LG Alsternord: 80-year-olds chasing world records

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Hamburg. It was an order, not a request, delivered in a caring tone, but that didn't change the fact that it was just that: an order that allowed no contradiction.

"You're coming with me!" they said to him. "We need you for the relay!"

It was the first days of February 2010. Shortly before that, on January 29, his wife's funeral had taken place, six weeks after she had returned from the Eppendorf University Hospital with the cancer diagnosis. Shortly thereafter, on February 10th, the German Senior Athletics Championships began in Sindelfingen. So it was a maximum difficult moment for this appeal. And at the same time the best imaginable.

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"I had to get out of the valley of tears," says Axel Wendt. "They felt that."

For example, he became a competitive athlete. At 70

"Look, you can't die either"

The sports field of the Alsternord athletics community in Hamburg-Poppenbüttel, a good eleven years later, a muggy July afternoon, the seniors start training. One after the other they come, tracksuits, spear in hand, the bag with the spikes in it. Gray hair, tanned skin, sinewy muscular legs, teasingly friendly tone.

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"Look, the herring isn't gaining weight either, the tough sack."

"Look, the rascal, can't be killed either."

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"That's Klaus, the chick, just 77. But he's also the fastest." Laughter.

A good dozen men are warming up here, stretching, running laps. And the season is complete again. The world record holders. Axel Wendt, the banker, who still weighs 60 kilos as a teenager, slim build, tanned, white hair in a boyish cut, born in 1940.

Bernd Fölschow, who says he only runs because he feels like it, as if it were that easy when it comes to records, born in '43.

Hartmann Knorr, the doctor, as they all call him, mathematician, who always trains with a stopwatch, according to exact specifications, a relentless chronicler of their own achievements and thus also of their own decline, which they are fighting against, born in 1940 .

And Heinz Keck, born in 1941, the restless man who always comes to Hamburg from Osnabrück for training and who started it all more than ten years ago. He saw the record lists, he saw himself, then he called the others in Hamburg and said: "We can really open up the world together. If each of us runs what we can run, we will set a world record.”

So it happened.

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More and more top performances

The old runners, the "Hamburg boys", as it says on the back of their red running bibs, reflect a trend. Germany is getting older. From 1949 to 2017, life expectancy for men rose by almost 14 years and for women by almost 15 years.

And these now older Germans are increasingly discovering competitive sport for themselves. In the statistics of the German Athletics Association, for example, in 1980 not a single outstanding performance was recorded for the age group over 75. In the year 2000, there were already 41 top performances for men and women together. In 2019, the year before the pandemic, the statistics even recorded 66 such top performances.

The statistics hardly know any upper limits. In 2010, the generation of over 90-year-olds appeared in the statistics for the first time with seven special achievements. In the past two years there were already 14 and 17 respectively.

Older people improve their records faster than young people improve theirs - as if they really had some catching up to do. Only frailty determines the limits of their ambition, and they push them further and further.

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A note with the next goal

Heinz Keck, from Osnabrück, brought a piece of paper with him to training and he wrote down numbers and times on it by hand, his next goals. At the top is "4x200 meters indoor USA 2:11.26 min" to get the record, age group M80, they are almost all over the limit now. Except for Fölschow, and then someone else has to run for him. As a club relay against a national team, but that doesn't scare them, they know that.

"That's where we attack," says Keck. "We can do it." As they almost always do when they set their mind to it.

Like on February 10, 2019, for example, when they broke the world record for four times 400 meters indoors previously held by the US relay. And they've barely reached the finish line when they're already planning the next run, as if all that wasn't good enough for them. A few months later, on December 15th, they are now racing against their own time and improving again, by a whopping 16 seconds. But because they have no opponent there, the world association does not recognize the record.

So they have to run again, now on January 25 last year, in the Hamburg Athletics Hall. The school championships take place here on this day, but in the middle all disciplines are interrupted so that the old ones can try their world record. They also have an opponent this time, the M50 squadron from their own club, so that everything is in order.

The old ones run and the young ones cheer them on. It's just the other way around this time.

The starting runner

In the relay, the fastest run at the beginning or at the end, on one or four. Hartmann Knorr starts this time, the reports prove it. He himself does not remember this exactly. He says he only focused on the time. As always when he runs.

When it comes to training, Knorr is the man with the stopwatch. He holds it in his hand on every run. If he wants to run the 200 meters in 40 seconds, he sets the stopwatch to beep every ten seconds. He can see if he's on time by checking the 50-meter markers. If it beeps before it hits the mark, it was too slow. That's how he drives himself.

"I started running so late," he says. "That's why I lack the natural sense of speed. When you run your whole life, you get a sense of how fast you are. But that's not the case with me.” When Knorr trains, the beeping is his companion.

Doctorate at 62 - in second degree

Hartmann Knorr is a mathematician, a man of numbers. He worked as a management consultant. But the fact that everyone calls him "Doctor" during training has nothing to do with his mathematics studies. But with the fact that he studied archeology after his job and received his doctorate at 62, simply out of interest. Once he did that, he needed a new goal. Until then, he had only done the sports badge annually. Now the world-class plan began for him.

Sometimes the watch will beep when he's already passed the mark. Then he has to slow down.

What he likes about numbers is their rigor. "You can fool yourself with cognitive abilities," he says. "You can convince yourself that everything is the same as it was five years ago." But that doesn't work when it comes to running times. They document how you slow down year after year, without mercy. And the point, says Knorr, is to delay the dismantling longer than the others. If you then draw a curve and choose the scale and scale cleverly, "you even see an increase". The mathematician's trick.

When the others are talking during training, about the new spikes or a competitor's illness, he's running again. Knorr runs the most. He has been world champion three times and European champion five times. Last year alone he collected four German championship titles, over 400 and 800 meters and in the pentathlon.

And it should have been an even bigger year. He wanted to go to the World Cup in Toronto, everything was already booked. The first year in the new age group, M80, is a great opportunity for a title. "Nobody wants to get older," says Knorr. "But everyone wants to go to the next age group."

And then came Corona. Hartmann Knorr had to cancel everything. "Bitter," he says. Because no one knows what will happen in five years. Will there be a new chance?

When Knorr ran his 400 meters in 80.5 seconds in her world record attempt, they are on course. On course for a world record.

In second place

Heinz Keck runs in second place. Keck, the all-rounder, who now also does decathlon, because he is not the world's best in any discipline, but is at the forefront in many. Who picks out the records they can break, but has another role before the race. "Then I'll say something, sometimes a joke." Then when he feels that the tension in some people is getting so strong that it paralyzes.

In Heinz Keck's living room in Osnabrück there is a trampoline, weight bench, treadmill, eight pairs of spikes and sneakers on the floor, suitable for every discipline, he also does decathlon now. There is also a stepper in the basement. This is where he trains, when he's not out on the course, pushing open the throwing ring and throwing the hammer towards the lawn, even if it seems to be raining endlessly. Then no one else is on the site, just him, like almost every day.

"I need to feel like I'm still there," says Keck as he pulls out of his pocket the wooden discus with the metal ring, not some newfangled plastic thing. "And after all, I'm also a bit vain." Now, at 80, hardly less than before.

Amputation was already imminent

Keck's parents were hired men, farmers without their own land, in modest circumstances. But as a schoolboy, as a high school student, he was discovered and promoted as an athlete, he was the best in his circle. Then he played football, top amateur class. For Keck, sport meant success, advancement. "And I," he says, "want to give everything back to sport that it gave me."

He has to give up football after breaking his tibia and fibula. At times he is threatened with amputation. Keck studies, becomes a representative of American animal pharmaceutical companies in Germany. But when he withdraws from his job, he simply continues with competitive sports. Certificates, medals and reports on his successes hang on one wall in his apartment, all framed. Six world titles, six European titles, six world records, that's his record so far.

And if something annoys him, it's when these achievements are not recognized. When someone pretends that it's harder to become world champion at 30 than at 80. When some get a gold badge of honor from the city and others don't. Then he complains - quite loudly - in letters and speeches.

"We are the stepchildren," says Keck. "We're on the verge of pity."

A long-distance relationship with the world's best senior athlete

Keck's girlfriend lives in the USA. Her name is Philippa Raschker and she has even more titles than him, 118 World Championship medals alone, the most successful senior track and field athlete ever, she is 74. He approached her at a World Cup in 2007, so they know each other.

When they don't see each other, they skype, sometimes several times a day. Today she talks about the heat and that she trains on a concrete track, the only option in the city right now, "quite difficult," she says, in German with an American twist. She was born in Hamburg, but has lived in the USA for 50 years. Senior athletes are no less stepchildren there than here.

From the fracture of his leg, Keck left a gap in his fibula, it never healed properly. Sometimes he sticks eucalyptus plasters on it and hopes it helps. Sometimes he needs to train less, he knows that. "But even in old age it's difficult to say, now it's good." The ambition, he says, isn't getting any less.

When he hands over the baton at the world record race in Hamburg, he is not as fast as he would like to be. But fast enough that it could be enough.

To three

And when Bernd Fölschow took over the baton, he was afraid of everything. around his leg. Before the strain he's been struggling with for weeks forces him to give up. "If you run for yourself, it would be bitter," he says. "But in season it would be even worse."

Actually, Fölschow didn't want any more pressure. He had enough pressure. He ran as a teenager, then set a German record over 1,500 meters in the early 1960s. Later the pressure came from elsewhere, sport was his salvation. Fölschow was head of an IT company when everyone was craving IT, which made his days so long that he was happy if he could get into his running shoes after ten in the evening to compensate. "If I hadn't run," he says today, "then I don't know if I would still be alive."

He was walking slowly then. And then, when he had given up the business, quickly again. World Cup bronze in the 1500 meters, that was one of his greatest successes as a pensioner. "I've achieved everything I wanted in sport," says Fölschow. He sits on the board of directors of Nabu, travels to India and Arabia. And then, six weeks before the race, the question came up as to whether he could stand in for the relay, the other runner was injured, they wanted to set a world record.

He immediately started training hard. So hard that he got the strain. "I only run when I feel like it," says Fölschow. So for fun. But what does fun mean when they want to be the fastest in their late seventies.

The goal: to be better than the others

The sports scientist Silke Keller from the University of Hildesheim investigated what drives senior athletes in her doctorate. According to this, most of them have an above-average education, and a good proportion, especially men, train more than six hours a week. Some even dope. The older athletes are also concerned with health and being together with others. But the central motive is different: the competition orientation. The desire to be better than others. "The days of the incredulous smiles at javelin throwing grandmothers are finally over," sums up Keller.

Fölschow needs over 90 seconds. More than the others. But he can do it, he hasn't given up.

The final runner

And when Axel Wendt takes over the baton, it's clear to him that they'll make it. "That now I just have to run like I always do."

When Axel Wendt took part in the German championship in 2010, they actually finished first in the relay. He also finished fourth in the 800 meters. For the first time in his life, he began to train specifically.

The next year, at 71, he was three seconds faster.

Running has always been a way for him to get out. Back then as a student at the humanistic grammar school, a boarding school, when he became a schoolmaster. And then with the Bundeswehr, where he signed up so he wouldn't have to go home after school. Wendt is allowed to go to the division championships, wins, "and we got a day off there". Running is always the way out of a tight spot for him.

And so now he's walking out of the grief, finishing second at the World Championships the following year, winning the relay despite the heat in Hungary, which he's used to from trips to Egypt.

The new chance - at 80

Between 70 and 75 he is one of the fastest seniors in the world. Until a doctor puts an injection wrong. He has had an open wound on his lower leg for more than a year. When she's finally healed, he keeps walking. Not out of boredom. Axel Wendt supports a museum, the Chamisso Museum in Kunersdorf, he sponsors the restoration of art treasures in a church in Salzwedel, cultivates an orchard on the Elbe, and then he regularly visits his son in Stockholm. But what would life be without running?

He has slowed down due to the injury. The doctor is faster than him now. But not this time, with the world record. Shortly before the end, the younger ones surpass him. But what does that mean. The last round belongs to him alone. At the end the clock stands at 5:37:03 minutes. Now they're partying. Are cheered. You've improved yourself once again.

A month later they run the next indoor world record, this time over four times 800 meters.

And now there is Heinz Keck's note, the plan for the next records.

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