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
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