This was my fourth time that I did the Pfronten MtB Marathon and every year I like it more than the previous year.  The mountains and scenery in this part of the Alps are just unbelievable.  That is of course if you can see the mountains – which was difficult this time because the weather was certainly not playing along.  It has rained so much that Noah (with his Ark) would have been scared the days leading up to the race.  On Saturday morning the rain luckily stopped, but it was still pretty cold with rain clouds covering the mountains.  This did not deter the 1,200 entrants, and everybody was ready for a fun and potentially wet day on the bike.  There were 4 different courses offered:

• Extremstrecke 70km (2,600m of climbing),
• Marathonstrecke 53km (1,900m of climbing)
• Kurzstrecke  26km (940m of climbing)
• Klapprad Word Championship

I did the Extremstrecke, but far more interesting was the Klapprad WC.  For those who don’t know, a Klapprad is a 70’s era “folding bike” that seems to have been very popular in Germany at the time.  As you can see from the picture on the left, there were pretty hardcore Klapprad participants…  There are numerous web pages in German that nostalgically goes on about the good old days when oil was so expensive that riding a Klapprad was considered chíc.  Given the current oil price and where it might go, it is perhaps a good idea to bring out those folding bikes again.  Nevertheless, the idea of the Klapprad WC was to use a conventional Klapprad and ride it up the northern side of Breitenberg, which is a 650m climb to the first cable car station.  This is quite an effort considering that the average grade is 11% – and that on two small wheels (and wearing a funny outfit.)  The winning time was 40min which I think is pretty amazing (especially considering the funny outfit you have to wear…)  So, a new world champion was crowned on Saturday – the world’s first Klapprad champion.

I started out on the Extremstrecke with that “remind me again why I’m doing this” feeling for the first half of the first climb.  After that I was warmed up and felt pretty good for the remainder of the race.  The weather was actually perfect – overcast, but not too cold.  It is always spectacular to reach the top of a mountain, looking down on all the switchbacks that you just did and seeing the green valleys stretched out as far as you can see.  There were 4 climbs - Breitenberg (850m, 13% average grade), Edelsberg (650m, 11.5% average grade), Barenmoos (320m, 12% average grade) and Breitenberg again from the south (720m, 11% average grade.)   Rita and her dad supported me half way up Edelsberg with a drink and some energy bars.  I felt pretty good throughout, but the last bit of Breitenberg towards the end was hard and I lost a couple of minutes (and positions) there.  Nevertheless, it was a great race and my timing was perfect – it started raining as I crossed the finish line.  Some of the guys that did the Marathonstrecke was not so lucky – they started an hour or so after us and some of the tail enders got some nasty hail, high winds and plenty of rain.  All in all, nothing that a nice Bavarian beer cannot fix.  I finished in 4h14min and was 12th in the Masters catagory.