German chapmionship 6h-race in Troisdorf, Germany

On Friday evening the DUV-member meeting was placed in Troisdorf. It was not the first time, that it was organised the night before the 6h-race. Because there are many differences came up and people dropped there post at the head of the DUV. So at the schedule new votes were listed. Most of the people had a long way to Troisdorf, so they arrived the evening before. Because of that the meeting was well visited. At 10:30pm it finally finished.

Luckly we had the chance to sleep long at the following day. The start was not before 10am. After a good breakfast Volker brought us to the start. There we met a lot of friends and the rest of the LG Würzburg running club. I picked up the start number, had some small talks and finished the last preparations. Then we had to move to the start line. Meanwhile it started to rain lightly. The forecast had told chilly, but still dry weather for the morning. But it was wrong. At 10am there was the start for the first German Championship at 6h running. It was a huge field of runners. After the start immediately the top runners pushed on a high speed. Multiple runners will run more than 90 km when continuing that speed. With them also Georg from our running club. Even I was not with the leading group I recognised that I was also to fast after the first hour. When I calculated up my final result I was going to go above 80 km. But right now I felt very good, so I decided to keep that speed. Benedikt Strätling tried to set off at the men top, while Pamela Veith and Tanja Hooß, the top two women, where still together. After two hours I recognised that the runners in front of me did not really get further away and one after the other started to slow down. One hour later I worked myself up to place five. It had stopped raining and for some moments the sun broke trough. Still the temperatures did not rise above 10°C. While I caught up places also Tanja had a shurt burst. The half loop she had in advance after it, she did not give up till the end. I moved more and more forward in the placement. I did not get faster, but the other runners slowed down. Especially Benedigt suffered from the high speed at the beginning. He was hand trough the back. Achim Zimmermann took the leadership of the race. At that point he was still followed by Jörg Hooß. But also he had to slow down. Maybe he still was tired from the 100km Championship beginning of October. After about four hours I also passed him. It did not take a long time till I recognised that I could not catch up Achim as well. He ran with a very constant speed and had already five minutes in advance. The big advantage of loop races, the whole field is easy to oversee. At 2/3rd of the loop we can hear the speaker placed at that stadium. So it was easy to have an “eye” on the runner in front and behind of you. The last hour was very interesting again. Because of the close distances between the runners, many fights for the placement took place. Jörg lost his third place in the end.

In the end it had another rain shower. So it was very good that the shower where warm. Then we all met at the small gym next to the course. It was nothing new that we had to wait for the award ceremony. Christoph, Udo and Georg did not stay the whole award ceremony. They went home and had to drive more than 300 km.