Today’s report from stage 2 of the Craft Bike Transalp 2011, from Weerberg to Mayrhofen.
Will’s day
Today was much shorter than yesterday at “only” 68km, but was pretty tough – there was barely a flat metre all day. Well over 3,000m of climbing, and most of it was pretty steep.
Good news – Lio got a good night’s sleep, and we started brightly, overtaking plenty of people on the first climb. The second climb wasn’t quite as good, and the third climb was a bit of a battle. Also relatively good news – I managed another almost five hours with only niggling pain from my dodgy IT band, heavily strapped and full of ibuprofen – magic stuff!
We found out a bit more about each other: for instance, I discovered that Lio absolutely drops like a stone on tarmac descents. The drop down towards Mayrhofen was all on the road, and fast. Not my forte – I’d rather have some technical singletrack. Anyway, Lio disappeared into the distance, and despite pushing what felt like pretty hard (washing out a front mountain bike tyre on tarmac sound like fun?), there was no bringing him back.
Result: 95th in Men, so 20 places up on yesterday.
What a day for scenery though! Today was a real advertisement for summer in the Alps. Sunshine all day, and stunning valley after stunning valley. Hopefully today’s video gives a bit of an idea of just how glorious it was out there.
Tomorrow is bit of a funny-looking stage – 30km uphill, then 65km consistently downhill to Brixen. It looks as if it might be a relatively steady climb, which we hope might suit us.
Incidentally, this probably won’t be the first time we praise them, but the guys in the Scott tent have been absolutely amazing – both days so far, we have just handed them a pair of dirty Sparks at the end of the stage, and picked them up later, clean and well fettled. Incredible.
Lio’s day
Hola! Overall a positive day as we net overtook 25 teams today, ranking today 95th. I would say we were fast up to the bottom of the second climb, overtaking constantly.
Today’s stage was basically three climbs of 1000m each, with a ridiculously long downhill in the end followed by a very windy false flat section of mixed road and track. As Will said, we slowed down on the second climb, some overtook us there already but not too many and we managed to catch some back then by the bottom of the third climb. The third climb was definitely painful. Performing at 2500m when you live in London all year long makes a difference, but it was mainly because of how steep that climb was, and windy too that it was so tough. The fact the scenery was breath taking too didn’t help our ventilation.
We had plenty of time to recover today so hopefully we will feel good tomorrow too.
We had another sunny day today, forecast is for rain tomorrow which may make some of those trails pretty interesting.
Stay tuned!
Lio.