1st Quarter 2008:

I got my feet back and started running with the beginning of the year. I just ran how I could, no plan and no constraints except for my shape, I just enjoyed it and it was great fun. Quite quickly my shape increased and it got better by the day. It is amazing how fast your body adapts and builds up stamina.
My room mate pressured me a little to take part in a race, just for fun. Since I always talked about marathons he showed me a leaflet from the "Fürth Metropolmarathon" and convinced me to signed up, which I did. This is were it all started, finally a goal to achieve and the only option was to do my best. Just crossing the finish line would not satisfy me.
A great book already was in my possession: Marathon - Das Erfolgsprogramm: Das Erfogsprogramm from Jeff Galloway. It is a great book and it helped me a lot. Especially the cross training and the day off. The day off is actually the hardest, telling yourself to take it easy while your whole body just wants to get out breath in the fresh air, absorb every little sun ray and run until... well, I never did that so I have no idea what would have happened.
The cross training was the first step to triathlon. 2 days in the week a non running sport should be done, like skiing, skating, cross-country skiing, swimming, bike-riding etc.. Bike riding was a possibility but the legs could not fully recover from previous running exercises. I already tried skating for 2 years and did not stick to it and regarding skiing, well snow was not always around. So there was swimming. Erlangen has a great public swimming pool and is cheap. Twice a week I did my laps in the water, easy, breast stroke and was now and then overlapped by some very old geezer. I had to change to crawl and sucked in every little advice from the Internet of how to improve your technique.
My stamina was there but speed was missing. A couple of short distance runs, 12 times 1.6km helped me there and I gained speed rapidly.
At the end of march I was a long distance runner, 30km was no issue in a good pace but still not enough for a good marathon time. And running Marathon still needed another 12.195km and I knew that was the hard part. Despite my achievements I was far away from finishing, forget about a good time.