Tagesarchiv: 25. Dezember 2013

Today was the start of day two of the festive 500.  After a light start yesterday, I thought that today I will definitely earn some more miles to reaach the 500 km goal quickly. Or maybe not at all.

Not at all, why? Well, yesterday I trid to upload manually my achivement of 80 km plus on the Strava website. This went reasonably well, however then I saw a small note, informing me that neither manually uploaded results nor trainer indoor hours will be counted in the festive500 challenge. What an unpleasant surprise. I mean, if this is really true, I will not receive a sticker neither the right to buy a T-shirt for a mere 30$. Out of protest I will continue to ride, but then, when I reach 499km I will dismount my bike and call my wife to pick me up. I will simply refuse to do 500 km, so Rapha will not face the inconvenience to hand out some token to me.

Actually I discuassed the matter with my wife:

„So I will ride 500 km between Christmas and New Year.“
„Hm, why?“
„Because I will get a sticker for that.“
„Really, is that all?“
„No, I will also be eligible to buy a T-shirt for 30$ in addition.“ 
„Are you out of your mind?“
„No, don’t worry, I cannot properly attend without a GPs device, so there will be noc prices anyway and I will stop at 499 km.“
„Now, that makes sense.“

Why is ist sometimes so difficult in conversions between men and women to get a simple point across? Anyway, I wrote an e-mail to Strava and asked them to kindly consider all my manual input or otherwise I will write nasty things on my blog about them and start a media shitstorm with me 27 followers.

On the other hand, the skies ober Bremen looked rather beauftiful today and the wind wasn’t that strong either. So this was the perfect day to ride North, as this is the direction where normally the wind blows from.

So I headed towards the Blockland. And just after 2 km or so I met Harald on his MTB. Sure, meeting Harald when ridind a bike is as sure as getting an nice sunburn naked in Malawai. Even when Harald retired half a year officially from cycling and is now only ..cycling? Whatever, I was surprised that I met him that early during the festive500. He was wearing a nice rcb short sleeve jersey and looked fresh and youthfully as ever. So I continued through the Blockland in direction Ritterhude. I have taken this road almost hundred times and there are really no surprises. At least my heartbeat was now able to move close to 170 when I had a small chase with a guy on a Specialized hybrid MTB. He was good and I was at the beginning of the tour an I had no interest to exhaust myself at the very beginning.

From Ritterhude on I continues alon the Lessum to the barrage and crossed over to the other side until I reached Blumenthal, also know as „Love Island“.

I made good progress until Farge where I then took the ferry over the river Weser to the other side.

This is actually the benfit of inputting data manually on the Strava website. If uploaded per GPS devide the distance the ferry moves will be automatically added, plus, because it is rather slow, it will spoil your moing average. And of course this is cheating! But I don’t want to complain, something which is called „motzen“ in German and is located just next to the river Weser.

So when I was ready with Motzen, I made good pogress to the Ochtum Barrage and moved thorugh the GVZ towards the Becks brewery and then slowly back along the river to our home.

And when I arrived at home my Canyon had finally become a little bit more dirty then yesterday. I was rather afraid, that due to the dry conditions today the collected dirt might fall off, but no, it managed to ctick perfectly. And imagine my surprise, when I nooted that I made an even longer trip than yesterday:

Cool, 300 meters more. So tomorrow there will be a group ride with Joerg and Olli to which I am looking forward very much. We will explore the South of Bremen and I hope that these two guys will pull me all the time.

PS Haven’t heard anything from Strava yet. But the whole festive500 is highly unfair; I noted that when I checked the results today. First of all, about 27.000 people applied but so far only half of them posted results. So the other half is either doing nothing or gaving the same problem like I do. Now, out of the 13.500 people that are riding, about 3.000 are from the US, 3.000 from the UK, 3.000 from Australia and the rest is from all over the world. People from Finlnd for example have my highest respect. But Australia? Hey, at least they should wear a full wintre outfit when attending this challenge, this shoul be made a rule. and the leading guy is from.. Singapore. More than 500km already. I guess he went around Singapore island 35 times. But this competition should be limited to the Northern hemisphere, really! Nations that put the Christmas tree next to the barbie outside shall be banned from attendance!