Every year some poor soul organizes a hiking event and puts the word “Marathon” in the title without checking who’s on the starting list. This year that soul was Schwarzwaldverein Engen/Hegau e.V., and the poor souls on the starting list were us: a small delegation of DAV Gogginsingen, a club whose entire personality is built around treating “recreational” as a slur.
45 kilometers, 7:30 am to 9 pm latest, advertised pace 4–5 km/h, advertised character “non-competitive.” We read “non-competitive” the way we read every warning label: as a suggestion aimed at other people.
Required gear included a headlamp “as darkness may occur during the route” — may, as if darkness were optional and not a scheduled feature of every day since the invention of the planet. For us, a headlamp is a lifestyle accessory we own three of out of pure spite for the sun.
Casualties before kilometer one
Two of our group dropped out before the start. Not during, not at the first supply station — before. Either a damning statistic about our preparation, or a very efficient way of finding out who actually wanted to be there. We’re calling it the latter.
The remaining roster overcorrected: one of us did the first half barefoot. Not “forgot proper socks” barefoot — actually, deliberately, feet-on-forest-floor barefoot, for twenty-plus kilometers, on a route that had been thoughtfully paved and graveled for people wearing shoes. No explanation was offered and, per club custom, none was required. Two people vetoed the event with their absence, one vetoed footwear entirely, and the math worked out to roughly one normal hiking group.
The last five kilometers happened anyway
4–5 km/h is a pace at which you could carry on a conversation and still transport a Miele washing machine without breaking a sweat — which matters, because that is a real, documented unit of measurement in our club, and you can try it yourself below.
And yet the last five kilometers were brutal. Not “character building” brutal — just plain, every-step-a-referendum brutal. Feet filed a formal complaint, legs seconded it, and by kilometer 42 our vocabulary had shrunk to grunts and doomed bargaining with the horizon.
We finished, obviously — the alternative involved admitting a flyer from another club got the better of us, and that sentence is not one we’re contractually able to say out loud. Whatever happened at kilometer 42 was, per tradition, just weakness leaving the atmosphere at an inconveniently slow rate. Two days later we were pretty fine, which is either a triumph of recovery or damning evidence about our baseline definition of “fine.” We’re not looking into which.
Solid organization, well-stocked stations, a good dinner at the end. A perfectly good event for perfectly reasonable hikers. We were, respectfully, the wrong crowd for “non-competitive.” We’ll be back next year to not compete even harder.
In the interest of filing 45km under proper club units instead of whatever Schwarzwaldverein uses, here’s the official converter: