Category Archives: Tours Bike-Club

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

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:

My new bike: Ridley X-Trail

Yesterday I got my new bike: Ridley X-Trail

Unfortunately the weather was turning bad just exactly this weekend … the first real snow of the season. Well, tough luck… the bike had to be tested..

An “All-Road” or “Cross” bike has to stand that … and so do I…

Ridley XTrail - Nach erster Fahrt ... gleich im Schnee
Ridley XTrail – After the first tour … a snow tour
Ridley X-Trail - Nach erster Fahrt ... Schnee verstopft Schaltung
Ridley X-Trail – After the first tour … the fresh wet snow blocked the gear shifter

Road-Bike End-of-season tours

The weather this weekend was unusually good for November. So we did a first seson-end tour on Saturday and another one on Sunday 🙂

On Saturday one of my favourite “short” tours, via  Aidlingen, 7-Tannen, downhill via Holzbronn into the Nagold valley, up the hill at Seitzental … wow, what colors, deep green grass, deep blue sky and yellow/red leaves… still have goose-bumps…. and then the side-way towards the traditional “Wildberg-View”:

Wild-Berg Blick: Wolfgang, Peter, Siggi, Ralf, Ulli, Herbert und Ali hat das Bild gemacht.
Wildberg View: Wolfgang, Peter, Siggi, Ralf, Ulli, Herbert and Ali took the picture

With the way back via Sulz, Kuppingen and Gärtringen we went in total 80km.

On Sunday we did another tour: via Herrenberg, Öschelbronn, Bondorf and Ergenzingen into the Eyach valley and then to Haigerloch. From there on some side roads that I remembered in most parts from an RTF earlier this year towards Rottenburg and continues to Tübingen. On a 8th of November with best possible weather, sitting with cakes and coffee in the sun… how could this ever be any better 🙂

With the short return via Bebenhausen to Holzgerlingen the total tour was 102km.

We’ll continue to ride with the Mountainbike, but we’ll see if the weather will bring us another “year-end roadbike tour”…

Bike-Season 2015 finished

For me the bike reason goes from October 1st to September 30th. So last Saturday was my last day in Season 2015, and yesterday started the season 2016. So it’s time to summarize the Season 2015.

  • The winter season started quite well. We continues to do tours Saturday and Sunday regularly in the Schönbuch forest nearby. This brought quite some kilometres and conserved the form. Unfortunately I had an accident early December which caused a almost 5 week break, until I could restart in January to do further tours. During bad-weather weekends, we went a few times to the bike stadion in Öschelbronn, which was a lot of fun, and also I used my Tacx trainer to cycle at home in some evening and rainy weekends.
  • Al in all, that was a good base for the training camp on Mallorca in April. That was again a lot of fun, with a great groups. We did a lot of training tours there, long ones and also a bit faster than previous year. That was a very good base for the season. Unfortunately I had a cold, had to pause for one day and another day just do a short easy ride. This trend continued also in May, I was sick for two weekends, but could do nice runs on the other two weekends. All in all, a good spring start.
  • Road-bike:
    • 7802 km in total, 86 tours, on average 90,7km per Tour; in comparison to last year, a few years more, but especially we went really fast, more than 1 km/h faster average speed compared to last year
    • Total 291 hours of riding time; 27,27km/h total average speed
    • 74.970 meters altitude
    • 58 Tours < 100km (Ø 68,3 km; with 554m alt., 27,71 km/h)
    • 28 Tours > 100km (Ø 137,1 km; with 1531m alt., 26,36 km/h)
  • Mountainbike:
    • 15 Tours
    • 949km total
    • 10.030m altitude
    • ~43 hours riding time
    • 22,4 km/h average speed
  • Tacx Ergometer
    • 23 Trainings
    • 1.020 km
    • 33:45 hours training time
  • All in all, this was the “best year” ever during my cicling career
    • 7.800km road-bike
    • 8.751km “outside” i.e. Road-bike and MTB
    • 9.771km total. The 10km mark just missed

Already looking forward to the next season and a “golden autumn”, the first Saturday yesterday was nice, but today we have rain.

Link to my biking-page

Mallorca Training Camp 2015

Our training tours continued informally during the winter, nice but cold. Therefore we already looked forward to tours dressed in “short-short” and we planned great things. We always go after the Easter holidays and due to other private appointments, this years camp ended up being April 18th to May 2nd. Mid April is high-season in Mallorca for bikers … it was quite full. On most smaller roads, that is not a problem, the island is big enough. But some of the “nice places”, obviously are visited by almost everyone, e.g. Randa, Sant Salvador, Orient and the passes in the mountains, Sierra Tramuntana. But we are ourselves part of the biking tourism, i.e. nothing to complain about. And having your cake and cafe con leche in Petra on the central plaza is kind of very nice with 200 other bikers there 😉

Marktplatz Petra, von links: Brigitte, Hartmut, Ralf, Jürgen, Herbert
Central plaza in Petra, from left: Brigitte, Hartmut, Ralf, Jürgen, Herbert

The weather was very similar for basically the full two weeks, between 19 and 22°C, sometimes only little, sometimes a bit more wind, but never too strong… ideal for a training camp. We started well, and quite fast. The first two days a bit more flat and high average speed, 82km / 750Hm (Hm=>Meters altitude) / 27,8kmh and 117km / 950Hm / 28,1kmh. On the third day, a bit more intensity with more altitude. I think that worked well, it allows the body to get accustomed, and everybody was able to follow and no muscle aches, all could recover for the next day.

Tour-Start ... von links: Wolfgang, Brigitte, Jürgen, Ralf und Hartmut
Tour-Start … von links: Wolfgang, Brigitte, Jürgen, Ralf und Hartmut

With an exception … I was hit with a cold, starting Monday evening with coughing. On Tuesday morning I felt so bad, that I had to pause for a day. Wednesday was a planned pause-day, which everyone used to recover and I did as well, with a small 45km tour. That went well, on Thursday I was back in game and was not much more impacted for the rest of the training. However I obviously “gave” my cold also to others, Hartmut and Jürgen got sick and Brigitte a little bit during the next days.

On Thursday we continued fully motivated. Already the last three years we wanted to take a bus to Andratx in order to check out the western part and the beginning of the Sierra Tramuntana and the “coastal classic ride”. Never managed to do it … but this year. So we took the organized ride by Hürzeler, which departs at 9am. A small disadvantage for us, because we first have to cycle from Can Picafort to Paya de Muro, and be there at 8:30. So we had only a very rapid and short breakfast and packed some bread for the bus. But in the end, nothing to be nervous about, all went very well. It was not just one bus, they filled two large buses with two large trailers for bikes.

Port Andratx, Ankunft der Busse, Ausladen der Räder
Port Andratx, Arrival of the buses, unloading the bikes

It would have been too early to do the coastal classics already in the first week, so we took the part to Valldemossa and then took the downhill to Palmanyola and continued through the central part of Mallorca. The bus ride has one disadvantage, you lose a lot of time of the day, we could only start at about 10:45 in Andratx, but this is the only way to get there in a sensible manner (riding there is 60-70km…). The route was really nice, so it is definitely worth the trip: the tour: 121km / 1800Hm / 25,1kmh.

Pause in Valldemossa, Jürgen, Herbert, Tilman, Brigitte, Hartmut, Ralf
Breakin Valldemossa, Jürgen, Herbert, Tilman, Brigitte, Hartmut, Ralf

In the past years, we did not go to Cap Formentor, because of the bad road condition and the tunnel without any light, just not appealing. But this year: the road is freshly paved and there are reflectors in the tunnel … I was prepared and brought a portable lighting for my bike. So nothing to keep us away, except for some quite steep climbs … but we are here for the training, right? Well, definitely this is one of the nicest little tours and well worth the effort!

Jürgen am Leuchtturm Cap Formentor
Jürgen at the lighthouse Cap Formentor

As the main tour (“queens stage”) we did in the last years Soller – Ferry – Sa Calobra. This year another variant: we went to Soller, but then took the long climb to Puig Mayor and return via Monastery Lluc. The climb to the Puig is not as spectacular as Calobra (calobra is one of THE best climbs in the world), but quite strenuous and the ride through the mountains via the water reservoirs is really nice.

Am Puig, vor dem Tunnel, Blick Richtung Soller - Jürgen, Ralf und Hartmut
Resting after the climb, before the tunnel, direction Soller – Jürgen, Ralf und Hartmut

For those that are good enough, the crossing to Calobra is on the way, and Ralf actually took it, he went down to Calobra and rode up the Calobra pass! Fantastic!!! My legs were definitely not good enough for that. Our tour: 148,2km / 2.100Hm / 24,5kmh. For Ralf, you have to add about 20km and 900Hm altitude.

As resume: A great Training Camp!!! I’m already looking forward to next year 🙂

The totals will be slightly different for the participants, for I missed the Randa tour, Ralf did the extra Calobra pass … but all in all I think this was a very good result:

  • 14 Tours
  • 1.445 km
  • about 56 hours total cycling time
  • ca. 16.500m altitude
  • average speed about 25,7 kmh

And for those into Statistic, like me:

  • Saturday 18.Apr   – 82,1km – 27,8 kmh – 2:57:06 (riding time) – 750 Hm (m altitude)
  • Sunday 19.Apr.   – 116,7km – 28,1 kmh – 4:09:30 – 950Hm
  • Monday 20.Apr –  107,5km – 24,5 kmh – 4:21:53 – 1500Hm
  • Wednesday 22.Apr – 44,5km – 24,5 kmh – 1:50:00 – 350Hm
  • Thursday 23.Apr. – 121,1km – 25,1kmh – 4:49:00 – 1800Hm
  • Friday 24.Apr.       – 122,1km – 25,4 kmh – 4:48:32 – 1700Hm
  • Saturday 25.Apr. – 101,1km – 26,6 kmh – 3:47:55 – 1200Hm
  • Sunday 26.Apr.       – 65,0km – 25,5 kmh – 2:15:00 – 500Hm
  • Monday 27.Apr.  – 104,1km – 24,5 kmh – 4:15:23 – 1250Hm
  • Tuesday 28.Apr.  – 126,6km – 25,7 kmh – 4:56:31 – 1400Hm
  • Wednesday 29.Apr. – 105,8km – 25,1 kmh – 4:09:09 – 850Hm
  • Thursday 30.Apr. – 148,2km – 24,5 kmh – 6:02:48 – 2100Hm
  • Friday 1.Mai          – 113,9km – 26,3 kmh – 4:18:38 – 1200Hm
  • Saturday 2.Mai    – 86,7km – 26,7 kmh – 3:11:10 – 600Hm