After Tour de Afrique (TdA), I was quite inspired to cycle more (sounds strange after all those thousands of km’s…)  It was very nice to be fit and it was so hard to get fit for TdA that it seemed like a waist not to capitalize on it further.  As luck would have it, there is an annual mountain bike race in Rita’s home town, called the Pfronten MtB Marathon (look at the map in this post to see where it is.)  It is a true mountain bike race – with emphasis on MOUNTAIN.  The race offers, for your riding enjoyment, a short 26km, 960m climbing route and a 53km, 1900m climbing route.  After TdA, 53km did not sound like much and the 1900m of climbing sounded not too bad…  However, these are MOUNTAINS – in fact there are THREE MOUNTAINS.

I entered the 53km race on a beautiful sunshine day in the Alps.  I was still in good spirit when we hit the first mountain – a 640m gain in elevation with an average grade of 11%.  I felt a little less enthusiastic half way up about the whole mountain climbing thing.  After a long up there is usually a long down.  People came flying past me on the downhill with loose gravel that will make any sane person scared.  Of course as soon as the downhill was finished we arrived at the second climb – 300m of elevation gain at an average grade of 10% with stretches of 14% grade thrown in for good measure.  After another hectic downhill on what can only be described as rocks with intermittent boulders thrown in, we arrived at the last climb – 700m of elevation gain with an average grade of 11%.  This is where I really seized up – it was very hard, hot and I was ready to get to the finish line.

I finished in a very slow 4h07min and promised myself that I will only do this again if I can train in the mountains.  Mountain biking like this is very different from TdA, where a lot of the riding was on bad roads, but flat roads.  TdA had 60,000 m of climbing, but it was spread out over a very long distance and it was never really very steep (apart from one or two days in Ethiopia.)   Quite an experience and I look forward to doing more of this racing – spectacular views, but you really have to be fit for this.

The results are here and a you can download my GPS data here to view in Google Earth.