Nowadays sports is mostly shown as an perfectly nice and shiny world where every training or competition ends in a new PR and every picture taken is candidate for your new profile picture. It is not always that easy.

Last weekend I participated in the SwissCityMarathon in Lucerne for the third time. This has become kind of a tradition to close the gap between the SUP season ending in September and the beginning of my winter training in November. This year things were a bit different, I did not have that much time to train and we moved into our new apartment just the days before the competition. Nevertheless I wanted to participate in the race.

For the first 25km everything was fine. I ran with the 3:40h pacemakers group and felt really good. This is where the first picture has been taken (just after the first half of the race). After that I continued feeling well, but I did not verify my heart rate enough, so I did not realise, that it has been rising steadily from km 20-30, arriving at 190 at the time we hit the 32km mark. Additionally our pace was getting slower, so this was another factor that made me not realise, that my heart rate has been rising for quite a time.

The bill came after trying to eat a gel and drink some water, when I started getting the worst cramps in my stomach I ever experienced while running. The second picture shows the brutal truth of what happens when you overpace and get punished on the last 10k. I then lost about 12 minutes on the planned time and my group within the last 8-10k of the race, but managed to finish in 3:51.06, two minutes slower than the last year.

I first did not want to publish this picture, but in the end I decided to do it, because after all I think that it is important to show the dark sides of sports, the suffering and the pain; not only the shiny social media worthy pictures of fun and success.

So with this years short running intermezzo in the books I will start into the winter training both on and off the lake. There is a lot of work to be done!