump over there – it was Karin from TCEC too – a weird coincidence.
So I started and got stuck in a fair amount of traffic this year, but after the first 400m it wasn’t too bad. There were some pretty aggressive girls from the Uni who were happy to push people out of their way, so I ran behind them for a while 🙂
I felt alright really, after 3km I had 11mins on the clock, so 3:40/km. I could see Jochen ahead of me (Schott were taking part for the first time), and I very slowly pulled him in. When I caught him I gave him a shout and he answered something strange about recognising my footsteps… He seemed to speed up for a while, but I soon passed him. Near the 4km marker I passed the first woman, it was pretty obvious as all I could hear was from people on the course was – oh here comes the 1st woman – all the time!
So after the last few turns I knew I was almost done and without much of a sprint, I crossed the line in 18:05, about a minute slower than last year, but 20 seconds faster than I had predicted.
In the finish area I saw that Timo has run well and was 3rd in 16:0x, and Steffen from TRON was very close to breaking 20 minutes (he wasn’t sure, he didn’t start a watch but his gun time was 20:30 – turns out he ran 20:06)
So that was that for another year. I was still very comfortably the fastest in TRON and Biontech, especially as their fast girl didn’t run this year. Next year sub17 – hopefully.