My 6. place in Abu Dhabi and 2nd at Challenge Rimini showed that I was on the uphill road back to my old performance. But life is never projectable. Short before IM Frankfurt my body said that he is not ready to start there. I had to step back and took a lot of deep breaths to get along with it. I didn’t have to stop training rather I could bike and swim really hard but I was not ready for a marathon. Jo and I spent a lot of time in Suisse (because Jo wanted to race the IM there and I said that I don’t want to stand at the side the whole day - therefore I had a really good training day;-) After the race we did some great training in the Suisse Alps: one loop was over 3000m of altitude! Although mountains are not my favorites - I loved it! Now I took Jo and showing him my old home around Jena (Thuringia). Jo is a typical Bavarian who thinks that we are the German Lowlanders. OK, we don’t have 3000m high mountains but therefore it goes only up and down – you hardly find flat parts for longer than 1min! Normally you have over 1000m of altitude on 100km. And you can be sure that one person is tired every eve: my coach Jo! From now on there are 2 more weeks to go for my first long distance race after a really long break (my last IM was in April 2012!). Really looking forward to race Challenge Vichy on 1st of September! 

Train smart!

Yours, Di