From Friday 24.6. until Sunday 3.7. I took a long week vacation in Nesselwang, Allgäu, or to be more specific, a short training camp. The weather was OK, especially compared to the weeks of rain we had recently. Out of 10 days it rained on 2 and I could do 8 nice tours on my road bike.
Apart from my usual smaller tours, I was able to try out a few new routes. One was on totally deserted side-roads (mostly closed for traffic, but well paved) from Forggensee to a very nice church, the “Wies-Kirche”, to Oberammergau … a really nice route with no cars, only farms and cows. After a few years, I again took up the challenge over the Riedbergpass and returning via a parallel valley where a nice paved track (closed for car traffic) exists that I didn’t know yet. This one was the top-tour of the week.
The first few days I was alone, Peter joined Wednesday, after he had participated in the Alb-Extrem on Sunday. So we did the second half of the week together. On Monday I returned home and Peter did another long tour, over the Hahntennjoch and Arlberg.
In total I did 8 Tours with 1.032 km and 10.990m of altitude. I’m quite happy with that 🙂
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.
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.
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: 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.
These first three days were really hard for me. Having skipped training mostly during winter, yes of course: my own fault, and then on day 2 90km and day 3 111km with altitudes of 1420m and 1700m, and with respectable speed.
OK, three days training and then one day for regeneration… As if planned that way, it started to rain today in the morning. We’ll see, if it clears and drys, maybe a few slow km later.
For today a strike was announced to affect also the Stuttgart Airport… so sleep was not so well, and also very short. Got up at 3:00 for departure at 5:50. Then at the airport everything was quiet and we arrived in Palma around 7:50 as planned to get our bus transfer at 9 to Can Picafort.
… But what… Started to rain heavily!?!? Whats that?
Well, around 12 it stopped again and with the sun coming out, the streets were soon drying up.
With that, on to Cala Sant Vincenç…
Our standard starter tour, today with 87km, 630m altitude and 24,5 km/h average speed.
Started the tour via Ehningen, Aidlingen, 7-Tannen and past Holzbronn into the Nagold-valley, then return “up” out of the valley at Iselshausen (Picture). Now I’ll see how I return home, probably via Mötzingen and Öschelbronn and Herrenberg.
