The MTB World Championships 2005
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The 2005 MTB Marathon world championships were held in August in Norway, between Rena and Lillehammer. The world title race was a part of the annual Birkebeinerrittet, which is the biggest mountain bike event in the world, with around 12 000 (!) participants taking part this year. The race course was mostly the same as the 89 km long Birkebeinerrittet, with some extra technical sections and a total of 116 km.
The start of the men's race was crazy fast on paved uphill road, with around 150 bikers battling for positions for the first technical parts of the course - and I was not on the first starting row. After some crowded technical sections, I settled into my own rhythm, trying to catch as many riders as I could, and trying not to blow!
The course was technically pretty easy for the most parts, gravel roads etc., which made my task of moving up the field and breaking the wind mostly alone a bit harder. After traversing the hills between Rena and Lillehammer and a long downhill down to the eventual finish area, the race ended with a 25 km loop of very technical riding on smaller tracks with sharp rocks and slippery roots. I found myself doing quite good on the technically easier uphills, but I really sucked on the final technical downhills, and finished on 38th position in 4 hours and 7 minutes. The men's race was won by Thomas Frischknecht from Switzerland (3:52:01) and the women's race by Gunn-Rita Dahle in front of her Norwegian home crowd.
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The actual physical race performance was probably the best of my short MTB racing career so far. As always when training and racing, I was using my Suunto t6 wristop computer, which enabled me to pace myself a little bit on the long uphills. The Suunto t6 has given me some new insight on my previously totally unstructured training, and it's also interesting to see how hard I have been going in races! As you can see on my graph from the race, the EPOC (Excess Post exercise Oxygen Consumption) rose steadily on the uphills, and on the other hand, I was able to recover quite good on the long paved downhill after about two and a half hours of racing. I was able to keep a steady tempo and push pretty hard all the way to the finish line, which means that I didn't run out of energy.
Click here to see Eero's graph of his performance in PDF file format.
An interesting feature on the hr-alt-EPOC graph is that the EPOC follows almost exactly the altitude graph. It's not very surprising that most races are won or lost on the uphills!
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