With only 0.75 mile of navigation errors! Gorgeous trail, felt like a winter wonderland at the top with all the snow. Put a decent effort on the technical way up but was cruising pretty easy and taking the technical parts pretty safe on the way down. Some notes below about going for a quicker time!
1). Definitely scout the route beforehand, ideally hike the entire trail. I added a little over an extra 1km of wrong turns and also had to run the entire route with my phone open to the alltrails route. Not making the wrong turns alone and hesitating at a lot of the trail junctions would have easily saved at least 4-5 minutes on the day.
2). Run the route counter-clockwise. I ran it this direction solely because the previous FKT holder did it in this direction and after completing the route, I can confirm that it's much faster than clockwise, as you can let loose on the downhills much more in this direction. I think if this route continues to gain popularity, the clockwise and counterclockwise should be split into two categories. I will say that I really liked the beauty of running the trail counterclockwise, as you get to ascend the stairs to the top of Königstuhl and then see all the forests on the descent.
3.) Pay attention to the weather. The muddy conditions near the bottom and icy conditions near the top definitely made the route a little trickier. If you could do it on a drier day, that would be ideal.
4.) In terms of where to make up time, I took the Himmelsleiter pretty easy, since I had my phone in my hand, I wasn't able to power walk up the stairs. I also took the descent pretty easy since I was more focused on not making a wrong turn, picking it up on the fireroad sections and not being afraid of the technical parts will save you a lot of time too. I think if I was going very hard and had great weather with no navigation errors, sub 1hr on this route would be doable.
Great route, highly recommend checking it out!