Once he was a football coach, now he's an ultra runner.
And as this German champion: Matthias Betzler fulfilled a childhood dream at the age of 65.
Höhenkirchen
- At the end there was a big sigh.
“With that,” says Matthias Betzler, “a long-cherished childhood dream came true.” Not only to run an ultra-trail, but also to be the fastest in all of Germany.
A dream that came true at the age of 65: Matthias Betzler from SpVgg Höhenkirchen triumphed on the so-called "Heldentrail" in Thuringia and won the age group 65 - 69 at the German Ultratrail Championships.
The way to the title: partly torture.
64.9 kilometers of route, 2471 meters of altitude.
A distance that Matthias Betzler covers in seven hours and 26 minutes.
Victory in his age group, and an extremely impressive 33rd place among 250 starters, of which 242 made it to the finish line.
"After I was unable to train at all due to an injury in 2020, the joy of winning this championship was of course all the greater," enthused Matthias Betzler.
Especially since the former soccer coach of TSV Brunnthal is more of a cross climber - it wasn't until 2017 that he started testing the challenges of ultra running beyond the marathon.
Which is a far larger dimension.
Start with headlamps
In Suhl, Thuringia, it started at 6:00 a.m. when the starting gun was fired, the participants ran off with headlamps in the dark. "A large number of ascents and descents were waiting for us, with the uphill sections in the first third of the route being particularly tough," reports the athlete from SpVgg Höhenkirchen. "To make things even more difficult, heavy rain showers soon added to the darkness, which required high demands on a technically clean running style over wet and therefore very slippery root structures, especially downhill."
After 24 kilometers, the longest climbs were achieved when the Schneekopf was reached as the highest point. We continued on a very undulating elevation profile back to Suhl, where the start / finish area was stopped for a while at kilometer 47: Matthias Betzler had five hours and seven minutes on the timekeeping. “From the results of the previous years on the same route, I knew that I had to cover the last 18 kilometers in about two hours to be among the first in my age group. That was quite feasible. ”Once again, a difficult ascent and almost pathless trails, which could only be recognized by the route markings, required all the remaining energy.
With ten kilometers to go, Matthias Betzler made what he said was a “bad fall”, but in the end he was 33rd overall.
And above all to victory in his age group.
At 65, a childhood dream came true.
