Sailing

I love being outdoors, and most of all on the water!

To me, sailing is a great, a truly technical sport. Racing means reading the wind on the water, fiddling with the trim, thinking about sail profiles and flow, and making tactical decisions in seconds — a regatta field is one big, wet physics lab. (Oh, and whoever sails with me gets all of this explained, whether they like it or not.) It’s simply exciting to feel the interplay between physics and sport all the time.

From 2018 to 2021, I passed exactly that on as a sailing instructor at the University of Bonn’s sports programme: Explaining forces, levers and flows not in the lecture hall but on the boat — applied mechanics, with more wind and no formula book at all. (I still wrote teaching materials for my students, though.)

And sometimes I like it entirely non-technical: just being outside — hiking, cycling, sailing — and feeling the elements directly. I really, really enjoy working with people — in the boat as well as in my team at work. But sometimes a squirrel or a dolphin is just as lovely company. Wind, weather and water have a pleasantly honest way of keeping you awake.