..   Pirate | News |


ADHM Cross Country 2005 in Bayreuth!!!

This weekend two other students from Freiburg and I undertook the 230m/450km ride to Bayreuth, because that is where the German University Championship for MTB CrossCountry was to take place. In order to become the German champ, one had to pedal in the Cross Campus race on Friday and in the CC race on Saturday.
On Friday the really beautiful campus of the University of
Bayreuth was transformed into a bad ass mountainbike happening!
Thanks to the sunshine and all the spectators at the track, the 1m/1,5km lap around campus was a real deluxe race. Steps, swampy grassland, skids and ramps had to be overcome.
I started with the liscensed riders, who were allowed to ride two of these campus laps to get qualified. Twelve starters per group and the first five that finish were qualified for the final. I was totally toast when I made the final and was happy and satisfied when I rolled over the finiah line in 5th place.
The next event on the schedule was the awesome Campus Party that evening, but since we had already been on our feet since 5am, we disappeared into our tent, which we had set up on the nearby soccer field, around midnight.
Promptly at 5:30am we were woken by a shower and we soon made our way to the old Federal League CC Course. It looked like a nice mud fight was about to take place!


After some delay the starting shot was fired in the early afternoon. The task we were to perform was a race over 5 laps of 3m/5km and about 755 vertical ft/230hm. The first hard ascent began right off the bat and I lost contact with the lead group.
After the second of the 5 laps, I had already fallen twice and was in between 6th and 8th place.
What followed was disaster!!! During the 3rd lap my derailleur cable detached. So after that I had 3 gears to choose from in front and only the easiest (inverse) one in back. This is very bad, since you have to have a cadence of about 200rpm to keep up a speed of 12.4mph/20km/h. In short: the uphill was okay, but downhill and flat riding was guaranteed to be a disaster. But I had to get through it, since I need the points for the overall ranking that included racer bikes, MTB CC and MTB marathon.
I fell back place after place and was surprised that I wasn't the last to cross the finish line when I came in after 1:22h. I can be extremely satisfied with 12th place out of 25.
And so I ended up in 7th place in the overall ranking of the German University Championship. Maybe I could have done better, but whining isn't going to help and it didn't stop from having a lot of fun at this event!!!
Also a shout out to the organizers that managed to create a really nice weekend.
Ride on…

Sönke Wegner



<<< zurück