On August 26th, the starting shot was fired under good conditions at 8am, for the 12 hour ride in Todtnauberg. This is my home race, where three others (that unfortunately aren't exactly part of the elite) and myself formed a team of 4.

However, my goal was to achieve good lap times anyway. So, I was given the honor of acting as our starting rider and I sped over the heights of the Todtnau hills with the other riders. Everything went pretty great during the first lap and I came in 5th out of all the starters, after which I sent off the next guy on our team.
As I said before, the other riders on my team weren't exactly the fastest on the track, so we quickly lost my "hard earned" fourth place in the ranking of the 4 person teams.

So, I rode 4 laps until 4pm and always had the 3rd or 4th best lap time despite the strong competition.
Then, when it started raining really hard, the orgaizers decided to make the cutoff an hour earlier, so that I only had to ride one more lap. Thank God. However, this lap was really shitty, because it was freakin' freezing, wet and muddy on the track.
So, I began to follow Florian Ackermann, the former German Junior Champion, and came in with the 4th fastest lap time, despite the "relaxed" tempo.

When the race was over, our team had managed to finish 15 laps, a third of which I was allowed to ride myself *yay*!
I was definitely glad that I only had to go out in the crappy weather once and would like to thank the organizers once again, for getting a great event going. Even though we didn't win in the 4 person team ranking (14th place), I was still pretty happy with the results, not only in terms of the last few races, but especially in terms of the next season, which I have a lot planned for.
In conclusion, I would like to say that it was totally awesome to ride in front of a home audience, even if there weren't that many spectators.

See ya and remember to keep the chain on the right ;)

jonas