"Your vacation rental is of the exact same quality as the one you had last year".... those were the last words of our landlord....
A construction site with everything that goes with it + construction workers at 7am and no heat... oh yeah, they must have built the second bedroom around the bed.... it was tiny... and when Stephan gasped for breath in the middle of the night, the wooden cover for the curtain rod fell on his head....
Thank you Mr. Schmitz !

At least we kept amused by our ladies' gruelling decision making process concerning their finger nail pasties :)

Other ladies even won medals ...

Sascha Bayer was awarded an even bigger medal...

At this point it was still extremely astonishing that Sascha was an absolute newcomer at the German 4X Championship and had only been riding his MTB for 2 months....

However, after coming in 9th in the preliminary, he made his way through the quarter, to the semi and, to our astonishment, into the final, where he emerged in 3rd place in the German Championship....

Even we were mobbed by the press.....

Congratulations from all us Pirates!!

In the evening in the swamp of Willingen .....

the usual number of beers met their maker .....
And Mike had to sign his new sponsoring contract. :)

After losing the ability to communicate in our mother tongue, we tried to assimilate ourselves to the surroundings....

and so we Pirates had a lot of fun in our little corner!!!

We're looking forward to next year!

Ron

Added by Elvis:

Compared to last year, the weather was almost grandiose.
In the beginning the temperature adjusted itself to around 57°F/14°C. Robert Karrasch made the top ten in the small lap (35m/56,44km, 4442 vertical ft/1354hm), coming in 9th in the Masters division (2:15:20.5h), which made him 37th place overall.
The tandem from the Black Forest with mit Jan Ramsperger came in 120th on the medium lap (66.5m/107km, 9026 vertical ft/2751hm) after 6:01:06.5h.
On the large lap (83m/134km and 11053 vertical ft/3365) Smits Luc, "B-means up that hill", team Pirate Belgium came in 6th in the Masters division (43rd overall).

Since my goals weren't that lofty, I attempted to place within the first half. I crossed the finish line of the small lap in the Masters division after 3:16:13.6h (my buddy Karrasch had already showered) and in 127th place. That's 437 overall.
So, I just missed my goal. I just would have had to have been 3min faster in the Masters division or 6min overall.
I ended up being pretty unhappy though, because I wasn't even all that beat after having finished the race, so I actually could have gone faster.
This gives me hope that I will be able to move up to the front alittle on similar tracks.
Let's see what the next marathon in Neuhaus in Thüringen will bring.
Bye,

Martin