“At the age of 16, I immediately finished second in the German U18 championship. At that time, I had improved my running time over 800 meters by nine seconds in a year trained five times a week next to school, my dad was my trainer and it was important to him to build me up carefully.
After graduating from high school, I wanted to go abroad. Because I wanted to keep doing sports, I accepted a Scholarbook sports scholarship and studied at the University of Iowa in the United States for two years. That was super nice, it helped me develop personally, but it didn’t work at all with the sport: Before Iowa, I finished fifth at the U20 European Championship with a time of 2:03 minutes. But when I came back to Germany after two years, I was five seconds slower and no longer in the squad. I no longer received any funding and was completely supported by my parents in terms of training and studies.
In autumn 2015 I started studying elementary school teaching in Munich, and in terms of sports, I switched to the Stadtwerke München team in autumn 2016. I made it back into the squad and am now financially supported by Deutsche Sporthilfe, my club and sponsors.
I never thought about just focusing on sports. It has always been clear to me that I want to study at the same time, because I also need something for my head. If things don’t go that way in sport, then you still have your degree and vice versa. I think it’s incredibly important not to have just one focus. As a top athlete, I didn’t have any special regulations for my studies, but it still worked out well.
I train around 20 hours a week, divided into eight to ten training units. Two to three times in the morning from half past seven, if you don’t take the lecture early in the morning, you can do it well. In the last year before the first state examination, however, I had to ask some of my professors whether it would be okay to be absent again because of a competition.
I go to competitions almost every weekend in the summer. One problem was that the state examination takes place in the summer, you only find out the dates a month or two in advance, and I qualified for the World Cup at the time and spent two weeks at the Universiade in July. So I got help from the Olympic base, who is at your side with such things.
My career advisor put me in contact with a school council, who advised me on how I can reconcile my legal clerkship and my sport. Because the second year of my legal clerkship is more difficult to combine with competitive sports, I won’t start until this fall. Because next year I really want to take the EM in Munich with me. I’m really looking forward to it because all family members and friends can be there.
I am currently working eight hours a week part-time at a primary school in Puchheim and I am incredibly lucky with the principal and the school board. They are very understanding and not only support me, but also follow my races live.
Hopefully I can stay at this school during my legal traineeship. In terms of sport, I only think until next year, because in sport you can never plan that far ahead. Now my goal is to get to the 800-meter semifinals at the Olympic Games. Two weeks ago I qualified directly for Tokyo in Poland with a new personal best of 1:58:68. I still can’t believe I made it. “