Erstellt am: 4. 6. 2010 - 17:59 Uhr

Ever Onwards Ever Upwards

Wanting to stop on Day 3 of the Trans Germany

I met my compatriot Matt on the steep winding up to the Buchelalpe. In places the serpentine track had a gradient of 24% and we were both puffing very hard. Matt, a Brit now living in Hannover, said he had been in the Armed Forces.

"You'd be used to this sort of physical punishment then!" I panted.

"Yeah, but to feel motivated, I need a sergeant major shouting at me!" he gasped.

I did him the favour.

"Quäl dich, du Sau!" I shouted, remembering how Udo Bölts claimed to have driven team-mate Jan Ullrich on to Tour de France glory.

Matt gave me a funny look and pedalled laboriously on.

trans germany peter musch

We both knew we had 1,830 metres to climb over the course of the day. I suppose you can't have a mountain bike race without mountains, but those sort of figures seem awfully daunting when you wake up with dead legs.

Still, for the first time in days we could see the peaks around us. Just before we left the start area at Pfronten bound for Sonthofen, the sun had suddenly made a rare guest appearance. The forecast the night before had shown a picture of sun peeping out from behind clouds, then a picture of rain, some snow and even some lightning. "Temperatures might rise to 17 degrees" the forecaster had enthused, with no visible signs of sarcasm. But he had been overly pessimistic. Even if the road out of town was still flooded, it was already getting warm.

peter musch

This led to some difficult sartorial challenges. I packed a full rucksack and over the course of the day, as the clouds came and went, I made more time-consuming costume changes than Beyoncé in the Wiener Stadthalle - dropping back as I did and having to rush back to catch up my friends. But after all the rain of recent days, the sight of blue sky made us feel as if we had won the lottery.

The days of downpours had, however, left their mark. The track up to the Buchelalpe developed from asphalt into gravel and then mud. By that time, with hundreds of bikers ahead of us, it was so churned up that it looked like a World War 1 battlefield in Flanders. But with a gradient of around 20%.

Not for the first time, we got off and pushed.

trans germany /peter musch

On the decent there was the grizzy sight of the rescue team in action. Pia Sundstedt from Finnland, who had started the day second in the women's ranking, lay prostrate and bleeding by the track-side. She had apparently been racing down to Schnitzlertal when a rider in front of her lost control and went down. Unable to avoid him, the Craft-Rocky-Mountain biker crashed into a barbed-wire fence and suffered a 15 centimetres long lacerated wound. Later, after a rocky root-strewn passage through the woods, I passed another rescue scene with a motionless rider wrapped in the thermofoil of the medical team. For all its rewards, this, I repeat, can be a brutal sport.

Slightly intimidated I picked my way down the mountains even more cautiously than usual, trying to remember the technical downhill lessons I'd learnt in Spain. I tried to get my weight distribution right and look ahead and around the corners so I could anticipate the oncoming hazards instead of just flailing over them in a state of surprise. I tried not to just follow the slick tyre tracks ahead - the so-called "lemming line" - but choose my own route down.

As I studiously followed my lessons, people flew by on my left and right. Maybe it wasn't just the cows yesterday!

peter musch

At 55 kilometres this had been nicknamed a "sprint stage" - but I certainly wasn't sprinting today. My lack of specific training was beginning to tell and today the final climb towards Sonthofen seemed quite torturous. Towards the end, my pedalling was becoming less and less fluid, my front wheel was zigzagging just a little more from the effort, I had started staring at the ground instead of the road ahead. I was, as they say, in the red. But I was not alone. To my left and right there were red faces grimacing in pain, dripping in sweat - all of us, probably, trying to block out those all important questions ringing in our ears: Why am I doing this? Why don't I just stop? Do I really want this?

And then I heard the sound of cowbells and cheering getting ever closer. Well if the people of Allgau can stand by the wind-lashed track to welcome us to their home, I couldn't let them down by stopping now, could I? The least I could was to keep on pedalling...

peter musch

All photos Peter Musch/Trans Germany