Bio

I am born and raised 1992 in Menziken, Switzerland, as the oldest of three kids. My Sister ist two years younger whereas my brother is six years younger than me. As a kid I enjoyed playing outside in nature but also spent hours in reading books. At school I started taking drum lessons and playing floorball (german: Unihockey, Swedish: innebandy). At that time my Floorball club Lok Reinach, was a small club playing between NLA and NLB (Playout/Playoff). Back then I wasn’t interested in running, even though I was normally the one with most laps in our Club Run “Sponsorenlauf”, where I collected a lot of money. As a young Teenager I also liked drawing and apparently had some skills in it (meanwhile they disappeared). Because of that my plan was to start an apprenticeship as an architect at the age of 15. However, the company I wanted to start made bancrupty, so I decided to make my Matura (High School Diploma) at Kantonsschule Beromünster where my favorite subjects where math and biology.

I maintained playing floorball with Lok Reinach on Junior Level up to three times a week.  Every year in our sport lesson with our parallel class we had to perform a sport test, running 4km for grades. So the first time, at the age of 16, me and a colleague were the fastest ones. The teacher was wondering, if we found a cutoff on the route. Until next year I decided to jog once/twice a week, to see if I am able to make some progression. So I also started in two local running competitions Baldeggerseelauf, Lenzburgerlauf. Next year I was the fastest one with a great gap, giving me the nick-name “white bekele”, which I definitely liked more than my other nick-name in High School which was “Göggu” (Swiss German Goggi = Coke) for all my to-zero losses in table football during breakes where you had to pay a coke.  This inspired my mother to start again running and she joined LG Homberg, whereas my sister was doing karate and my brother played floorball too.

At the age of 18 I started a Biology study at University of Zurich. Due to my relocation to Zurich I stopped playing floorball with Lok Reinach and lowered my jogging frequency to almost zero. Normally I just went once a week to university-sports. I shared a flat with two other students and discovered cooking. Since my father is gardener I often helped him to seed and water vegetables. I inclueded this experiences in my cooking and used own vegetables (potatoes, carrots, peas, salade, tomatoes, beans..).  Probably I missed my mother’s cuisine. After one year I quit my biology study due to  one failed exam. Anyway, I did not like the university mentality of learning by heart tons of facts (which is actually called knowledge) and forget everything after the exam. Nevertheless I learned a lot and wanted to stay in Science.

In 2015 I wanted to finish my first Half-Marathon. Normally this would have been the Freiburg Half Marathon in April, but it tourned out to be the Arosa Snow Run in January. Because of too much snow they cancelled the 16km mountain-run and transcribed all runners to the Half Marathon. So this was the first time I run the 21.1km and it was fun! In Spring I wanted to improve my 10km-time and I finally run 35.11 in Nice/France, together with my Mum (she came in 10min later). In summer we had great success in several company runs (Basel, Zurich, Frankfurt) with Roche. Together with Matthias Koerner, Anders Holmberg and David Herzig we won the Swiss final in Zurich. Also the girls had great success, many of them are also training at LSVB. Besides running I finished my apprenticeship with the grade 5.8 (max. 6), which has been the highest in the whole city in 2015. In Autumn I wanted to train more ambitious, with a training plan, a target race and a target time. So I asked Matthias Koerner if he could write me a Training Plan for the IWB Basel Marathon with a target time under 02:50:00. He agreed and took time to meet me once a week until the Marathon in the end of Sepember. My amount of training went from three times/40-60km a week up to six times/100km in the last hard week. And this during a very hot summer! Thanks to the weekly meetings I was able to prevent training overload and discuss next steps.  I really felt the progress, so that I wasn’t anymore in the chasing group in preparation races I already was a Front Runner (2th place Liestaler Stadtlauf, 3th place Rothenburg). Finally my first running season ended with my first Marathon in Basel, a negative split, a good time of 02:45:33, a 2th place and a beer.