World Ranking Events in Dresden

Monday, 2 July 2007

After a couple of nervous days my bike finally arrived in one piece.  Actually 5 pieces as that's the way I packed it.

This weekend was two world ranking events in Dresden.  Strangely it clashed with a Czech Cup race, so none of the Czechs went, although some Swiss, Danes and Finns were there.

The terrain was basically a big hill with a network of good, fast forest roads and lots of small forest extraction tracks.  The former were almost all solid line tracks and the latter dotty tracks.  As is typical in Europe the intensity of use of the forests and the change of seasons made the speed of the tracks quite variable.  Dotty tracks were sometimes ok and long dash tracks sometimes very slow.  But overall the map and courses were very good.

After only a couple of short rides in Europe it seemed quite strange to start racing.  My brain wasn't switched on.  Saturday's middle distance race saw me without my Euro-brain.  I was still in Aussie MBO mode, which means riding flat out on good, hard tracks.  Here it is often very hard to read the map whilst riding on anything other than the biggest tracks and one has to slow down a lot more to avoid mistakes.  Overall I didn't slow down enough and made a lot of mistakes.  The encouraging aspect was I seemed to have good leg speed on check points I didn't make mistakes on.

Fastest on the day was Rune Ottesson from Estonia in what was a little bit of a surprise win.  The Dane and Swiss followed. 

For Sunday's long distance race I was determined not to make any mistakes.  Overall this worked really well.  Except for one brain explosion where I went straight from check point 8 to 10.  Normally this isn't catastrophic, but this time it involved about 3 km and 100 m of extra climb and nearly 10 minutes wasted, just like that.  Doh!!  Apart from that disaster I rode quite well.

Tobjorn Gasbjerg, the Dane, won convincingly from Holger Mager of Germany who led from a tight following bunch.  Full results for both days can be found here.