End of May Ride – May 31 2019

I began May with a bike ride and ended it with another; in fact I rode quite a lot in this spring month.

On Wednesday I went road riding but went off script and ended up on gravel, Wednesday I did the same ride on my cross bike and it was so much easier. This latter ride was interesting in that I was surprised to find that Thursday was a public holiday and everywhere was closed. This was also Vatertag where groups of men (young and older, you do not need to be a father) pull hand trollies filled high with beer and then get very drunk in the forest. They were good natured and wished us a good journey as we passed them.

On the last day of May I and Gunnar Fehlau spun a good pace (over 21kph) taking in gravel and tarmac, he on his Mawis and I on my cross bike. Gunnar’s Mawis is amazing with tubing cunningly configured to make it so special. It has huge tyres and you could say that the bikes reflect our different perspectives – I have never stopped being a roadie at heart and am quite old fashioned whilst Gunnar is very much in the modern age with his kolonweg busting machine.

He has had it only a short while and he is dialling it in for a mighty ride along the now abandoned Internal Grenze. See the Grenzsteintrophy for more.

My cross bike is nimble and fast on hills; it can quickly gather pace whilst Gunnar has to build it up but when he does you can hear those tyres on the gravel, think Jaws. Going down a long descent no matter what I tried other than to be suicidal, I could not keep up with him as that Mawis just ate up the rough stuff! I hit 47.7kph (46/11) in my attempt.

Now, there is June to look forward to and I don’t need to go shopping for a sofa or a sofa bed (for anyone who wants to visit) because we did that also this week and in fact we did more than simply ride our bikes in May even if that’s what I enjoyed the most.

The Ride: https://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/3701179263

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