Jun 10
27
Day 1 Race Report
With views like this you almost forget it hurts. Almost.
Sorry folks, I know it’s only the first day but I’m beat so this will be short.
The day was 120 km with a little less than 2700 meters of climbing and on paper it looks like one of the easier days. God, I hope not. The first 45km was pretty uneventful which was good as there are many things that can go wrong with a mass start of 1200 riders. That’s when the fun ended and the first climb started with about 10km before a bit of a reprieve. Then the work really started with the long climb up to Kuhtai which is a lot like Seymour for most of the time, but it’s a whole lot longer and there are 2 sections which don’t drop below 16%, one 2 km long and the other 1 km long. I actually had a pretty good climb with no cramping and very few issues with my back tightening up which it’s been prone to do the last few weeks of training. Up to this point I had been stopping to take quite a few pictures which means our overall time was terrible, but I didn’t really care, I’m here to try to enjoy myself.
Once we started our descent into Oetz, the picture taking stopped. The descent was just way to fast and way to tricky to try to stop for photos. Jer and I got to the bottom with no issues and then we started the long slow climb up to Solden. It’s not steep at all but it constantly stays at 3 or 4 percent so it was good that we had a tailwind for a good chunk of it. We motored along pretty good at this point with a little pacing help from Toby for a kilometer or so as we worked hard to bridge from one group to the next. I managed to hold off the cramping until we were about 5 km from Solden and then I had to stop for a bit so that I could stretch out the hamstrings. After that it was just a slow spin into town for the finish which concluded with a little stretching and a lot of eating.
On to day 2.
