It was a supported attempt. We had a team of four outdoor enthusiasts/runners who joined seperate sections on the trail, while I covered the full distance in one push. The team consisted of Erik Kemper, Salif Bakayoko, Claire "scotty'' Bear and my girlfriend (Lotti Lohmeyer) as well as my mom (Evelyn Podzimek) who joined with a support car on the second day.
I started 10:00 exactly in Korbach on Wednesday (7th of September), a beautiful town, with relatively hot weather. I ran until it became dark and then Erik Kemper joined for the first night section. He parked his RV further away (took the train back) and we both ran through the first night. After some rest and food in the RV, Erik departed homewards due to work.
I ran by myself the second day, a very rainy day, until Salif joined for the second night section. It was a cold night and we powernapped for 2 hours during the night in the forrest in a rescue blanket to fight sleep deprivation. The third day my girlfriend joined during the day section. At night, Claire joined to go through the third and fourth night together. We powernapped another hour in rescue blankets in the forrest. During the day she rested and recovered. Coming out of the fourth night, Lotti joined again for the last stretch. On Sunday 23:34 (the 11th of September) I finished at the Kyffhäuser denkmal, together with my girlfriend. She also took the finish picture.Overall, we had no major problems during the run. There was a lot of wildlife (deer, wolves and so forth) and almost no hikers at all. I had many blisters but luckily brought sterile needles. The lack of sleep was difficult, but the beautiful views made up for it.
Recording such a large run turned out to be more complex than expected: due to the large amount of kilometers my strava unfortunately crashed on my phone and the file was not to be recovered. Luckily, we had professional GPX trackers on us at all time. My tracker unfortunately broke down, but luckily we immediately realized that (as everyone was following the website that was build for us by Legendstracking in real-life, link attached) so I instantly took the pacer's tracker. To summarize, we thus always had a tracker on course and could thus provide a complete GPX file. Moreover, we had a live website build for us so that the people at home could follow the FKT attempt non-stop. Legendstracking is a very trustworthy and professional, paid tracking service so our attempt could be tracked 24/7 in a transparent fashion. Moreover, there were 4 pacers that joined the run and each of them can verify the above. Due to the fact that the trackers only signalled every 5 minutes the GPX file turned out slightly shorter than the full distance (305km) but this is due to the interval. The start and finish match on the GPX and the full distance of 305 kilometers was fully covered.
It is a route I can highly recommend! If you have any questions about it feel free to reach out,
To many more adventures!
Cheers,
Daniel