This is not the kind of post I usually write here. No Kubernetes, no LLM, no homelab. Just a race report, because last weekend deserved one.
On Sunday, Challenge Roth took place in Roth, a small town close to Nürnberg. Red Hat had registered a relay team, and together with a teammate, I raced the DATEV Challenge Roth 2026 edition. My job was the marathon at the end. It was my first time on that start line after years of watching the race from a screen.
For anyone unfamiliar with it, Challenge Roth is one of the best known long-distance triathlons in the world: 3.8 km of swimming, 180 km of cycling, and a 42.2 km marathon to close it out.
I have followed this race for a long time. Usually that meant sitting somewhere with a livestream open, watching the pros fly through places I only knew from camera shots and commentary. This time I was there with a race wristband, a start number, and months of training suddenly reduced to a very simple instruction: run.
The Organization
The thing that stayed with me most is how well the whole event was run. Roughly 5,000 athletes started the race, split between individual finishers and relay teams like ours. Behind them stood about 7,500 volunteers, out on the course from early morning to late evening, making sure nothing went wrong. Along the route, a reported 300,000 spectators showed up to watch, cheer, and in some sections, throw an outright party.
Some stretches of the course felt more like a festival than a race. Music, people shouting your name off your bib, complete strangers cheering as if you were their own family member. It sounds small, but when the legs start hurting, that gives you one more reason to keep pushing.
The other thing I noticed was how relaxed the whole event felt, despite its size. Volunteers and athletes were friendly with each other in a way that didn’t feel forced. During the weekend I saw Felix Walchshöfer, the race director, out at the Triathlon park or the festival market several times, walking around, checking that everything was going well, talking to people. For an event this size, having the person in charge that visible and that approachable said a lot about how the race is run.
Race Day
Race day had that odd mix of routine and unreality. You do the normal things athletes do before a race: check your gear, find your place, wait for the next thing to happen. Then somewhere in the middle of all that routine it hits you that this is real, and I had to pinch myself and say: you are actually participating in Challenge Roth today.
Waiting for the handover was probably the strangest part. In a normal running race, the start gives you a clean break. Here, someone else had already been working for hours before my part even began. By the time I started running, the race already had a history. The pro races had already finished: Sam Laidlow with an impressive new world-best time over the full distance, and Alanis Siffert with a very strong race, keeping seasoned athletes at bay for long stretches of the day.
The run course itself is fairly simple. You descend toward the canal early on and follow it for almost 25 km, then turn back toward Roth. From there, the course climbs up to Büchenbach, loops around a small pond, and drops back downhill toward town. Once you are back in Roth, the last 4 km go by quickly.
My own race felt almost comfortable for those first 25 km, comfortable enough that I had time to chat with someone I follow on Instagram who happened to be running next to me. The climb up to Büchenbach was a different story. After the race, I watched an interview with Rico Bogen, who finished third that day and said the same climb had wrecked him, so at least I was not imagining it. The downhill back from Büchenbach felt good, mostly because you know the hard part is behind you. The Ryzon corner, with their crew cheering everyone through, gave me exactly what I needed for the final stretch and helped me bring the run in under four hours.
My relay team finished in just under 11 hours, running into the stadium together at the end, which is exactly how a relay should end. That finish was the part I kept thinking about afterwards. You spend the day doing your own job, but the last meters belong to the team.
Sharing a race with the top professional athletes in the sport, current and former world champions, Olympic champions, all racing the same course on the same day, is something I hadn’t experienced before. At the finish line I had my one proper fanboy moment of the day: a photo with Kristian Blummenfelt.
Being there in person, even for one leg, was a dream come true. I know that phrase is overused, but in this case it is simply accurate. I had always wanted to take part in a long-distance triathlon, but knowing how bad a swimmer I am, I also knew it would probably have to happen as part of a relay team. So when the chance came up, I was very happy to take it. Challenge Roth had lived in my head for years as a race I watched from somewhere else. Last weekend, for a marathon, I was inside it.
