So today was Backeslauf day, my first run in the Wingertscup this year.
It's a 14.3km run, with an advertised 274m of climbing, meaning it is hella hilly in my book!
Framersheim is 26km away from where I live, so I decided to cycle to and from the race. Katja kindly joined me as support, but had to take the bus there.
When I arrived I was bit bit taken aback. The first few km were supposed to be flat to slightly uphill, but I could see that from metre 1 it started climbing at about 2-3%. I quickly started to reassess my goal and decided that 1h would actually be a good achievement!
When the race was about to start, I realised that we started in the other direction, so in fact it was flat then slightly uphill, phew! I ran with about 7 people in front of me, but the leader was well ahead after not very long. I felt like it was going to be a hard day. After about 4km, it was going ok, but I knew the steep stuff was yet to come. I had passed a couple of people by the time we hit the hill, but although it wasn't easy, it wasn't too bad really. It was maybe 4% for 2km, then flattened out before descending, also not so steep to start with, then finally getting steeper near the end.
The route wasn't the smoothest in the world, with lots of gravel and dirt tracks, but that didn't seem to cost too much time, and no ankles were turned, not by me anyway! After the first loop, which didn't go right back to the start, rather about half way down the hill before re-climbing it, I was feeling in the zone. Knowing that the last 4km were pretty much downhill meant I was looking at the 8km marker thinking I was nearly finished! A guy had been less than 50m behind me on the decent of the first loop, but seemed to burn out on the 2nd climb. I went up it at my pace, then knew I could just roll down the hill to the end. There was one small shock, which was the steepest section of the day with about 1km to go, but it was only 100m at most. Then straight back to descending.
I had hoped 58m would be possible, with 2.3km to run I had 8:20 in hand, with 0.6km to go I had 2m, which seemed like it would be hard to do to me, given that a 90s 400m is going some for me, but the downhill helped all the way to the end and I skipped over the line in 57:40.
I thought I had counted 5 ahead of me, but as there was also a 1 loop race at the same time, I couldn't be too sure. Katja thought I was either 3rd or 4th. I waited an age to find out the results, but eventually found that I was 4th, so didn't win any bread and wine 🙁
I really enjoyed the race, a long downhill to end the race meant that I felt ok as I crossed the line, even if my heart rate was 184! My average HR was 176, which is a hard day at the office for me, so I think I paced it pretty well.
I happened to run into a colleague of mine Ronald just before the start who was running too, he also beat his goal time, so it was a successful day all-round!