Genkhis Khan MTB race – Day 1 of 3

• Erich
 
Xilinhot and here I am in XiWuQi (Inner Mongolia) for a 3-day MTB race in the grasslands
BLUE (www.rideblue.com) is my TT/Road sponsor for Triathlon/Road cycling races -> thanks BLUE
For MTB races it’s always a great fun and pleasure to ride for my friend Pierre-Arnaud’s team (CHIRU-WTB) on its CHIRU Pulse 29ers MTB 
Never been there, could not say no…and some good training anyway!
 
1st day is 63km and starts straight away with a steep climb to split the pack after 5min!
I tried to be not too far behind at the top as the leaders were already far down the hill…
Passed 2 guys and kept my solo riding (hard) under some heavy rain…
Caught the leaders at 12-13km mark, then they pushed hard again and dropped me…damn
Lost a bit of time choosing some wrong muddy lines after at around 16-17k
Kept pushing and saw the leaders not that far ahead 
Finally made the junction at the 40k mark approx…and yes, as you can imagine, drafting in MTB also helps a lot ;-) glad to be there sitting behind these guys
 
felbabel
Rode together until the very last stretch
Tried to attack far from the finish lane but got cramps and could not drop these guys – i was pretty spent too for sure!
Finally settle for a very last short sprint and got 4th (out of 4)
 
 
 KDK_1632-Version-2-1024x662
Anyway, good we put 5 or 6 min over the competition.
“Just” need to hold that lead over the next 2 days! (43km and 100km)
 
 
 
Coverage from organizer HERE
 
Strava HERE
 
Website HERE
 

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. ( Log Out / Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s