Tim Teege

🎨 Impressions Before I finally decided to read this book, it had been on my list for many years. It first entered my radar when it was recommended by Ali Abdaal, the productivity YouTuber. I heard about it a few more times in different contexts and now felt like it was time. It’s a long book with way over 500 pages, which made me hesitate. Apparently, in the UK the author Derren Brown is a household name who had a few successful television shows to his name. He started out as a performance…

Welcome to the fifth-year anniversary of me trying to get into Western States 100! Yes, it’s already been that long. What started in 2021, when I was fresh off the pandemic and eager to experiment with mountain ultras, now has become a real tradition. Getting one of the 369 tickets for arguably the most popular 100-mile foot race in the world is as difficult as it’s ever been. So far I haven’t succeeded and the chances are not exactly doubling like the doubled ticket count each year would…

Finally, my return to the home of triathlon, Roth. 🥰 In the past, I have completed four full distance triathlon races. The goal has always been just to make it to the end in one piece. The races ended up taking me between 11:51 and 11:26. The most recent one happened in 2019, seven years ago. During those years I moved away from long triathlons, towards ultra running as well as faster marathon racing without the swim and bike combination before it. But then, in 2024, my friend and training…

I’ve always liked to play. There’s this saying “We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.” — if that’s true I’m definitely a young person albeit having been here for 41 years. Making running more fun by introducing games into it has been a guaranteed bringer of joy to me in these past 17 years I’ve been a runner. There have been several different games, such as collecting all streets in my city, going on a run streak, and I consider the tough long races…

🎨 Impressions Richard Ringer ist zur Zeit einer der besten deutschen Marathonläufer. Mit seinem Sieg bei den Europameisterschaften 2022 in München ist er zum ersten Mal auf meinem Radar erschienen und hat seitdem auch in mehreren anderen wichtigen Läufen außerordentlich gut abgeschnitten. Platz 12 bei den Olympischen Spielen 2024 in Paris, sowie kürzlich erst ein 8. Platz beim Boston Marathon, wo jeweils die Rennen von Männern afrikanischen Ursprungs dominiert wurden. Im Herbst 2025 wurde ich…

🎨 Impressions I came across Mike Monteiro about ten years ago, when a talk of his on design principles made the rounds. At the time, what he said was pure gold for me at my company. He ran a digital design shop in San Francisco and was quite successful at it while still staying true to the small business ideal he had cultivated. He’s an opinionated guy, not afraid to speak his mind at all. On the political spectrum he clearly is on the left side, trying to make things better for normal people…

Running coaches all over the world have become increasingly anxious during the past few years with the advent of large language models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini. But rightfully so? Can chatbots really replace a human running coach? One thing is for sure, the actual human touch will inevitably be missing when choosing generative AI over a running coach. We don’t know yet if it’s ever going to be possible to replace that, but certainly not right now. Every aspect apart from that…

🎨 Impressions Influenced by the Artemis 2 mission that had humans fly around the Moon once again in spring of 2026, I got back into space. Not literally though. I’ve always been fascinated with it and wanted to become an astronaut as a small child. In fact, that’s the only profession I ever really wanted to have. None other got me excited ever again in my life so far. I remembered the movie that had been made on the basis of this book some ten years ago. I saw it at the theater back then an...

🎨 Impressions The book started out really promising. I usually enjoy pop-science that talks about how our animal brains trick us into making false sense of our surroundings and how to overcome those built-in limitations we have. We tell ourselves lots of things that sound reasonable but are actually wrong, and we’re especially fast at reaching conclusions in order to not having to think about it more. The first vaguely plausible argument our brain comes up with often wins. The point is, thi...

🎨 Impressions I followed Michael Schur’s book “How to Be Perfect” with this one, because they pair well. First I learned about moral philosophy in the small setting from Schur before moving to the big picture questions with this book. In the end its all related, of course. How you deal with the people around you in an ethically sound way is closely connected to how we should deal with each other in a larger societal picture. Many ideas and influential people are mentioned in both books. Rut...