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Hot ride through the Black Forest

The Black-Forest-Ultra-Bike-Marathon on June 18 2006 in Kirchzarten: early in the morning, at 8:15am the starting shot was fired for the 48m/77km lap right through the Black Forest, in awesome weather.



The first 6m/10km went pretty smoothly and I tried to make my way to the front of the leading group, which was pretty hard considering the number of licensed riders.
When we went up the first long and especially brutal ascent, I missed the gravy train and rode up the mountain with the second group.
I pulled 25m/40km away from the group with two others and so ended up only about 14min behind the first group (places 40-43).
Up until then everything was going great, but unfortunately I lost my second water bottle at some point and couldn't get another one (Thanks a lot my dear organizational team!!!;-) ), because supposedly only the lead group gets water bottles handed to them.
Excellent!
When my other bottle ended up being empty 9m/15km before the finish line, I had to turn it down a notch, so that I would reach the end alive. I was handed some more water in cups, but it didn't help much.
When I was going up the last ascent, I totally broke down and just sort of tottered back and forth.
That was a pretty shitty experience!
After being passed by a few other riders, I finished in 69th place (4th in my age division) and was finally given something to drink.


I took some comfort in the fact that I was given prize money for coming in in 4th place, but if I had gotten enough to drink I could have made it to 2nd place, at least.
Oh well, you can't have it all. However, you learn from your mistakes, as they say. ;-)

Servus, Jones



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