Wings for Life Worldrun Darmstadt, Sunday May 4th

It was great to meet a lot of guys at the Wings for Life Worldrun in Darmstadt on Sunday. The night before, they had organized a pasta party and a reading/concert of Samuel Koch, a guy who had suffered an accident on a TV show when he tried to jump over some cars and fell. He has been paraplegic since from the neck down, like our friend Zwecki many years ago. With the world run, Wings for Life collected 3 million Euros for their foundation to support spinal cord research!
Like Matthias Dolderer, Im a pilot, but not exactly a runner, so we were a bit nervous of embarrassing ourselves with poor results in this new formate of a run. We started out on a track, and half an hour later a "catcher car" starts on the same track, disqualifying the runners it will pass. Matthias and I both could not believe that we were able to run 11 km, just like Hannes Arch in Austria and Robby Naish in the US, just like Jonny Durand and Alaina! Jamie got to 16km.
Miriam Gössner, world champion with the relay in biathlon, made 22,7 km - she is fit! Mark Webber ran an awesome 28km!
Mocki went 25km, and her brother Markus won the run in Darmstadt with 57km!
Big congratulations to the world wide winners, Norwegian Elise Molvik who made 54,79km in Stavanger, and Lemawork Ketema (Ethiopia) with incredible 78,58km in Austria!
We gave all we could, running for the ones who can´t, and my muscles are still in pain today. But the real heroes are the guys who never give up hope that they will walk again - I know some of them already fly again!!! Cheers to Mariann Moen, Petra Kreuz, Hannes Kinigadner, Josef Zweckmeyer, Lois Neubauer, Tarek Rasouli, Fernando Fernandes, Samuel Koch, Paulo Barbosa and Tamara Oliveira! You guys rock, and you will walk again!
Im sure we will all be back in Darmstadt on May 3rd for the second Wings for Life Worldrun! Thanks to former triathlon world champion Daniel Unger (race director in Darmstadt) and to the whole crews around the world for the perfect synchronisation and organization, it was a lot of fun to participate in my first "run" ;)