Bavarians Do It Better

On a bike ride last week I came across this:

A flagpole with the Bavarian flag on top, the German flag hanging much lower. Sheesh.
It made me giggle, because it very accurately represents the Bavarian attitude towards most everybody else: You're OK, but there's no denying that we are the best. Deal with it.

While I do not always agree with that statement (Especially when it comes to politics, conservatism, entanglement of church and state, conservatism, ...Argh, maybe I have to rant about this some other time...), I will say this: Bavarians know how to party and how to put together a kick-ass race.

Which brings me to today's topic: The 2008 Arber Radmarathon, the 24th edition of a bike race which starts and ends in Regensburg, a city close to my parents' home.

My dad had done the race twice before and for some reason I thought I was in decent enough shape to go do it with him this year. The term 'race' might be a bit misleading, because there is no timing or actual racing. Bikers show up at a designated time and do one of the different tours at whatever pace they are comfortable...Some are definitely going fast though, it was pretty impressive.

There were four tours for road bikes and two for mountain bikes. The organizers had also included a tour for families with small kids.

Well, dad and I decided on the second shortest tour (Tour C in yellow in the picture below), but it seemed daunting enough for me. I don't think I've ever biked much further than 100K at a time...


And at any rate, 170 and 250K (blue and purple route) seemed just insane, especially with the elevation. Yikes!

Here's the elevation profile of our ride. The hill at kilometer 80 sucked the most: Tired legs + elevation = no fun.


Well, we set off with what seemed hundreds and hundreds of others at 7AM (All the tours combined had 7000+ bikers.). I started off pretty slow, didn't want to run out of gas halfway. Dad told me later that he was a little worried in the beginning. Guess he wasn't worried so much later, because I think I did alright on the hills. And it got pretty hilly pretty fast. Some nice downhills as well, my maximum speed was 60km/h, which is fast for me...

All in all it was an excellent and amazingly exhausting bike ride. The ride led us through beautiful scenery. Of course, I was too lazy to take a lot of pictures...Here's a few random dudes:


And why do Bavarians do it better?
First off, the organizers, volunteers and the police did a great job patrolling the roads. Much nicer to ride on streets/in towns with less or no traffic...
Secondly, the food/drink stations were really well run. They had all kinds of stuff, and of course the last station had beer already! Haha.


At the end of the ride, there was a huge party with all kinds of food and drink again. Every participant got three drink/food vouchers, which dad immediately exchanged for two more beers and brats.
Don't know how he (and a lot of the others) do it. No way I could down a beer and fatty food right after a ride or run...

Oh, and we got a decent-looking bike jersey at the end as well.

A pretty amazing day, all for the low price of 30 Euros and utter exhaustion.