FKT: Mikula Thalmann - Around Lake of Biel (Switzerland) - 2023-03-24

This was my first ever attempt at an FKT and oh boy it got close!

So why this route?

I remember when we were kids our mom took us to Biel and the plan was to go around the Lake of Biel with our bikes in 2-3 days. We managed to do it within a day. And now I wanted to try it running within a couple of hours. So I chose this route as my winter project. Usually I try hibernating in my cave in winter. I don‘t like the dark, the cold, the messy conditions and prefer chocolate instead, leaving me somewhat unfit when spring arrives. This year I wanted to avoid this and took up training throughout winter to do this FKT early this year. 

I took the first train from where I live to Biel and started running around 06:30 in the morning just around sunrise. I had a large pack with a 1.5L water bladder and two flasks with .5L of Drink Mix to get some of the calories in with fluids. Two large energy bars and two gels and the usual safety stuff completed my equipment for the day. 

In the beginning it was raining but not too hard. It took me a while to get into a consistent flow but then, despite the bad weather I really enjoyed the trails close to the lake in the first 20k and made decent progress. The only small uphill section broke my rhythm a bit but after the downhill I managed to find my consistent stride again. After some more and heavier rain around the 35k mark the rain stopped mostly for the rest of my run. 

But other challenges emerged!

My right leg, especially hamstring and ankle were not feeling very well. It wasn‘t that painful but still slowed me down a bit. I could keep going but I realised that finishing with an FKT would be a challenge now, despite making good progress in the first half being well under the anticipated pace. 

Around 3k before I finished, my right hamstring started to cramp but nothing too serious. However I lost my focus in the last kilometre and took a small detour around the city which added about 1k to my run compared to the original route. Hope this still gets accepted. If not, I‘ll try again some day :)

So in the end when I arrived back at the train station I was just a bit more than 2 minutes under the current FKT! Photo finish after running 54k I guess. 

Thanks to my predecessors to opening this nice route. Hope to see a new FKT on this soon!