Originally written in German. Translated to English by AI — please excuse any awkward phrasing.
Last Sunday I raced Challenge Kraichgau over 1.9km swim, 90km bike and 21.1km run. My 9th start at this event — more than at any other race.
In previous years I’ve always used this race as a training tune-up for the main season goal, racing it straight out of a training block. This year the dynamics were different — my season highlight was already 4 weeks ago. To still have some meaningful comparison with previous years I trained fully through the two weeks prior, as preparation for the next race (Challenge Roth). Those two weeks were among the harder ones — not because the training was so different or longer, but simply because I was hitting a wall after about 30-45 minutes in every single session. In short: nothing was working.
On Friday before Challenge I had the first session where that didn’t happen until after 2 hours. That was acceptable — it was a 2.5-hour run at 25°C with 400ml of water on board… things can fall apart in those conditions.
On Saturday there was a 70-minute swim at race pace, plus a 3-hour bike session with plenty of power work up the Königstuhl (the usual 3 times up and back). That put me at roughly the same exhaustion level as in previous years. In the race it accordingly took almost 3 hours for the engine to warm up to operating temperature.
Wetsuit or not? That was the question of the week, causing much discussion among athletes. I have no idea how they arrived at the measured temperature, whether they measured it in a sunken ice chest in the lake or not — either way, wetsuits were allowed. Funny enough, for the shorter S-distance race later that day it was banned, as the lake was apparently too warm by then.
Personally I would have preferred a ban — it was already borderline hot in those things. And when even I, recognized as a cold water wimp, say something like that…
On the swim there isn’t much to say, except that it was too slow and too hot. From the start I had neither a decent body position nor any strength in my arms — the resulting time of 31 minutes for 1.9km shows it. Though my watch showed 2.1km — for that distance the time would actually be fine. Maybe I should just learn to swim in a straight line…
The first transition was reasonably okay — got the wetsuit off quickly, though I managed to rip out half my visor putting on my helmet and had to reattach it.
On the bike the usual chase race followed — even if the first two hours were mentally very draining. My legs just hurt, and I wasn’t ready to embrace that pain. I wasn’t really feeling it either, and strong headaches kicked in on top of that fairly quickly. Still, I wasn’t going badly — making up position after position. Partly because of the conditions too — it was the windiest of all my Kraichgau races so far. Windy is obviously relative: as a Lanzarote-seasoned rider it felt like a light breeze to me, while others considered it a storm. Either way, conditions like this suit me — I was only a few seconds slower than last year.
The headaches unfortunately stayed with me until the end of the bike — lots of drinking didn’t help at first, but 2 bottles of cola eventually brought relief. I’d ridden out the fatigue from the days before at the Schindelberg climb (on the return), just late enough but in time for a good run. From that point on I felt fired up and was genuinely having fun. Bike time: 2:35:23h.
T2 went smoothly and quickly, then followed one of my best runs ever. The time was identical to the second — 1:21:27h — and yet it felt absolutely fantastic. Light and easy, a pleasantly hard effort. Position after position, with the 15th-best run split of the day I flew past friend and foe, relatively effortlessly and above all consistently without any collapse. Most people probably only saw this from me on the run:
Unfortunately the race was already over — I’d barely warmed up and it was done. 1:21:27h for the half marathon — overall I finished 41st and 3rd in my age group.
As a reward I received this — trophy from the organizer and bronze medal from the German Triathlon Union.
Congratulations also to my friend Gerhard on his second German championship title in a single week! First German champion in the sprint distance in the M50 age group, and now German champion in the middle distance too. Respect, old man 🙂