Friday, August 14, 2009

UCI Mountain Bike Marathon World Champs - Preview



Only 2 more long training units this weekend and then it's all tapering and resting up for the Marathon World Champs on the 23rd of August in Graz, Austria.

The women's course will be 84km with 3.061m of climb and the men's course will be 104km with 3.818m of climb. The race starts at 419m above sea level and the highest point is at 1438m. Below is the profile and the map of the course.



This year there are only 55 women signed up, with Germany sending a contingent of 10 women. My start number is 37, so I'm more towards the end of the field, but it's going to be a long race, so I am not too worried.

Entries list can be downloaded here (add .pdf to filename) and more info can be found on http://www.bike09.at.

Even though illness kept me off the bike for a few days after Bontrager 24/12, I had a very good 2 weeks of solid training, mainly longish rides with tempo/threshold/sweet spot long climbs. I concentrated on getting a lot of climbing done. Unfortunately the hills around me aren't that high, so in one evening training session instead of climbing 2000m in one go, I just went up and down 3Rock until I hit 2000m (it's about 300m a lap) - it got too dark in the end to go the whole (unlit) way up, so I stayed around the bottom for the last few meters.



That week was actually my second biggest distance and climbing week (400km, 7200m), after one of the weeks I did on Gran Canaria (460km, 9000m ).

Apart from being very tired yesterday after a hard 2 training days on Tuesday and Wednesday, I actually feel in good form. I am looking forward to see if I can improve on my 29th place from last year :)

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