Interview with Julia Bottger

As a kid I lived in the north of Germany without any mountains – just flat and the sea. I did a lot of horse riding, volleyball and tennis. So really different sports. After school I moved to France for a year as fille Au-pair a Marseille. C´est pourquoi je peux parler francais ?

I studied tourism and sport in the south of germany and moved to munich in 2001. So now I live next to the Alps where I started running and very shortly after that I started mountain running. In 2006 I joined the Salomon Team. For work I am a Personal Fitness Coach and Journalist, organise trailrunning camps and do nutrition analyses.

Trailrunning is a very important part of my life. Nearly every day I go out in the mountains to play and to have fun. An ultra is like your life. So many things can happen, make you stronger, are hard or fun, ups and downs. The Ultratrails give me the opportunity to see different countries, trails, to meet great people with the same passion and to spent a lot of time outside in a wonderful landscape.

I am part of the Salomon Trailrunning Family. With out the support of Salomon I would not be able to take part in so many different races around the world and to have a great high-performance equipment. And on the other side the social part in the team is fantastic. We are friends even if we compete against each other in the race and I can learn a lot from the other runners.

As the Dodo Trail is a very technical course with a lot of elevation I am training as much as I can in the mountains, do some Mountainbiking, swimming and gym. As I normally do longer ultratrails the Dodo Trail will be faster form me and I have to do some speed training as well.

This year my main race is the Andorra Ultratrail which is one of the craziest races in Europe. My saison planning is to run different races every year and to have enough recovery time between the races (that does not always happen).

The Tor des Geants is a manifique race. Very very beautiful and hard. An outstanding landscape and lovely people everywhere. It was the hardest Ultra I did but great. I learnt so much about myself during this race and the people are just so happy that you come to their country.