A 78-Year-Old Berliner Will Run His 50th Berlin Marathon on Sunday

Wilfried Köhnke had been running for eight years and living in Berlin for five when the city staged its first marathon in October 1974, and he decided to watch from a distance. Reporters at the time had persuaded him that the event was meant for specialists. He tried it anyway the following autumn and finished in 3:57:05. On Sunday the 78-year-old will start the Berlin Marathon for the 50th time, more than anyone in the race’s history.

In 2012 he passed Bernd Hübner’s mark of 36 participations to take the record outright. The two Berliners had been level through 2011, before illness brought Hübner’s run of starts to an end. Köhnke says the number crept up on him. “Of course, I never expected that at the beginning. At some point, the idea did occur to me: Maybe you’ll make it to 50,” he said in an interview published by the race organizers this week.

Born in Pritzwalk in 1947, Köhnke moved to Berlin in 1969 and spent 41 years as an accountant at Germany’s federal pension insurance agency before retiring in 2013. He has raced for the police sports club, Polizei SV Berlin, since 1988. Sunday’s race is the 52nd edition, so across half a century of Berlin Marathons he has been absent from only one since his debut.

From 286 Starters to 55,000

That first race drew 286 starters from four countries, and 244 of them made it to the finish. They set off from Waldschulallee in Charlottenburg, near the Mommsen Stadium, and ran two loops out to the Wannsee lido and back, parallel to the Avus in the Grunewald forest. The race moved into the center of West Berlin in 1981, with the start at the Reichstag, and it has grown ever since. By last year the organizers had 55,146 runners registered.

Köhnke has run the course in every form it has taken since 1975, and he is honest about what the crowds changed. The size of the modern field, in his view, has taken some of the edge off it as a competition, though he still approaches it the same way. “Nevertheless, if I am going to train for a marathon, I would still rather run it as a race,” he said.

His fastest marathon, 2:44:48, came in 1985, one of 11 times he has broken three hours. During one marathon build he was running 68 kilometers (42 miles) a week, a fairly modest load for a runner of that standard. These days he averages 43 kilometers, or about 27 miles.

A Lifetime Bib and a Guaranteed Place

Anyone who finishes Berlin 10 times joins the race’s Jubilee Club, which now lists more than 6,250 members. They are guaranteed an entry every year, so they never have to go through the lottery, and they keep a colored bib number for life. The club also hands out a free entry after the 20th, 25th, 30th, 35th and 40th finishes, which means Köhnke ran past the last of those milestones years ago.

Martin W. Teague is the other runner Köhnke credits with keeping him going. An infantryman with the U.S. Army’s Berlin Brigade, Teague finished the 1974 race 61st in 3:31:25 wearing No. 6, and he was given the same number again for the 50th edition in 2024. According to Köhnke, he is running again this year. Other races have their own long-haulers: Johnny Kelley started Boston 58 times between 1928 and 1992, Mark Bauman has an unbroken run of Boston finishes of his own, and Antonio Rao finished his 31st Rome Marathon at 93.

Köhnke had completed 106 marathons by this spring, including a stretch between 1991 and 1997 in which he raced on five continents. Eight of those were in Australia, where his sister settled in 1973 and where he has visited 23 times since 1976. The one he would most like to run again is in Shellharbour, south of Sydney. It was his 100th marathon, in 2022, and it fell on May 1, the birthday of an uncle who died in the war.

The 52nd Berlin Marathon starts Sunday, Sept. 27 (start times and how to watch), and Köhnke will be somewhere in a field of tens of thousands, a long way behind the elite race at the front. Seven days later in Slovakia, Peter Polák, who first ran the Košice Peace Marathon as a 26-year-old in October 1974, is due to make his own 50th start there.