Christoph Fuhrbach

Christoph Fuhrbach (born December 16, 1970 in Frankenthal ) is a German endurance athlete who was initially mainly active as a marathon and mountain runner and is more successful with his racing bike on long and mountain routes at an advanced age .

Life

Family, education, job

Christoph Fuhrbach grew up in Frankenthal as the son of the artist Dankmar Fuhrbach (sculptures and painting). After graduating from the local Albert Einstein grammar school , he studied Catholic theology with subsequent training as a pastoral consultant . Since September 1, 2004, he has been working at the Diocese of Speyer as a consultant in the diocesan office for universal church tasks . He lives in Neustadt an der Weinstrasse , is married and has two children.

Circumnavigation

Fuhrbach became known throughout Germany when he went on a bike tour around the world in 1998/99 and when he was out and about - back then, long before the smartphone era, mostly from internet cafés - he regularly sent reports by email to the Ludwigshafen daily Die Rheinpfalz . The mammoth bike tour took him within eleven months via Southeast Europe, Turkey , Iran and India to the geographical highlights of Nepal and Tibet , continued via Thailand , Malaysia and Indonesia to Australia and New Zealand and ended with a good 3000 km across the USA . Later he presented his travelogues as a slide show using cross-fading for charity purposes; it was accompanied by music typical of the country and commented on with freely spoken descriptions.

Peace initiatives

Fuhrbach lived from 2002 to 2004 in the area of Ramstein Air Base in the West Palatinate . As part of the peace initiative of the Ecumenical Working Group Landstuhl , from which the Peace Initiative West Palatinate emerged , he worked as a co-organizer and co-designer of the "peace prayers". These deal with world peace in general, the Ramstein air show disaster of 1988 and the war in Iraq from 2003. On August 6, 2005, the 60th anniversary of the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima , he was co-organizer and participant of the “Pace- Makers-Radmarathons “over 333 km from Stuttgart to Büchel in the Eifel. The bike marathon has been held every summer since then and now runs over 342 km from Bretten in Baden via Mannheim and Bad Dürkheim to Ramstein in the Palatinate and via Neustadt an der Weinstrasse and Germersheim back to Bretten.

Sports

Running

Fuhrbach had his first cross-country skiing successes as a schoolboy; at the age of 15 he completed the Kuseler 100 km run in a time of 16:53 hours. It was not until 1999, when he returned from cycling around the world at the age of 28, that he started again seriously with cross-country and mountain runs. As a pupil and high school graduate he belonged to the clubs TG Frankenthal and TuS Flomersheim , later he switched to TV Hatzenbühl in the south of the Palatinate , which has a long tradition of cross-country skiing. There he trained under Hans-Jürgen Eichberger , a former master runner with a marathon best time of 2:19 hours, and was accepted into the German national mountain running team in 2003.

Fuhrbach won the German Mountain Running Championship twice with the team from TV Hatzenbühl. In the half marathon of the German Weinstrasse marathon ( Bockenheim ), he took first, second and third place each. At the Bienwald-Marathon ( Kandel ) he finished second on the whole and once third on half the distance. He also won six mountain runs and fun runs in southwest Germany as well as three runs in the Palatinate mountain run series (2003 and 2005 Donnersberg run, 2006 Nanstein mountain run). In 2003 he was third in the Tromsø Midsummer Night Marathon in Norway . In the same year he set his marathon best time in Kandel with 2:31:25 hours.

Cycling

As a cyclist, Fuhrbach is a member of the Cycling Club (RSC) Neustadt an der Weinstrasse. In 2011 he also joined the Challenge-BIG, a cycling association that aims to climb high elevations.

At the age of 38 he achieved an unofficial German best. On August 23 and 24, 2009, he covered 488 km on the steep Kalmithöhenstrasse near Neustadt within 24 hours and climbed 17,615 meters in altitude. He drove the distance between the western exit of Maikammer (about 170 meters above sea level) and the parking lot directly below the Kalmit summit (673 meters), which is almost 6 km long, up and down 42 times; on the 43rd ascent, at the end of the 24 hours, he reached the 400-meter height sign. Fuhrbach exceeded the previously known German best performance by Rainer Klaus , who had achieved 15,458 meters in altitude in 1996.

On 24./25. In July 2010, Fuhrbach set a new altitude record on a 1.8 km long and an average of 10% steep stretch of road between Grenzach-Wyhlen and Rührberg (Lörrach district) on the edge of the southern Black Forest . In favor of a Misereor project in Peru , he climbed 21,060 meters in altitude within 24 hours and significantly improved both his own mark (17,615) from the previous year and the old world best performance of the two Austrian twins Gernot and Horst Turnowsky , which took place on June 30th and 1st July 2007 had reached 20,050 meters in altitude.

In August 2011, at the age of 40, Fuhrbach took second place behind the Italian Alessandro Magli in the six-stage international tour of the Dolomites for everyone . The first three stages - under the pseudonym "Max Kraft" - were also driven by the 1997 Tour de France winner , Jan Ullrich . On September 3, 2011, Fuhrbach won the 20th Kalmit folding bike cup in 19:02 minutes, in which the 450 meters of altitude of the 6.5 km long and on average 7.6% steep route had to be mastered with a folding bike without gear shift.

On June 2, 2013, Fuhrbach achieved 2nd place in the open mountain bike race on Mont Ventoux ( 1912  m above sea level ) in Provence, France, 23 seconds behind the winner. On July 19, 2014 he won the German mountain championship for cyclists in senior class 2 at Berchtesgaden in 42:12 minutes for the 13 km long route. In the race of the elite class he would have finished fourth by this time. In his third participation after 2009 and 2012 in the German mountain time trial with around 800 participants, the Schauinslandkönig in the southern Black Forest (11.5 km, 770 meters in altitude), Fuhrbach won on August 3, 2014 in 30: 35.06 minutes.

Web links

• Christoph Fuhrbach's website

Individual evidence

1. ^ Peace Initiative West Palatinate: History. Previous FIW actions and events. July 12, 2009, accessed September 5, 2011 . 
2. ↑ Pace-Makers: Radmarathon 2010 - The route. Archived from the original on March 12, 2012 ; Retrieved July 27, 2010 . 
3. ↑ Cycling for Peace . In: The Rhine Palatinate . Ludwigshafen July 27, 2010.
4. ↑ ^{a b} Vita Christoph Fuhrbach. (No longer available online.) Voll-das-leben.net, archived from the original on May 2, 2015 ; Retrieved July 22, 2014 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
5. ↑ ^{a b} Klaus D. Kullmann (ku): Two mountain titles in the Palatinate . In: The Rhine Palatinate . Ludwigshafen July 22, 2014.
6. ↑ Fuhrbach manages 17,615 meters in altitude . In: The Rhine Palatinate . Ludwigshafen August 25, 2009.
7. ↑ Misereor: A world record for MISEREOR. Archived from the original on April 5, 2010 ; Retrieved July 27, 2010 . 
8. ↑ Cycling world record: Fuhrbach sets a new record . In: The Rhine Palatinate . Ludwigshafen July 26, 2010.
9. ↑ At six o'clock the chills come . In: The Rhine Palatinate . Ludwigshafen July 27, 2010.
10. ^ Gernot Turnowsky: Horst & Gernot Turnowsky. Retrieved July 26, 2010 . 
11. ↑ The Rhine Palatinate . Ludwigshafen August 16, 2011.
12. ^ The Royal Kalmit Folding Bike Cup. Palatinate Klappverein e. V., September 3, 2011, accessed September 5, 2011 . 
13. ^ Christoph Fuhrbach: Kalmit-Klapprad-Cup 2011. RSC Neustadt, September 4, 2011, accessed on September 5, 2011 . 
14. ↑ Christoph Fuhrbach: Mont Ventoux 2013. (No longer available online.) RSC Neustadt, archived from the original on May 1, 2015 ; Retrieved June 28, 2013 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
15. ↑ Berg DM. rad-net.de, accessed on July 22, 2014 ( open PDF Master 2 ). 
16. ↑ Oliver Wehner (olw): Fuhrbach crowns himself King of the Schauinsland . In: Die Rheinpfalz , complete edition . Ludwigshafen August 7, 2014.