Welcome to My Blog
about my Cycling adventures
This is the story about how I started my cycling adventures, my motivations, the challenges and what I’ve learned during the years – I’m sharing all my unpolished personal experiences and hope you’ll read along and follow my journey.
I started cycling back when I was a kid. I grew up at a real country side where I had a duty every day to bring out newspapers. The route was approximately 10 kilometers in the open land. During my rides with the newspapers I soon started competing against myself, I started to see how fast it could be done. Also the days when the wind was harsh, the clock was ticking from the start to the end, forcing myself to produce more watts. I don´t think though, I had any idea at that time what watt is about.
Some days today during training, I think back, and still believe that is where the foundation for my endurance was established.
For some years I did not have ANY interest in biking, but at an event at my work in Annecy in France, we tried Downhill Mountain Biking. The fire was on again, and I bought a mountain bike when I came home from the event. I remember it was a Specialized Rock Hopper in aluminum. I had other great bikes after that, I especially remember a Ghost carbon hardtail, great bike too. During that period I started to go to Austria for mountain biking. In the beginning it was Kitzbûhl, Saalbach and later on primarily Nauders. What I discovered during the stays, was that I found some kind of challenge doing long uphill rides. Only problem was that my weight in those years was over 100kg. That changed.
After a few years I thought it was about time to buy the first road bike. I bought a road bike, a Canyon Endurace, and did a 1000km charity ride to Oslo. During the ride, I found out that I was mentally strong doing long rides, I still had a lot of mental energy left when others were under pressure and tired. Only problem was still the weight. So I decided, after some years, to get rid of 23kg, which left me with 77kg and an incredible feeling of how easy it now was to go uphill on the bike.
During the years I have also done a few 24hour MTB races in a 4 man team, and a few 12 hours races in the solo class, so the long distance and endurance has obviously always been in the back of my head.
The last years I have been looking for something more extreme. At one point I was looking at doing Paris-Brest-Paris, a 1200km unsupported bike race. But I found it too cumbersome to go to Paris with the bike at that time and do an unsupported race.
For two years ago I saw a long distance race here in Denmark, Race Around Denmark. Only problem: It was 1600km. A good friend of mine and me shook hands on doing it as a two man team in the supported class with a team to support us. We had a blast together with the team and a really great experience.
After the great experience with the two man team, I decided to raise the bar and do the same race but in the solo class. The race was hard with lots of crises, primarily because of bad weather with a lot of wind and rain. But because of a hard working support team and all our mental strength, we succeeded passing the finishing line in a second place.
This year we raise the bar once again…
