Your bike is almost always with you. It’s right behind her desk chair in Julia Eyrich’s office. It’s a yolk-yellow bike with skinny tires and croissant handlebars, with no frills like fenders or lights. “The bicycle is my best friend,” says Eyrich. A friend who brought her back to life. In February 2019, Eyrich had a serious accident that changed a lot. Her employer, the Bundeswehr, and her strong will have remained constant. Achieving what she set out to do is what drives the 30-year-old.
It was a skiing accident. Eyrich came off the runway at full speed, overturned and ended up on a slope. Her memories of it are only vague, the fact is: her rescuers found her with her skis on her right foot. The binding had not opened. After the fall, her sports watch was smashed and worse: her right kneecap. The clock showed 70 kilometers per hour, her body, how vulnerable it is. Eyrich was covered in bruises and she was bleeding internally.
“On that day my life came to a standstill for the first time,” she says. She was in intensive care for a week. It wasn’t until May, when the swelling had gone down, that she was operated on. What Eyrich didn’t know: She is one of those people who develop severe arthrofibrosis after joint surgery. More and more connective tissue formed on the scars, and the injured knee became thicker and thicker. “It was barely recognizable as a knee.” She went under the knife several times. Five kilograms of tissue were removed in an operation. Not everything went smoothly on the operating tables.
Eyrich is a member of the Bundeswehr and was mainly treated by Bundeswehr doctors. She is uncomfortable talking about it, she does not want to publicly accuse anyone. However, two interventions have now been recognized as surgical errors. Eyrich could hardly walk, was in a wheelchair and lived with constant pain, for which she was prescribed opiates. At some point she heard from a medical professional: “Accept that you can no longer move around without aids.” That sentence got to her heart. She felt too young for such a diagnosis.
A first step was to get rid of the drugs. At home she struggled through withdrawal. Sweating and loss of appetite for 14 days. And she sought another medical opinion. She found it at the end of 2021 with the sports orthopedist Andreas Imhoff at the Klinikum Rechts der Isar. Athletes come to him from all over the world. Photos of grateful football stars hang at the entrance to his department. What did the professor do? Eyrich lists: the cruciate ligament removed, screws removed, different material used, treated holistically. She paid for everything herself, using her savings. But the turning point came with the operation in Munich.
Julia Eyrich trains hard to regain her mobility.
(Photo: private)
You can find her in her study at the Bundeswehr University in Neubiberg (UniBW). A room at the end of a corridor that she shares with a colleague. Eyrich is wearing tight jeans and a pullover, and his shoulder-length brown curls are tamed with gel. She is 1.64 meters tall. The bicycle, her friend, looks almost massive next to her. On the bottom shelf of a shelf is a helmet covered in camouflage, a reference to the soldier. On Eyrich’s desk is a cup with the inscription “The Ice Mile”. Some friends call her that: Julia, the ice mile. The cup should motivate them to swim 1609 meters in winter.
Unlike before, water is now Julia Eyrich’s element.
(Photo: private)
As soon as her knee allowed it, Eyrich challenged herself again in sport. She was looking for the adrenaline rush that she has known since childhood. At the age of three she stood on the soccer field for the first time. At 13, she made it into the youth national soccer team. “Football was my life,” says Eyrich. The accident at work took away her ability to play soccer. She can no longer sprint, no longer jump, no longer stand on one leg for long. Even as a soldier going into the terrain with a backpack and rifle is no longer possible. But she can walk again – and she can cycle and swim. Water had never been her element before, especially not in winter. In Wörthersee, Austria, she immediately managed 500 meters at temperatures of around five degrees. This now qualifies them for the ice mile.
Last summer, Eyrich crossed Lake Starnberg from Seeshaupt to Percha. An acquaintance accompanied her in the rowing boat. The two made involuntary detours. “It got tough after 20 kilometers,” says Eyrich. By then she had squashed ten bananas and twelve energy bars in the water. After nine hours and 45 minutes she reached the shore. To build muscle, Eyrich rides her bike as often as she can. Today she says of her crossing the Alps by bike from Munich to Venice: “It was probably not that clever.”
A tough challenge: from Munich to Venice by bike.
(Photo: private)
A day before that accident in February 2019, Eyrich found out that UniBW had accepted her as a research assistant and doctoral student. A wish had come true. The morning after, we went with our comrades to the “winter fight”, to a ski trip. A team-building measure. The soldier had been looking forward to the day in nature. She loves competition, she wants to be the best. Would she otherwise have driven so fast?
Julia Eyrich always wants to do her best.
(Photo: Claus Schunk)
“I need action,” says Eyrich. She wanted a job that would challenge her physically and cognitively. She grew up with four siblings in Eschwege, Hesse, so that’s where you learn to assert yourself. At 18, Eyrich graduated from high school, and in the same summer she joined the army. First station was Munster near Soltau as an officer candidate. She felt catapulted into a new world, separated from family for the first time. Now Eyrich is the first military doctoral student at the Institute for Journalism of the Faculty of Business Administration. Soon after the accident, she began her dissertation between the hospital and the rehabilitation clinic.
“The bicycle is my best friend,” says Ms. Hauptmann.
(Photo: private)
From 2012 to 2015 Eyrich studied management and media at UniBW. In the Bundeswehr she climbed steadily up the hierarchy. At the age of 24, she had her first leadership assignment in the armed forces: as a platoon leader for personal protection and access control in a military police unit. Anyone who speaks to Eyrich on duty today has to say Frau Hauptmann to her. The decision to join the Bundeswehr was the best of her life, she says. The work at the university, the research for the doctoral thesis, the colleagues caught on. Sport, the armed forces and science are the three pillars of her life, she says. It sounds like the advertising slogan of a recruiting agency.
This September, Eyrich will take part in the Invictus Games in Düsseldorf – in the disciplines of cycling and swimming. Invictus like invincible. Two sports that require stamina and the ability to suffer. “I used to hate water,” says Eyrich. But the water carried her when she could hardly move. She got into swimming through therapeutic aqua jogging. She taught herself how to crawl and dolphin with tutorials. In freestyle you can keep your legs mostly straight. Not so with Delfin, when the upper body jumps out of the water with the combination of the leg kick. “Well, I shouldn’t do that too often,” says Eyrich and laughs. She trains with the university swimming team, so she wants to show what she can do.
The Invictus Games, initiated by Prince Harry in 2014, are taking place in Germany for the first time. More than 500 soldiers from around 20 nations, but also firefighters and employees of the Federal Agency for Technical Relief will be there. They all suffered an impairment from an assignment, just like Julia Eyrich, who is officially considered to be severely disabled. A few days ago she was in Cologne to film an image video. In an older video, the Duke of Sussex can be seen playing table tennis.
When she’s not training, the 30-year-old sits on the last pages of her doctoral thesis, for which she deals with peace-building communication using the example of Afghanistan. She evaluates the Bundeswehr mission there with regard to strategic communication. The aim is to develop a concept for future operations. She lectures about it, the Ministry of Defense and NATO are interested in it. How her career will continue is still unclear. Eyrich would like to become a professor. At the moment she sees herself as an ambassador, as a role model. But not everyone is as ambitious as she is. At least she has learned to accept support. “The real strength is accepting help,” says Eyrich. But she only knew that after her accident.