Category Archives: Sports

Patagonia – Part 1

This year I once again took the time for a longer vacation. Many years ago I had decided to do this every 3-4 years, however the last time was 6 years ago, South-Patagonia was over year-end 2010/2011. This time I went a few hundred kilometers further north to Patagonia.

I worked till Friday and left on a Monday, so I had the weekend for packing and preparation. It was a late / night flight, so I arrived in Buenos Aires on Tuesday. I had one day buffer in BA with Sun and 32°C, quite contrast to cold weather in Germany.

The continuation flight on Wednesday unfortunately had 2 hours delay, so I arrived only late afternoon in Bariloche. I got the rental car at the airport and had only little time to visit the nice and tourist oriented city center of the town… and then to enjoy my first real Argentinian steak!

Lago Nahuel Huapi, Bariloche, Blick vom Zimmer Hotel Tres Reyes
Lago Nahuel Huapi, Bariloche, View from my room in the Hotel Tres Reyes
Bife de Chorizo, Rest. Boliche de Alberto, Bariloche
Bife de Chorizo, Rest. Boliche de Alberto, Bariloche

I’m not here for eating only, and I’m an early starter. So next morning I left for a first trip, in car this time. The quite known “Circuito Chico”, the small tour in car through some of the nice areas around here. If you leave early, there is almost no traffic (which in any case isn’t too heavy here outside town). The only thing is that the cable cars only start around 10am. The trip is only about 2 hours driving, unless you take a side tour via gravel road to Colonia Suiza, so there is lots of time to stop for sightseeing and taking pictures. The road via Colonia Suiza is gravel road… that was my first time. Not as bad as expected, but still you have to get used to it… and I have a couple hundred more kilometers coming, so a little practice doesn’t hurt. As I was too early to begin, I took the cable car up to Cerro Otto at the end, with a small hiking to the highest place outside the station, where there was a fantastic view without other people.

Cerro Otto, Blick zum Lago Nahuel Huapi, Bariloche
Cerro Otto, View to Lago Nahuel Huapi, Bariloche

A slow, leisurely start, but I’m here for hiking… for the next day I planned a trip to Refugio Frey, on the simple route. The driving to Villa Catedral is pretty short, so I started hiking form there around 9am. This tour is technically easy, it is specified as T2 (but only a small part, rest is T1), but with 18-20km there and back it is quite long, and also has 800m of altitude. So quite some training … and really nice landscape to enjoy.

Refugio Frey, Laguna Toncak
Refugio Frey, Laguna Toncak

I had feared muscle ache, but didn’t get any… so on the next day I took directly the next tour, to Refugio Lopez. The tour is shorter, the one-way 4-5km, so ~10km in total, but it is all the time very steep, it has also about 800m altitude. I think it’s a bit more difficult then Refugio Frey, but it is also marked as T2 on the map, probably right. But it’s quite difficult to hike almost all the time on steep rocky/gravel passages, so you need to concentrate, that’s why it may appear more difficult. Ah yes, by the way…  T1-T5(T6) marked on the OSM, are the official classifications of the YDS scale.

Forelle am Heiligabend in Bariloche
Forelle am Heiligabend in Bariloche

This evening was Christmas Eve, so I had trout, just like I normally have at home 😀. The next day is Christmas, and after two days hiking, time to do “nothing” and relax. Well, nothing is really difficult for me, so I did some research and planning for “what’s next”. I wanted to check out the trail “Refugio Frey por el filo”, which is the trail via the ridge of Cerro Catedral to the Refugio Frey. Well, everything is relative, some people wrote it’s really nice and well marked etc., others write that is it T5 and really difficult. And on OpenStreetMap it is also marked as T5, so that means without practice in that kind of terrain, I should not do it. Therefor plan: take the cable car up to Cerro Catedral and check out the view and take some pictures. Can visit the ridge and check out how that looks like. There is one more day in Bariloche, so I have time.

OK, planned, done. Went again to Villa Catedral, bought the ticket for the cable car, nice trip up, first in a gondola then the last part a chairlift to “Diente de Caballo”. Well, this is a skiing area. So although the view is nice, the terrain is all being prepared for winter season, i.e. many machines and not a very natural area. The view to the lake and the mountains on the other side is nice, but nothing to stay long. So I hiked further up to the ridge to take pictures. there were a few other hikers just before me, obviously on their way to take the hiking trip along the ridge. So I followed them. Reaching the ridge there is a splendid view to Monte Tronador, the highest mountain the range near by.

Now I can see a part of that path along the ridge, quite impressive and a little frightening also. I don’t have alpine experience, so I decided to just go along the first few hundred meters across a gravel slope, I can go back any time. After the gravel slope, there are only rocks, no path anymore. Well, I can only try and see how it goes. Can turn back any time. I do have hiking experience and I’m pretty sure-footed also. So I try a little further and take it slowly, checking out very thoroughly the rocks to be sure they are stable. Also need to check if the path can be found. As said, there is no path anymore, just rocks. So they marked rocks with a red dot every few meters, so you can find the safe route. Well, long talking… now that I’m here, why turn back with this fantastic landscape 😃.

Hochgebirgswandern am Grat des Cerro Catedral
Alpine hiking at the ridge of Cerro Catedral
Hochgebirgswandern am Grat des Cerro Catedral
Alpine hiking at the ridge of Cerro Catedral

Although the path doesn’t gain much altitude, the climbing over the rocks is very strenuous, basically you gain and lose altitude every meter. The distance from the start of the ridge at Diente de Caballo until Laguna Toncak has around 6-7km, but that takes 3-4 hours, as per guide information in Bariloche. I wasn’t actually slow, it took me a little over 3 hours. I didn’t need gloves, although this is sometimes recommended, as you have to use hands very often to secure the climbing up and down over sometimes quite high rocks. I saw a few people using hiking sticks… I think in this difficult terrain they wouldn’t help much, but that might be matter of taste, I didn’t have any with me anyway. I must say, I’m quite proud that I made it!

Next day… rest and relax. This time I do have muscle ache. That climbing was really strenuous and at the end I also had to hike down the 1200m of altitude, which I probably took a little too fast. So there is time to read a little in some books, buy y maté, bombilla… tomorrow driving the whole day. And of course write this article…

Part 2 to follow….

(Ah yes, most of the pictures on this article are taking with the smartphone, I don’t have the equipment here to extract the SLR photos… a picture gallery will come later when I’m back home. I might also publish list and exact tracks of the trails I hiked.)

Biking Season 2016 finished

My biking season starts on October 1st and lasts until September 30th, hence today’s Friday is the last day of the season, this coming weekend is part of the new season 2017.

It’s time for a summary of this past season…

  • The winter-season started pretty well. Saturdays and Sundays we did regularly tours on the mountain bike in the Schönbuch. In January I got my new All-Road bike, a Ridley XTrail, which is quite fun to ride. With this I got to do quite a number of kilometers and conserve some of the good summer form. A few weekends with bad weather I used my Tacx Trainer or went to the cycle-track in Öschelbronn.
  • This formed a good base for the training camp on Mallorca. Unfortunately I got a cold shortly before travelling to Mallorca, but recovered in time. Mallorca was great, we did a lot long tours with low to medium speed in order to train the base endurance. Returning from Mallorca, the Spring time was going very well. In July I went to the Allgäu (Nesselwang) for a long week and did another 1000km there… From that point onwards it looked like I could do a record season.
  • Road bike:
    • 8788,6 km total, 96 tours, average of 91,5km per tour;
      several more compared to last years.
    • In total 334 hours of cycling time; 26,85km/h average speed
    • 80.793 m altitude
    • 62 toures< 100km (Ø 66,3 km; avg 517m, 27,32 km/h)
    • 34 tours > 100km (Ø 137,6 km; avg 1433HM, 26,00 km/h)
  • Mountainbike / Cross:
    • 25 tours
    • 1385km total
    • 13.690 m altitude
    • ca. 64 cycling time
    • 22,0 km/h average speed over all
  • Tacx Traininer
    • 34 Trainings
    • 1.387 km
    • 48 hours training time
  • All in all I would call this the record year, with:
    • 8.788 km road bike
    • 10.173 km “outside”, Road bike and MTB/Cross
    • 11.561 km total

Now starts again the winter-season. This year I will have a long break form December to January for a hiding vacation in South America… lets see how the next season will go

Link to my biking page

Training in the Allgäu

From Friday 24.6. until Sunday 3.7. I took a long week vacation  in Nesselwang, Allgäu, or to be more specific, a short training camp. The weather was OK, especially compared to the weeks of rain we had recently. Out of 10 days it rained on 2 and I could do 8 nice tours on my road bike.

Apart from my usual smaller tours, I was able to try out a few new routes. One was on totally deserted side-roads (mostly closed for traffic, but well paved) from Forggensee to a very nice church, the “Wies-Kirche”, to Oberammergau … a really nice route with no cars, only farms and cows. After a few years, I again took up the challenge over the Riedbergpass  and returning via a parallel valley where a nice paved track (closed for car traffic) exists that I didn’t know yet. This one was the top-tour of the week.

The first few days I was alone, Peter joined Wednesday, after he had participated in the Alb-Extrem on Sunday. So we did the second half of the week together. On Monday I returned home and Peter did another long tour, over the Hahntennjoch and Arlberg.

In total I did 8 Tours with 1.032 km and 10.990m of altitude. I’m quite happy with that 🙂

The most interesting routes I have put up on GPSies in the Allgäu Folder. Always very nice is the Namlos-Tour, and of course the new Tour Wieskirch-Oberammergau and the route over the Riedbergpass (to Balderschwang and back via Oberstdorf) with its steep climbs of ~16-18% and ~600m altitude on ~6km.

(The altitude of the tracks on GPSies is usually about 20% too high, in comparison to my barometric speedometer).

Mallorca Training-Camp 2016

Again we went end of April to Mallorca which is close to the end of the biking season on the island. Reason was the we always go between Easter Vacation and Pentecost Vacation (less people, lower price), and Hartmut and Brigitte wanted to participate at the Hamburg Marathon on 17.4., so we decided to go the week after. We had a nice group, with Jürgen Karrer, Bern Ammer, Brigitte Krist-Priehm, Hartmut Priehm, Wolfgang Mayer and myself.

The winter season had started pretty nicely, the weather was not too cold, so we could ride basically every weekend on the Mountainbike, later my new All-Road/Cross. But mid of February the colds started. Altogether I had 3 colds, with 2 weeks “ok” inbetween them, so only very little training was possible until early April. When we did a few tours in April I realized that the power was still there, but no endurance, my legs were tired after 2, max. 3 hours already.

So the training camp was necessary and I looked forward to it. Last year, we went a little too fast sometimes and I was quite tired many times, this year we took it a little slower and trained more the base endurance. Some intervals to train power, and then some mountains in the second week. A very nice mix, and some well known roads, we could ride fast fun rounds … this is what road-biking is all about 🙂

Traditionally (happened for the last 2-3 years), it rains when we land in Palma… but it stopped also this year at 12:00 and we could start at 14:00 a first short tour. During the whole two weeks, we had between 14-16°C at start around 9-10 in the morning, which went up to 18°C on more cloudy days and up to ~22°C on the warm days. So we always had to take some wind protection etc… but for training purposes this is still very nice. Especially compared to Germany, where they HAD SNOW for several days and day temperatures around 3°C.

Leuchtturm Cala Rajada: Jürgen, Herbert, Hartmut, Brigitte, Wolfgang
At the lighthouse Cala Rajada: Jürgen, Herbert, Hartmut, Brigitte, Wolfgang

As the weather was quite nice for the first week, we didn’t break and did tours for the 7 first days, including one longer tour (famous Orient). It rained on Thursday, so day 8 was the first break. Directly the next day we did a first top-tour: First we went in direction to Sant Salvador. But then we did not go up there, but instead to Castillo de Santueri, which is so-to-say the mountain next to Sant Salvador. That’s a nice change, this is relatively flat in the beginning, but then 18%-20% ramps on the last passage. Then we continued to Randa. Another new thing here, instead of going the boring road to the town Randa at the bottom of the hill, we took a side road directly out of Llucmajor. This is a really nice alternative, which then joins the main road up to Randa, very good when you come form Llucmajor anyway.

Am Castillo Santueri (bei Sant Salvador): Bernd und Herbert
At Castillo Santueri (bei Sant Salvador): Bernd and Herbert

Then again we had two more days of rain, but only until 12:00 each of the two days, so we could do smaller afternoon tours. We used this to try some new roads, that we had never tried in the past years. And this was really successful, as those roads had no cars, few bikes and excellent pavement. With Smartphone and OpenStreetmap it is easy to navigate and find the right turns, otherwise we would not have dared to try those, because you never know when a road suddenly ends in the nowhere.

After that … THE long tour: as already in some previous years we wanted to go over the Soller pass to Puerto Soller and take the boat to Sa Calobra with the great serpentines up into the mountains… so we took off at 9:00am…

Mallorca 2016: Auf zur Königsetappe
Mallorca 2016: start to the long tour

Taking the fast road via Sineu to Santa Eugenia (in order not to miss the boat) and then over the Soller-Pass. This is a nice hill, that you can really roll up , not to steep and good to ride. Then fast down and into the harbour. When buying the tickets, the lady already warned us that the ocean would be very rough and the tour could take a little longer today. Ouch… not good, rough sea?

Well… now we are there, so lets try. So the boat leaves in time, and takes 2-3 minutes out of the harbour… just to hit the first wave. Probably half of the people cheering loudly. Myself just thinking… oh, oh… concentrate and look at the coast and hold on… wow this IS ROUGH.

Hey, what is the captain doing? Strange route…

… hey, it looks like he’s going the wrong way? Actually, the captain decided to back into the harbour. Probably he was thinking about the cleaning he would have to do, if he continues and half of the passanges would … you know what. OK, I had no problem with this decision, quite happy about it.

But what now? We lost one hour and are back in the harbour. Going back over Soller-Pass? Hmm boring. Well, this is supposed to be the long ride today, so let’s do a long ride and take the mountain road up to Puig Mayor! Said and done … at the end of the day we had 150km und ca. 2000m altitude!

After this one, one short and and relaxing day tour. And then for the last day, we planned a tour to the Monastery Lluc. As Wolfgang had never before been to Cap Formentor, I offered to go with him, while the others wanted to take it more slowly. The road to Cap is actually a mountain tour. So we, Wolfgang and I, took only a short rest and started directly down to Pollency and then the road to the Cap. This is a 18km (and back) trip, which goes up first 250m, then all of that down again to shore level… just to go up again the same climb … and of course the whole thing back, plus the climb to the Monastery, so we had a pretty tough day. But the weather was fantastic… so it was a really great final tour for our training camp.

Am Cap Formentor: Herbert und Wolfgang
At Cap Formentor: Herbert and Wolfgang

Statistic for this year:

  • 14 Tours
  • 1.504,5 km
  • ca. 61 hours of riding time
  • more than 13.000 Höhenmeter (low estimate)
  • approx. 24,6 km/h total average across all tours

Here’s the Link to my tours-folder on GPSies.

  • Day 1, 21.4.: 52,5 km – 24,3 km/h – 2:09:26 (riding time) – ~379m altitude
  • Day 2, 22.4.: 100,2 km – 25,7 km/h – 3:53:37 – ~628 Hm
  • Day 3, 23.4.: 133,5 km – 26,1 km/h – 5:06:41 – ~954 Hm
  • Day 4, 24.4.: 122,3 km – 25,1 km/h – 4:51:17 – ~1.076 Hm
  • Day 5, 25.4.: 102,9 km – 26,0 km/h – 3:56:54 – ~635 Hm
  • Day 6, 26.4.: 122,7 km – 24,4 km/h – 5:01:31 – ~1.087 Hm
  • Day 7, 27.4.: 111,0 km – 24,9 km/h – 4:27:30 – ~819 Hm
  • Day 8, 29.4.: 147,7 km – 24,9 km/h – 5:55:34 – ~1.406 Hm
  • Day 9, 30.4.:  70,4 km  – 22,5 km/h – 3:07:35 – ~479 Hm
  • Day 10, 1.5.:  91,2 km – 27,0 km/h – 3:22:07 – ~644 Hm
  • Day 11, 2.5.: 151,4 km – 23,3 km/h – 6:28:46 – ~1.971 Hm
  • Day 12, 3.5.:  84,5 km  – 23,7 km/h – 3:31:04 – ~695 Hm
  • Day 13, 4.5.: 126,7 km – 22,2 km/h – 5:41:45 – ~1.712 Hm
  • Day 14, 5.5.:   87,6 km –  24,9 km/h – 3:30:50 – ~614 Hm

And once again… being back a week, I look forward to next year already!

Training auf der Bahn in Öschelbronn

When we checked the weather forecast yesterday… misery. We were lucky this winter season, we could ride outside almost each weekend, MTB/Cross or even road-bike. But for this Sunday… rain. But then the idea … why not go once again to the  cycle track in Öschelbronn? As we got that idea only late Saturday evening, only a short  WhatsApp info got out and Ralf, Jörg and I went there, as there is open training for everybody, Sundays 10:00-12:00am.

It’s almost a year since I was there the last time… I thought I would need more time, but I felt home almost immediately. 2 rounds to warm up and then get into the first group. Today there were a lot of strong cyclists on the track. So there was always 1 fast and 1 super-fast group 🙂 . Twice I joined a super-fast group for several rounds, first in the back of the group in the wind-shade but with the regular changes, I also got my turn in the front with 5 fast rounds. Wow, what great fun!

And I have to say, 1 1/2 hours of cycling track, going fast at times, is quite tiring, I can feel my legs… But this is so much fun, I guess we will repeat this again in the near future.

One of the guys from the club RSV Öschelbronn recently put a video with impressions on YouTube: