Ever since its inception a few years ago I’ve been aware of the “Red Rock Challenge”, a weekend-long event in October that offers a multitude of different trail run and mountain bike races; near my home in the south of Luxembourg. After I covered part of the event for the newspaper in 2014 and 2015,…
Category: Race report
Race Report: Mamores VK (5km, 1000Hm)
One of my favourite side effects of competing in athletic events has always been to travel to places I normally wouldn’t get to see and experience. So when in early 2016, I stumbled across an announcement for the Mamores VK, which would take place in a fairly isolated corner of Scotland, I jumped at the…
Race report: KM Vertical du Mont-Blanc
[osm_map_v3 map_center=”45.93,6.857″ zoom=”15″ width=”100%” height=”500″ file_list=”../../../../wp-content/uploads/2016/06/activity_1227001334.gpx” file_color_list=”blue”] If you’ve done something once and then set out to do it again, the expectation is that you’ll do better. Otherwise, why bother, right? For the second year in a row, I was in Chamonix, France for the “KM Vertical du Mont-Blanc”, a vertical kilometer race that ascends…
Race report: European Champion Clubs Cup, Leiria, Portugal: 100m, 4x100m
Sometime in April, my club asked me if I could join them in Portugal for the European Champion Clubs Club on the 100m and 4x100m. At 38 years old, I didn’t consider myself the strongest sprinter for that task, but their options (not that many 100m sprinters, studies, injuries, people not having the Luxembourgish nationality,…
Ancona EMACI 2016 (11th European Masters Athletics Championships Indoor), day 3: 200m
Ancona EMACI 2016 (11th European Masters Athletics Championships Indoor), day 3: 200m series When the entry lists for the EMACI first appeared online in early March, it looked like my best chance to go on to the next round (half-finals) was in the 200m. As it turns out, the number of athletes in attendance and…
Ancona EMACI 2016 (11th European Masters Athletics Championships Indoor), day 1: 60m
Ancona EMACI 2016 (11th European Masters Athletics Championships Indoor), day 1: 60m series All throughout the day leading up to my 60m series, I was doing mental mathematics: 14:36 minus 20 minutes call-room minus 1 hour warm-up equals the time I was supposed to start my warm-up. I checked my simple math several times, and…
Race report: 33. Championnats Nationaux Indoor
Having a competition after an 8-hour work day is always a bit of a challenge. But yet, that’s the reality of the Luxembourgish indoor championships, where I was running the 60m and 200m series on Friday evening, and looking to qualify for the finals on Saturday. I was off to a bad start. Not just…
Race report: Indoor Lafmeeting 2 (200m, 4x200m)
I did my final indoor meeting for 2015/2016 on Luxembourgish soil this past Saturday, over one month after the Luxembourgish Championships. Athletes in the national team were afforded two more opportunities to compete in between, but the rest of us had to make do with regular training or travel abroad to compete. I chose the…
Race report: Indoor Meeting Régio 2 (16-Jan-2016)
For the second competition in 2016, I’d come up with a grandiose plan: I’d run the 200m, rest for about two hours and then give it all in a 400m, a distance I’d never done indoors. Reality would turn out to be different, though. The week before the competition, I’d done two trainings with the…
Race report: Indoor Meeting Régio 1 (09-Jan-2016)
When I signed up for the 60m race on Tuesday 5th, I was quite sure I was going to be in way over my head. While the doctor had cleared me (and my achilles) for racing, it had been just four short months since I’d done tentative short jogs at 6:30km/h pace, and I’d just…