Only racing myself would have been more fun than photographing the event!

Participants looking for photos are invited to drop me a note – ideally with bib number and clothing / helmet colors.

Shot with a Nikon D700, using 24-70/2.8 and 70-200/2.8 lenses. I was shooting in manual mode, sometimes with f/8 to f/11 to underexpose the background at flash sync speed (1/200 to 1/250), so smaller lenses would have been just as fine if I had any for the FX format. Lighting came from the sun (naturally), but in some shots also from a bare Elinchrom Ranger Quadra A-Head for cross lighting.

This is the Kraftwerk Trophy, and took place in Vienna for the first time, attracting people likeJure Robic, winner of numerous Races Across America and other long distance events. And he remains the man to be beaten, stuck with the fastest relay teams and missed the magic 500 ever so closely, completing 498.4km within the time limit.

And me?

Well, after 4 weeks of antibiotics and lacking reasonable training, I didn’t even want to participate… but good arguments persuaded me to register on short notice. In the singlespeed category. Not (only) for masochism, but also because my road bike is well worn after 9 years of racing, and the little noises it has started to produce would have probably driven me insane after 7 hours. I’ll eventually have to replace it, but that is a different story.

So – my strategy was clear: see what happens, and don’t make any big expectations. Of course you always get psyched my the race, but since I didn’t know how much form I had lost in the past weeks I decided to start slowly. Which wasn’t really a difficult decision, because the speed of the lead groups was terribly hard to hold with my gearing (48×16) – at 45km/h this translates to a cadence of about 120rpm. Not a problem initially, but after 6 hours or so your legs start to complain, and would rather have an easy 80-90rpm. So, better not burn all my matches right from the start, and quickly find my own pace.

My stomach wasn’t very happy with the race either, and around noon I was very close to just putting the bike in a corner, kick back and enjoy the afternoon sun in a supine position. Surprisingly, though, a longish break and a Bratwurst (props to the goys from fixedgear.at!!) put me back on my feet. The afternoon was everything the morning hadn’t been. The wind had calmed down a bit, so the tempo on the back stretch wasn’t quite as high and I not only held the speed of the groups I rode with, but I was actually able to do my share of leading work.

So, it was pretty clear that I would ride until the official end – especially since it emerged that from the originally 10 singlespeed riders (not counting my late registration) only one was actually riding. A shame really, and since now I couldn’t avoid ending up on the podest I tried hard to earn that place, too. So, full bore for the rest of the day. And it worked out just fine, barely riding over the occasional cramp but keeping the tempo high. I ended up riding 341km (given about 10h net riding time, that translates to about 34km/h average), placing 63th overall and defending my title in the (very small) singlespeed ranking.

Alright!

Mad props to the 2RadChaoten for this absolutely great race, so close to home I actually rode my bike to and from the race!

Kraftwerk Trophy
Results (Pentek Timing)
Mountainbiker Racing Team

All in all, I must say that I am very happy (and proud) how everything worked out, especially since this was Nicole’s first 24 hour swim event. That made it a bit difficult to predict what would happen and schedule everything, but she settled into a nice rhythm very quickly, and after a little while also started to drink as often as she should. People often forget to drink when they are swimming, which can lead to cramps fairly quickly – as happened to Maria, another 24h solo swimmer that I ‘adopted’ after it turned out that she didn’t have any support staff.

The usual mess in the crowded pool was better with the solo swimmers than in the relay lanes.. but after a while people started to switch lanes, and the chaos spread to all the other lanes. Our plan was to try to swim without long breaks, and enjoy the relative peace between 2 and 5am before having a longer pause in the morning.

We also followed that plan fairly well; of course muscular and mental fatigue set in after a while – also with me – but until 5am everything was going along very nicely… however, then things started to deteriorate fairly quickly; I started taking mini-naps (even between taking lap splits, sleeping for a minute or two!) whenever possible, and Nicoles shoulder started to develop sharp pains due to swimming with a wetsuit (which she wasn’t used to). All in all, the swimming intervals grew shorted and the recovery breaks more frequent, until we decided that about 20 hours and almost 580 lengths – so close to 30km! – were enough. There wasn’t really a reason for Nicole to ruin herself entirely to maybe keep her 6th place, so we called it quits a few hours early.

All told, it was a terrific event.. even though I’ll admit that supporting a solo swimmer isn’t really a walk in the park and almost as hard as swimming myself. Especially when trying to shoot a few photos as well…

Until turn #9 …

I started out as usual, planning to take it relatively easy on the first 500m and then increase the speed on the way back. At about 400m, I felt a distinct pop in my left calf followed by fairly significant pain. Damn…

Somehow managed to hobble back and send off our next runner in 4:00 or so, but I knew the day was over. The diagnosis was pretty clear: a ruptured muscle fiber.

Therapy: no training for a few weeks.

Oh well, at least I’ll start off next year’s training season very well rested. And maybe I can at least go swimming in the meantime (without flip turns of course).

I went home after a little while (tx to Silvia for driving me!), so I don’t know how our team did after all. But they managed to recruit a replacement runner on very short notice, so I’m hoping they could keep up the awesome performance of the first 50km.

Update:
Our team got second place overall, finishing the 100km in slightly less than 6 hours (3:34/km average or so) – and by far the smallest team ever to do so! (I think the next larger group had more than twice as many runners) … awesome …

Five runners on our team, so it’s only 20km per person. That’s manageable, but I predict that running 20x 1000m intervals will hurt. A LOT. We’ll see how it goes.

If you’d like to come watch, the start is tomorrow at 10:00am at the Prater Hauptallee, near the Stadionbad.

For details, check out www.rekordjagd.at.

In einer 5er Staffel, also eh nur 20km pro Person – aber die halt in bösen 1000m Intervallen. Man darf gespannt sein.

Wer zusehen will, Start ist morgen um 10:00 auf der Prater Hauptallee, Höhe Stadionbad.

Mehr Infos auf www.rekordjagd.at.