Exactly 20 years after her mother’s win in Frankfurt, Katharina Heinig wants to shine in her hometown
You can imagine, how Katarina Heinig feels after she comes home from a 30-kilometer run: Hungry. There are athletes, that control everything they do to have an optimized sports performance through specific dieting. But for Katharina Heinig this is not always the case. There a can of soup will be opened or some quick noodles with tomato sauce. The body is exhausted enough – and then to stand in the kitchen and stir the pot? No way. It’s quite amusing, to talk with Heinig about the theme nutrition, for and extreme performance athlete its it quite rustic to hear, “I eat currywurst with French fries and a Doner sometimes, I like to grill – and I’m a chocolate junky.” Is this a runner, that by the Berlin marathon in 2016 who placed 5th and ran a 2:28:34 marathon and this reached a new performance dimension? Yes, maybe is the elementary way of eating a way to heal the soul for the 28-year-old. Then is the high-performance training not fun as often as it should be, “sometime the tears just pour down”. By as much as 240 kilometers training a week, pain in the legs, and to react with no desire, starts when a tempo training is planned. Or when you’re lying in bed instead, and the trainings round is in drizzling rain. Katharina Heinig will be starting this year her first time by the Mainova Frankfurt Marathon. She already knows this race. The native Frankfurter participated in her school years by the mini-marathon and in 2014 until kilometer 30 as a pacemaker for a trainings college Nina Stöcker and she was also a 2-time end runner for the relay marathon in Frankfurt and was able to run in the Frankfurt Convention Center and had every time a “bombastic” experience that she took in and enjoyed: “Everywhere was lit, blinking and flashed. That is a party” she said.
She wants to enjoy this feeling once again on the 29th of October, but she also knows that this time around it will be perceived different. Since here stardom time by the Berlin Marathon, she is one of the top German runners and by the world championships in London reached the 39th place and had a great performance there. But even more: Katharina Heinig is starting under the Eintracht Frankfurt club, she lives in the Frankfurt district of Niederrad and the meets the criteria to be a local hero.
And then there is her familiar background. Mother Katrin Dörre-Heinig was unique and world-class by marathon. For exactly 20 years, she won her third marathon in Frankfurt, today, the native Leipziger is the German marathon trainer for the women’s team. This special mother-daughter-trainer-athlete relationship is challenging for both sides, the family and sport lives overlap each other constantly and that doesn’t always function without problems.
That she was able to come so far, that was not predicted. As a small girl, Katharina Heinig had experienced first-hand how hard the runners’ life was for her mother and said that she would never put herself through this. “But then it grew on me”, says Katharina. As a child the running athletic group in Erbach in Odenwald, where she parents’ house is since the 90s and where she ran her first long distance – and finally with 21 her debut and then the win by the marathon in Cologne. At that time, her trainer was her father – Wolfgang Heinig, the same one that brought his wife to be one of the top world athletes.
That the Frankfurt race will be special, even through all of these circumstances, this Kathrina already knows. “It’s a little more pressure than normal.” And that’s why is even more important to withstand the pressure – or at least lessen it. Just like in Berlin 2016, as she didn’t have very high expectations as she went to the start and so relaxed and ran her best time and bettered it by 5 minutes. Off to the last and hardest training block, mother and daughter Heinig traveled to the Allgaeu near Oberstdorf with an altitude of 1,000 meters, in September, where low single-digit temperatures were normal both in the morning and evening hours. Up to 3 times a day, training would take place including strength training and aqua jogging. The rigid daily routines consisted of eating, training, reading and sleeping. It wasn’t always fun. But luckily my soul was caressed, with coffee and cake.
