May 18^th of this year turned out to be a very athletic day for both our team member at AUT and our partner but also for their families and friends. That day would see the results of their training efforts of the past weeks being aptly summarised by two words: “hopp, hopp!”. These words kept coming up as our two athletes covered “the most beautiful 10 Miles in the word”, running through the Swiss capital during the annual Grand Prix of Bern. After seemingly endless days of rain and gloomy weather, the day of the Grand Prix the sun finally came out and rewarded all participating runners, nearly 30,000, with bright blue sky and warm temperatures.

The weather was bright, and so was the overall atmosphere which can be described as a very peculiar and blissful mixture of folk festival and major sports event. There were bands and musicians from different genres playing in pretty much every corner whose upbeat rhythms helped to give the runners enough momentum to get up even the steepest hill. Both inhabitants and visitors gathered along the running course, clapped their hands or, in some cases, the lids of boiling pans, and encouraged participants to keep going. The cheering of the audience but also the great ambition of fellow runners really seemed to spark even more motivation among all participating runners and enabled individuals to get through some tough moments, for instance, when the goal appeared to be too far away or too difficult to reach. Thoughts about stopping or abandoning the run didn’t even have a chance to come up.

For a little more than 16 kilometres, runners of the Grand Prix mastered a track that required them to go up, down or straight on, across bridges, through forests, along the Aare river or right across markets in order for them to get where they had initially started. This course was aptly described by the website Laufticker.de as sightseeing tour for Bern “in fast-forward” (Laufticker.de, 19.95.2013). After one hour and 42 minutes the first AUT runner crossed the finish line, followed only a little later by our second runner (1 hour and 48 minutes). We would like to take this opportunity again to congratulate our runners and we are looking forward to the next athletic success stories of our team members and partners.

 Feel like going for it? Next year's Grand Prix of is going to take place on May 10th (www.gpbern.ch).