2015 Midseason

Just wanted to drop in and share some rides and race results from this season so far.

In March-April I returned to the States for 5 weeks where I took a needed break from Europe and rode like crazy, an estimated 60-70 hours in 5 weeks, which set me up with some fitness In May, which I parlayed into a month of climbing mtb rides around Dortmund alone or with my Spanish riding partner Alfredo and a handfull of subsequent 100+km rides by June, one down the Rhine after buying another used mtb in Andernach and riding it back as far as I could.  These rides were looking good, so I decided to race.

Since I am technically a college student I was able to compete as a collegiate athlete again for the first time this year since 2000, in the Deutsche Hochschulemeisterschaften.  The DHM was at Haltern-am-see, a ~150m high rocky uplift in the lippe/emsher geologic complex NRW covered in tall dark forest, with a fat boy time trial on Saturday and a cross country on Sunday.  We did it as a family vacation weekend and took the train out to Haltern Saturday and I pulled Jason in the trailor and Annika rode along side to Flaesheim (a dorf) where we spent the race weekend at an old Inn just 500m from the race start.  Long story short, I had terrible flat luck all weekend, but stuck it out and took home a result.  I double flatted before the start and at the line of the time trial but ultimately raced on a borrowed wheel and had a mediocre TT but which placed me in the top 40 of the 200+ field start the next day.  In the CC, I got a rock stuck in my shoe at the start and had to get off and pry it out, loosing lots of that place advantage, then flatted on the first lap at the top of the big climb, Fuck!  But I fixed my third flat for the weekend and fought back over the remaining 80 minutes and ended as the top TU Dortmund finisher and 10th overall in Germany in the student category, with 1000vm’s over 21km’s.  As is often the case, the top student winners were also factory pros who won our race (lapped me – reality check), and then also won the pro race later in the day.  Oh to be 20 again.  Its was also Jason’s first race and he was so excited from Saturday’s events that he didn’t sleep on Sat night, so Sunday I was tired…as were a few other racers who stayed in the same Inn, oops!  The organizers also miscategorized my number and placed me in Senor 1 in Fun results, not Collegiate, so Im not on the collegiate finishers list but if you look at Senior 1 I am listed as TU Dortmund and a comparison of my time to the collegiates shows I got 10th.

http://www.time-and-voice.de/mtb/haltern-2015/ergebnisse

After the DHM I wet to Greece for 2 weeks and did a couple notable rides, one with over 2000vm’s over 4 hours on a mountain bike…the so called “Monopigado” ride.  The first photo is dropping into the valley before the big climb up to Monopigiado on the left showing the undulating Greek terrain it takes to get there, then the second one from above Monopigado looking across the other side to Mt. Chortiatis, a 1200 m non-active volcano I climbed on a trip in early 2014.

Upon return to Germany I did a tour around the Ijsselmeer in the Netherlands over 2 days with a buddy of mine.  What a blast, with the best being in Edam sitting on the canal eating a cheese sandwich and drinking an IPA…like we stepped back 700 years.  Here is an image from about half way across the 20km causeway riding out of a thunderstorm which came across the Ijsselmeer and just knicked us.

RIDE ON BWRE!!

2014 Recap

I just wanted to post to the website and give a quick update of what has been happening in Dortmund.  Basically, I moved to Dortmund from Essen in early 2014 and immediately began a whirlwind of work, finishing a National Science Foundation grant with Kansas State University studying the effects of political fragmentation, land cover changes, and water quality and quantity across the USA in February; Spent several months preparing methods and work assignments for an intern from University of Toronto I hosted at TU Dortmund to collect data for my PhD project via the DAAD RISE scholarship; My wife and I had a baby, Jason Philip; and I prepared and delivered a curriculum for Landscape Ecology and Urban Planning as well as am advising a course on sound pollution in the landscape here at TU Dortmund.  In between all of this, I am still charging ahead on my PhD project and hope to complete it by end of the summer semester 2015…because I really need to get a job and make some money now that the funding is dried up!

I did get the chance to do some great rides, because it is the only way to say sane with such a schedule and often occurred in the middle of the day on my city-bike in normal clothes when the weather gave a nice window, but the frequency simply wasn’t there to be in any kind of racing condition this season.  My sports-tracker account I use for recording pleasure/training rides says I rode 790 kms in 2014, but I use that app infrequently, so I did maybe 3x that amount.  I also don’t have a car and use bike as my only transport with my school and back trip right at 10 kms per day (50km per week), and I estimate I rode 70% of possible work weeks last year.  So I would put a crude estimate on last year’s riding at 4100km.  Not enough to race and be competitive, but enough to keep me skinny and fit enough to do the 3-5 hour rides when I had time and to keep the pilot light on so that I can get back to it in 2015.  I have planned a 2 week base-training block in Greece this March, which by then I hope the weather here will turn and I can go back to real training rides and make a competitive showing at SIS.  I am really hoping to travel down there this year with my wife and (will-be) 1-year old and have our first family camp out.

Here are a few photos of my favorite rides this past year..It really is great riding in Germany, as I’m sure all the folks living in Germany already know!

Berlin Velothon

On June 9th I finally put my 2000+km’s training to the test at the 120km Berlin Velothon.  The Velothon is a beloved road biking event in Berlin attracting over 2000 competitors for a Berlin-Brandenburg Rundfhart.  The Jedermann event occurs at 9:30 in the morning and is followed by a pro race in the afternoon, from which I snagged a few nice bottles after riders jettisoned them on the last lap.

This year had great weather and a huge crowd in the city and in every Dorf we passed, along with motorcycles, helicopters, the odd notartzwagon, cobblestones, lake views, forests, fields, tree allez avenues, fast pavement, autobahn, and above all a whole heck of a lot of people who love to ride road bikes.  I even saw some blood on the road…  This year I did the 120km’s in 2:52:58 placing 988th (out of at least 2200 riders based on my start number) and a split time of 41.6km/h, with the Jedermann winner finishing in 2:38.  Ten minutes faster than my time last year and beating my goal of under 3 hours.  I had a blast, working with a group of about 10 guys including a tandem team for much of the race.  There are so many competitors that the race is staged from starting block A through E and I started in C and ended solidly in block B finishing time, moving up through the field until the last 30kms where I got caught in a failed bridge attempt with 2 lone riders between groups on a 15km windy autobhan stretch of the course.  After that I was gassed and just settled into the next grupetto that caught us after the autobahn and then rode the wave in.  2:33 of the 2:52 was in my HR zone 4 or 5, so pretty much a suffer-fest.  I was VERY relieved to cross the finish line in one piece and see my sub 3 hour time.

I know its not mountain biking, but hey, the wheels are still big (technically) and the distance is big-ish, so it fits the theme.  I look forward to rolling this fitness into some nice training over the next two months in Berlin and Dortmund in prep for SiS.  Here are two pics from the event.

Here I am on the left of the frame about 5kms into the start, moving up the field on the outside

Here you can see my jersey as I came by Annika at 45km’s/h…Big Wheel!

Start of the Jedermann courtesey of Berlin Velothon 2013 Website..I’m waaaaaaay back there!

Be Merry and Ride, Like the Teutonic Knights Did

This year has been good and I logged many of the rides here (but not all):

http://www.sports-tracker.com/#/view_profile/blawrence77

More to come next week after the Berlin Velothon

Early Season in Berlin

And then here I am back to riding with Cafe Egal in Berlin. Chris, here in the front, has a sweet little cafe/bike shop with a name that roughly translates into Cafe “Who Gives a Shit.” Anyways, the Sunday group rides have started back up again now that I am back after Greek training camp, which will lead up to racing the Berlin Velothon in June with Cafe Egal.

Bryce

2013 Training Camp Continued

And here is the view from 1100 meters over Thessaloniki after a 2.5 hour gnarly off road climb. Macadonia is like a poor man’s Catalunya!

Bryce

2013 Training Camp Continued

Just a quick pic in my quickly fading 2012 BWRE Gear with the Macadonian mountains (playground?) in the background. Looking forward to some new gear this year!

2013 Traininglager

I spent two weeks in Greece between late february and early march 2013 and brought my 29er with me. Having a 29er with cross tires and a gps opened up some amazing routes I have been lusting after for years. In all I put in about 500 kilometers with around 8km climbing in 10 days of riding.

After a long 2012 that ended with 4 months of fast riding with the kansas state university team I took a couple months off and this camp was a great way to “wake up” for 2013. Looking forward to a great 2013!

BT Epic – Mark Twain National Forest, USA

Two weeks ago I went down to Steelville, Missouri for the 55-mile point to point off road BT Epic with 4 of my Kansas City bike buddies – Ed, Duffster, Bobbie, and Sarah.  The venue was Bass River resort in the Ozarks and the event capped off the 2012 UFD endurance series.  We got to stay at a nice cabin and i took a pic from the porch of the terrain we got to ride.  The Ozarks are a rocky and eroded uplift covered in dense Oak forests, much like the hills flanking the Rhein Valley in central Germany.  It was a cold start (right at freezing) and warmed up to a sunny 55 by mid-race.  There was a dense leaf fall covering the entire course and it was hard to see most of the rocks and the downhills were prone to leaf washout on corners.  There was a 10 mile gravel road section on the 4th leg, with 3 chances to grab something from the bag at checkpoints.

Overall a great event, no major mishaps, my Bergamont handled the terrain well and I had a number of queries about the brand from random fellow riders.  Got to meet up with many of my long-time friends there and a few newer ones, like Garret Steinmetz – a young newly minted pro rider living up in St. Joseph Missouri just north of KC and Garth Prosser – a new friend living up north of Missouri in the Midwest.  Duff, being an Enbev distributor rep brought along a cooler chalked full of great microbrews and one off special beers from all over the world for us to gnaw on the whole weekend – it must have been 500 bux worth of beers in just one cooler, or something like that.  I posted a pic of the cooler where some of the beers were loaded from.

As for the race…Duff and I started together and saw each-other in the middle, then finished together in the 50’s at 5:51 with Ed and Bob at around 6:50.  The winner, Steve Tilford, did it in 4:20ish and has a nice post about the race and course conditions on his blog, and the last place finisher was 12+ hours.  There were 270ish racers I believe.  This year’s time was 30 mins slower than my time in 2009, probably from the conditions because the winning course time also set by Steve is 4:09, so I guess I am in the same shape im was in during the 2009 season before coming to germany, thanks to BWRE for keeping races on my schedule and to motivate my riding in Germany.  I only felt mediocre unfortunately, fatigued, and probably should have not ridden Sun, mon, tues, wed thur leading up to the event on Saturday morn, but it was a really nice week in Kansas the week before and had some great rides in the flint hills at my current homebase of Manhattan, Kansas.  It was one of those where my legs felt like bricks at the start and end and I had about 50 minutes worth of big ring the whole day.  Took about 5 days to recover from the event, with 6500 feet of climbing recorded by my Garmin.  Its tough to do such a long event so late in the season, it will be nice to have a bit of a break to recover since I have lots of little injuries from riding with the young and fast Kansas State University team while ive been here in the USA, a story I will save for the next post.

Bryce

 

Like a Country Song Played Backwards…

Since my last post in January I have had a quite exciting and stressful time, but so far I think I managed to come out at least even and only very rarely had to sacrifice my riding.  Although my 29er Stumpjumper was stolen on March 23rd I was able to ride my 7 speed steel Hercules Stadtrad throughout March and April.  I got a handful or more of 100km rides on this bike and if anything it gave me a taste of longer road rides again since the tires are semi-slicks and I seriously had only ridden my 29er for the past 13 months.  Once the spring started first week of April I started riding long sunday road rides with a local pelaton and was able to hang on 100+ km rides with the road bikes on my Schrot.  A couple shots of the Schrot in its prime habitats.

At the same time, a link from my call for help email to the BWRE group came through with a sweet Bergamont 6.1 frame equpped with XO/XX 10-speed and a Reba that is good enough for training and racing.  Thanks Ralf and Martin!  Once I got the fit dialed in I basically started riding every Midevil village, Singletrack, Hansa Stadt, or hill on the landscape that was within riding distance.  I logged one of these here: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.3535874568157.144222.1611131706&type=1

There are 2011 and 2012 Bergamont 29er Revox reviews available and both were pretty true to the review after riding it for over a month now.  I am just glad to have ended up with a great ride after what happened.

2011 Revox,  http://twentynineinches.com/2011/02/22/bergamont-revox-9-1-29er-hard-tail-final-review/

2012 Revox,  http://twentynineinches.com/2012/05/22/bergamont-revox-team-29er-final-review/

I also got a job as a bike mechanic at Stadler in Berlin.  Ironically, the pelaton I had been riding with the past month was out of this shop so its been a good fit so far and I have an instant crew to ride with and will have enough dough to travel to a couple three races before SIS.  I am working 3 full days a week which gives me 4 days off to ride and recover, do my research and whattever else.  And to top it all off, last week I came across a used aluminum Trek SLR road bike through the shop and snapped it up.  Riding road again has been AWESOME since its been well over a year.