Tereza Hrochová delivered a great performance at the Mattoni Half Marathon České Budějovice. A time of 1:10:52 means not only a new Czech and European race record, but also her new personal maximum. The path to success was hard and redeemed by a long, lonely battle with the wind and absolute physical exhaustion on the finish straight.
The Czech Olympian Tereza Hrochová entered Saturday’s race with bib number 1, which put her in the position of the biggest favorite of the race. She began to fulfill the on-paper predictions, supported by a recent improvement of her personal record, right in the first kilometers of the race, when she started to distance herself from her biggest challenger, Natasha Wilson from Great Britain. “I lost the British opponent from my tight slipstream somewhere around the third or fourth kilometer – or at least since then I didn’t feel or perceive her behind me anymore,” the winner recalls. “From that moment on, I only knew about her at the turnarounds, where she was already quite far away.”
During the first half of the course, it seemed that Hrochová could attack the absolute race record of 1:09:53 by Kenyan Agnes Jeruto from 2017. Spectators could speculate whether fatigue or heat was to blame, but the real complication was something completely different. “Around 7.5 kilometers, I unfortunately lost contact with the runner I had been running with from the start, and from that moment on, I ran basically alone the whole time. I went primarily on my feeling, with the thought that as long as I felt good, there is no point in slowing down,” she describes her tactics. The weather, which could have been a bit of a scarecrow due to pre-race forecasts, played no role in Hrochová’s performance. “Compared to the track race last week in Italy, where it was absolutely crazy hot, this was pleasant weather. The slowdown came largely due to the strong wind and the fact that I ran two-thirds of the race completely alone. That wind and solo run were the biggest loss for me,” she recalled again the unenviable position of a lonely runner. In this windy lottery, she therefore welcomed even momentary help from her colleague Karel Tyrpekl, who pulled a bit of the way together with her. “I hoped that after catching up we would go together until the end, which unfortunately was only a few hundred meters, but it was nice,” she looks back at his gentlemanly gesture.
As the tired but victorious Hrochová approached the packed square, she had to squeeze the last remnants of energy out of herself, but the spectator backdrop did not let her slacken. “I tried to give everything into the finish. Even though it was already ‘only’ a battle against time, I wanted to give it my maximum. The atmosphere was great and pushed me forward,” she paid a compliment to the Budějovice fans. Right behind the finish line, however, the toll for the fast pace manifested and the elite endurance runner fell to the ground from exhaustion. “In the first moments in the finish, I was glad that I mostly had it behind me,” she admits openly. “Afterwards, when I recovered a bit, it only then somehow sunk in and I had immense joy from the overall victory and the time, which is not only the Czech and European race record, but also my personal best.” Tereza thus managed to break the previous European race record, which had been held since 2024 by Maryna Nemchenko from Ukraine with a time of 1:11:26, by a full 34 seconds, and Hrochová improved her overall personal maximum by 17 seconds.
Anyone who would expect that after such a performance an evening full of celebrations, good food, and well-deserved time off followed would be mistaken. “Yesterday evening was classically dedicated to doping control,” Hrochová smiles and adds information over which an ordinary mortal just shakes his head: “Today (Sunday) at seven in the morning I already went to training. On Friday, a start at the European Mountain Running Championships awaits me, so there is no time to lose.”
