flachlandskater.de

Rainy race in Stade: As mentioned, last Saturday we had another stage of the Northern league in a small town called Stade. 10km - and as the forecast threatened, it rained all afternoon. Well once you are wet it is not much of a problem anymore, so I still did enjoy the race. Happy with my performance, except the start (general problem), chose the wrong side and then got caught between people. But after that caught back up several skaters, had a nice escape, finally got third in the group's sprint, 33rd overall. Here's a picture of me during my breakaway...

In the northern league, our team is now 6th out of 13 teams. This will probably also be our final position, since there's only one stage left.

Mirror bus returns to Hamburg: Yesterday we one again hosted a workshop with Sebastian Baumgartner of Experts in Speed, where he used his famous mirror bus to help people improve on their skating. It was a nice and long session, finally we got kicked off the track by security (joke, he was a very nice guy!). Thanks to all who participated and helped during this day, great one!

RollerEnLigne interview: The french site has posted an interview about our recent Le Mans experience, feel free to check it out.

Next up on the calendar is our annual trip to London, to take part in the marathon and enjoy the beautiful city. Next update afterwards.

Today I experienced my so far "shortest" track training session ever in Halstenbek... put my skates on, did 5 warmup laps, then two laps of the first push drill, then ran off for shelter to escape a heavy rain shower...

Anyway - so tonight I had some time left to play around with Le Mans lap data. Here is a chart that shows the lap advantage / disadvantage for the top 10 duos, compared to a fictitious "reference team" doing 9:23 per lap (which will give the same laps as the winners did).

This chart gives some interesting insights - it seems that some of the top 10 duos stopped skating for longer times during the 24 hours, while others clearly planned their strategy well and skated very constant lap times... I might look into this further some time

Finally, an update on fitness - I'm slowly improving again, this week's interval training felt OK for the first time since Le Mans. I'm racing a 10k this weekend, we'll see how that goes.