Today was very windy. And there was Thorben.
Who dragged as all the way. We made a shorter Loop through the Blockland then to Ritterhude, taking in all the mountains that Bremen has to offer.
Phlipp is doing a fixed festive 500 with 48/12 gearing and massive sails aka as high carbon rims.
Col de Sandberg at Worpswede.
Day 3 of the Festive 500, this time as trio infernale.
Today, as usual, unfriendly skies but at least the weather forecast promised that it will stay try until lunch at least.
Well, at least finally, I was able to find the place in Bremen where all the clouds come from. There seems to be a very big „cloud making factory“ located next to the river Weser operated by SWB. It was fenced off heavily from its surroundings and guarded by grim looking security men. I guess that inside the factory many workers are toiling day and night to produce these fine looking, grey clouds, soaked with condensed water that the inhabitants of Bremen have becoming so fond of. Good works guys, please keep it up.
I was off to a comparable early start to meet Olli and Jörg and the famous Weserbank. The Weserband is one of the few banks in Germany that came through unharned by the world financial crisis of 2008/09. It is a very old bank and during this time of the year also very cold. I refrained from entering the bank and aimlessly rode around until the others arrived as I was afraid that I will freeze into a solid statue of ice and will then not be recognized by the others. Temperatures were hovering between 2 and 4 degrees. But here they were and we proceeded South towards Bruchhausen-Vilsen. It was nice not to be alone on the road for a change and we shared many stories about family adventures with the family. If I remember correctly the main tone of the conversation was, that all of them are an unthankful bunch that does not appreciate our beautiful presents. I mean, it is not that we presented them with wrenches, screwdrivers or Campagnolo cassette removal tools; although Olli came closest with a bike lock. Generally I had the feeling that all of us were happy to be united on the road again, chatting with people who really understand each others topics of conversation. I confessed that due to the clever marketing of Strava I am inclined to buy a GPS device and was told that my best choices would be some rubbish device from Conrad electronic store for 30€ or a Garmin 800 for about 10 times the amount. I am still considering. And while we were talking we didn’t realized how time flew by and in no time we were in Paris as evidenced by this photo.
and then, as we were in good mood we continued, just like Tom Hanks continued to run in „Forrest Gump“ and in no time we were in Berlin, as we can see in the next photo.
In the forefront we can see some remains of the Berlin Wall that haven’t been removed yet. So now it was time to say goodbye and we continued on different ways home to our loved ones. I felt good on the bike for the first time during the Festive500, my legs were a little bit more lowerful than the first two days. And so I thought that I can do some extra miles. So when I reached my home I just continued to the HaW and then to the Blockland in direction Dammsiel. Yes, this road is very boring but at least I know where it takes me and what do expect. There were quite some cyclist making out there and I saw at least three guys on racing bikes with huge beards that would qualify them handily for a place in the Fixed Beards Bremen team. Then I rode back on the other side of the river to Lilienthal and there, much to my surprise I met Philipp. He was just on the way back from a party close to Lueneburg on his Fixie: 48/12 gearing, skyhigh carbon rims, quite impressive I must say. We continued for about 3 km and then we agreed that we will meet again tomorrow to put in some additional kms. Philipp is also attending Festive500 and, much to my delight, told me that he is not interested in the T-shirt, so I might have find a way to get around all the fuss and lay me hands on this thing.
Today I rode about 105 km, bring the total to 266, so only 234 more to go at least. But I must say, I quite got used to that rhythm of riding by now, so I might continue also for the next days with shorter stretches, weather permitting. And apart from the agreed ride tomorrow, we will have a pub meeting on Saturday and perhaps an new year inaugural ride on January 1st. So there are really some things looking forward to.
My bike, dirty as usual.
More clouds in the making.
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!
Eingeordnet unter Uncategorized
Today was day 1 of the Rapha Festive 500 to which I have submitted myself at free will. As this blog entries are intended for the greater Rapha Festive500 community I dare to write them in English an not in my German mother tongue.
The night before I tried to think of an appropriate slogan for the first day and came up with the wonderful idea of naming it „Prologio“, which is Italian for „Prolog“. I found this nice enough as I didn’t want to overdo it on day one, just like the pros at the Tour de France have a rather easy day before they start for some grueling three weeks in earnest. Also, I wanted to add some nice Italian touch to emphasize the fact that about 50% of my DNA comes from this great cycling nation in the South. The fact that this particular part of Italy was only annexed in the course of WW1 and that my mother doesn’t speak any Italian at all can be safely neglected here.
The skies over Bremen had the typical look of skies over Bremen between October and April: Grey, full of condensed water, to be released any given minute and threatening as usual.
Neverthless I mounted my bike and started in direction East, Fischerhude to be precise. I made good progress at the start which I unfortunately related to my superbe form which is steady, even I just recovered from a nasty flu and hadn’t done any three digit km tripe for quite a while. Of course I wasn’t in good shape, there was just a strong wind with occassional gusts that propelled me forward in no time. From Fischerhude I moved onwards to Wistedt and passed the fateful gas station where last summer our Bremen cycling group divided into two fractions after a bitter ideological debate about the Vietnam war. Nevermind, I thought, what else happened cycling-wise in 2013? Well, the year started very well with a nice cycling holiday with david and Juliane on Mallorca in March. After that I felt ready for bigger adventures (RTF Sulingen) and the „Eagle round“ in the mountains of the Harz where I adopted a new training technique called „short seatposted“. I didn’t do any races this year with the exception of the 20km time trial at the City Traithlon in Bremen, but I spend a wonderful holiday with my family in Oberstdorf where I climbed up the Riedberg three times getting better and fast every time. Then I was ready for the event of the year, the Positivo Espresso high altitude training camp in the Sierra Nevada. The highlight was the climb up to 3.000m plus of the Pico Velato with David, david and Juliane. After that I basically stopped cycling for the rest of the year with the exception of some nice trips around Osnabrück. But now I was fully motivated again to put in the missing mileage until the end of the year.
It was still dry so I decided to extend the loop a little bit in direction Adolphshausen (before WW2: Adolfshausen).
From there I moved on to Worpswede. It had started to drizzle by now but I decided nevertheless to go ahead. Worse than the drizzle was the very powerful wind which slowed me down sometimes to speeds of less than 20 km/hr. I also felt that I hadn’t overcome the flu yet, it was hard to get the heart beat even up to 150 BPM. But when I came to the next junction to shorten the trip I decided again to take the longer way home and continued in direction of Ritterhude. Much to my surprise the bridge over the river Kwai, or whatever the name is, is now almost completed after endless years of construction and the old bridge is in process of getting demolished. Although unknown, this bridge is in terms of construction delays far more significant that the new airport in berlin or the train station S21 in Stuttgart.
I was so happy to see this happening after passing the construction site on foot for what.. three years in a row now? This gave me back faith in German engineering power. I turned back in direction Bremen on the left side of the river Kwai. Now the wind was really nasty and in addition it became wet. My feet were now soaked in water and slowly I felt that I will become very, very wet if I don’t speed up. The road was by now thick with water and many puddles. As the last part of the road is anyweay a slimy mix of bricks I didn’t felt too much secure on the bike.
And then I was home after about 80 km and more than 3 hours of riding. The average speed is of course miserable but I was very happy that I started on the first day of the callenge nevertheless and that I did already 16% of the total. So 420 km more to go until Dec 31st.
My bike was rather dirty after the ride. I shall refrain from cleaning it at all, it will be nice to make a picture of it every day at the end of each ride to note the subtle change in color.
Wolber GTX2 Felge, 36L mit Shimano Deore LX Nabe, alles aus den Neunzigern. Gewicht ca. 5,7 kg inklusive 24 dezidiert ausgesuchten Geschenken von Tochter, Sohn und Mann für meine Frau. Die braucht jetzt allerdings eine Leiter, um sich diese in den nächsten Tagen abzuholen.
Fröhliche Weihnachten allerseits!
Weihnachten, Silvester: Plätzchen, Kuchen, Alkohol, gutes Essen, alles Dinge die Spaß machen und so leider gar nichts mit Radfahren zu tun haben.
Eher im Gegenteil, denn dieser ganze hemmungslose Konsum führt ja leider dazu, dass man noch schlechter auf den Bock kommt und dann noch weniger Lust zu fahren hat. Und die Leistung dann erst… grottig. Gut, man kann sich damit trösten, dass die Luft kein kalten Temperaturen eine höhere Dichte hat, was wiederum dazu führt, dass der Luftwiderstand höher wird. Was dann auch erklären würde, warum niemand versucht im Himalaya neue Stundenweltrekorde aufzustellen. Um diesem Teufelskreis zu entkommen habe ich mich dieses Jahr bei der Festive 500 von Rapha angemeldet. Im Prinzip geht es darum, eben die ganzen oben beschriebenen Dinge nicht zu tun. Also alles was Spaß macht. Stattdessen macht man all das was Spaß machen sollte: Radfahren, und zwar mindestens 500km zwischen Weihnachten und Silvester.
Also galt es zunächst einmal das Canyon wieder in Schuss zu bringen, denn wenn es ein Rad in meiner Garage gibt, mit dem ich 500 km fahren möchte, dann ist es das Canyon und zwar nur das Canyon. Alle anderen Möhren taugen doch eh nur was für’s posen und für den Stadtverkehr. Mit den Fixies würde es auch noch gehen, aber dann müsste Sommer sein und die Luft dünner. Das Canyon jedoch wäre perfekt, wenn nicht, ja wenn nicht die ganze Schaltung mal eine gründliche Überholung brauchen würde. Das Ultegra Schaltwerk habe ich gegen ein Dura Ace ausgetauscht, eine neue Kassette und eine neue Kette kamen drauf und ganz zum Schluß wollte ich nur noch kurz die Züge austauschen. Das stellte sich dann als weitaus nervenaufreibender als vorgestellt heraus. Es endete erst einmal mir, dass ich das Lenkerband abreißen musste und dann das Rad frustriert in der Ecke stehen lies, bevor ich mich nach dem Ansehen diverser Shimano Lehrvideos wieder an die Arbeit machte. Ok, es ist nicht sooo schwierig, wenn man weiß wie es geht, aber herauszufinden wie es geht ist auch wiederum nicht einfach. Bei dieser Gelegenheit habe ich dann auch noch die Schalthüllen ausgewechselt und einen Wetterfesten Brooks Cambium Sattel montiert. Mal sehen, wie sich das alles so fahren wird. Anbei ein paar Bilder vom Upgrade.
Wetterfester Sattel: OK
Wasserfestes Lenkerband mit SM Appeal: OK
Wasserfeste Schaltung: Noch nicht Idiotensicher
Eingeordnet unter 2013, Canyon Ultimate CF, Mob
Ächsz, Stöhn, gar nicht so einfach, wie ich gedacht hätte. Wer jetzt aber hier ein paar gute Tips erwartet ist leider falsch. Enttäuscht? Hier gibt es ein gutes Video, dass alles erklärt und es so simpel aussehen macht, dass es fast schon peinlich ist, wenn man es selber nicht richtig schafft.
Grundsätzlich gilt für internationale Problemlösungen wohl dieser Ansatz:
Vermutlich von einem Deutschen erstellt. Die japanische Variante fehlt noch. Nach meinem Erfahrungen etwa so: Es werden erst einmal eine Anzahl von Meetings mit recht vielen Unbeteiligten abgehalten, die dann an einer Lösung arbeiten, und zwar so lange, bis das Problem nicht mehr relevant ist. Die Lösung ist dann allerdings super. Leider gilt dies nur für kleine Probleme. Große Probleme werden nie gelöst.
Kettenstrebenschutz, heute abgepuhlt von meinem Moser Leader AX Evolution Rahmen. Sah auf dem nicht wirklich gut aus und hatte sich teilweise auch schon gelöst. Ich bin sicher, echte Bastler bekommen das wieder glatt gebügelt. Oder auch nicht. Egal, ich verschenke es gerne an jemanden der es haben möchte mit kostenlosem Versand. Einfach melden.
Ein belgischer Freund von mir hat in Aussicht diesen, wie ich finde, sehr schönen Rahmen der Marke Abbondanza zu kaufen und bat mich um ein Urteil.
„Abbondanza“ ital. = Überfluss, dt.; ich vermute einmal, auch wegen dem Spraypaint, dass dies nicht die Originalmarke ist. Auch weil der Schriftzug stark an das Design des Campagnolo Schriftzuges erinnert. Als Idee aber nett. Kennt das irgendwer?
11-23
Rot Weiß Silber Schwarz
what ?
[not for real]
Geldgrab mit 61 Zähnen.
Fuchsien Schönheit
Japan Braut
Blau Gold Weiss
Track Version
Zu schön zum fahren
7 kg Plastik und Blech
Motobecane, Raleigh oder Peugeot?
Beginn der der Fixie Liebe
... what you gonna do ...
Nun komplett in blau
Leider nicht in Gunmetal Grey
Da einzige RH 60+ Rad in Tokyo
Keep on cruising in the free world
Der Todesstern
Daccordi Universum
Design follows function
Blau Rot Silber
Arktis Blau
CIÖCC. Hannes.
Drei Farben. Schwarz.
Beim Shopping.
Schwarz Rot Weiß
Shopping Blockade Runner
Entlackt
Viner Black Viper
Gross und Gelb
Oops.
Zwischen Florenz und ....
Dancelli O-nabe
Prinzessinnentraum
Aus einer anderen Galaxie
Fixie Projekt
Concorde Twin
Lange Geschichte
Classic Cyclone
Für Manu
Für Midori
Deutschland !
Grelle 80er Farben
Reus
Gold wert ?
Für Shozo
Neunziger eben
British Racing
Wait and See
Kotter für Heike
Colnago Super XL 1988
bikesnob28hb
fixiefanboyhb
sudi1662
there is no "I" in cyclyng 