Reevax hunts for Trans Schwarzwald wildlife !

It is 7h30 AM and Daan’s cell phone wakes us up with a modern tune. Tonight we jumped against the roof of the mobilhome when the safety pressure valve of Pforzheim’s central heating system across the street suddenly starts blowing steam. Starting at 10 AM hass its advantages: we can sleep longer and have fresh breadrolls from the bakery. The opposite side is that the sun is already burning hard. Daan will drive directly to the finish town to find a nice camping spot. Kroki, on the move with the Citroen-Reevax-van, will try to take care of supplying us with fresh drinking bottles and making some pictures. At the start some familiar faces: Rob and Gerd from the Landrover team, Forza with as well a mens as womens team, father and son Schellens, Kurt and Jochen from Zolder. It will be a fun week.

The accomodation at the start in the walking area of Pforzheim looks professional: a Reevax-orange start banner, a couple of advertisement stands, lots of meters publicity and a speaker to create a nice atmosphere. They even brought the same music. Does nobody have any creativity to play something else then Stand up for the champions and Highway to Hell to kick off a stage race? At 10 AM sharp, Domie and I start under a tropical sun together with 132 other teams for the first stage of the first Trans Schwarzwald race. Very strange and absolutely unusual is that the first 30 km are neutralized. We can understand that they want to ride slowly in the walking area for the sake of safety, but once on wide forest roads this seems completely useless. It is however the first mountainbike race for the organisation and they are prepared to learn a lot. And they will have to as quads are unable to pass through the metal barriers indicating thewalking area. The group is separated and after only 15 km in the neutralisation we are unable to find a sign. Tell us it isn’t true ! Not again Crete-conditions ? The whole group, about 50 teams, waits for the nebxt quad, that, depsite all the latest GPS technology, doesn’t seem sure either. Also the pace of this neutralisation is almost as high as our race-pace. Doable for us, but we can imagine that this is not the case for everyone.

After more then 1,5 hours, 31 km and 600 meters of climbing we reacht the first supply station. We wait untill the whole group is complete again for the offical restart. Many teams were not aware that the stage lengths do not include the neutralisation and that todays 99 km and 2600 altitude meters starts now. It will be a long day. Kroki is there, like we expected, and gives us fresh river-cooled Performance drinking bottles and air for the tires.Domie immediately kicks the pace up with a couple of km/h after the start, but I try not to force myself: knwoing your limits and racing with this in mind seems the best thing to me in this extreme heat and long distance. Domie understands the message and shift to a lower gear. The race itself goes mainly over wide forest roads with once in a while a technical singletrail. The descents are wide as well, but with loose gravel veryslippery and treacherous: avoiding doing stupid things is also the message here.

The ever changing climbs and descents and the heat take care of a slow demolishing process, but we can keep a not too-high, but steady pace. After about 65 km there is a climb of 500 vertical meters. The moment for Reevax to launch an attack to get rid of some teams. We set the pace and steam up the mountain and away from the competition. It hurts, but it is succesful as we are able to catch a couple of other teams. However, a little before the top my turbo gets overheated and we have to slow down a little. Luckily the downhill is close, so I can cool down a bit. One big climb left on asphalt and we can start the downhill towards Sasbachwalden. At 2km before the finish there is a partly unrideable technical rock garden, with big steps in between. Carefull down, and after 4h 58min over the finish line. We have completed 131 km and 3200 meters of climbing and have been underway for almost 7 hours. All this should be good for an18th place in the preliminary results in the men category. Rob and Gert finished 10 minutes earlier and earned a nice 10th place.

Tomorrow another tough stage is waiting for us, so we quickly grab something to eat and try to recover a bit.

Pepe