China, Asia, Climbing and Fixed Gear Bikes

My cycling friends Shannon and Ricky decided to go to the indoor bike roller race with me. We were not so happy about the 8:30am registration and start but last night we said let us do it. When I looked out of the window this morning I was astonished to see it had snowed. I had not expected that.

There were still quite some people on their bikes cycling through the city.

But it is amazing to see how fast the nice white snow turns black due to the Beijing dust.

Whenever there was still some white snow left we cycled on it as the black slush was splashing up our butt and backs.

My bike got covered with black slush and covered with snow.

My messenger bag got slashed by the Beijing street dirt.

When we arrived at the BJ Golden bike shop there were only 3 cyclists: Shannon, Ricky and me. And the guy with the software for controlling the bike trainer had not arrived yet. The Shimano guys started setting up the indoor bike race system. The competition was on an ELITE RealAXIOM roller with a virtual route of 2 km with an uphill slope.

Within the next few hours a few other cyclists showed up. Most of them were China cycling champions and China ex-National Team members. So we did the competition. One person at a time on the bike that was mounted on the bike roller that was connected to a computer running a virtual bike race course. The computer would adjust the resistance of the bike roller to simulate the steepness of the uphill. You could watch the 2km route on the computer as well as your current time and speed and how much distance was still left. Someone had to hold the bike handlebars to avoid too much rocking.

That was the most exhausting thing I have ever done. After that 2 minute uphill sprint at an average speed of 54.1km/hour my throat, airway and top part of my lungs were burning! And my legs had no more strength left. I could hardly stand. And the burning in my throat and airway as well as a resulting cough stayed till later in the afternoon. Wow I wish I could do a 2:19 minute long uphill sprint at that speed in a real bicycle race…

Taking not only the time but also the average power into account it seems I finished 4th. What a surprise!

I uploaded many more pictures of this event to a new webalbum. After the race the BJ Golden shop owner Yang Yang invited us for a lunch. We went to a nearby hot pot restaurant. We had delicious food and cool Yang Yang was happy to drink many bottles of beer with Shannon and Ricky.

It was a great Saturday activity and I finally arrived home at 5pm still feeling the effects of the short but extremely intense race

This entry was posted on Samstag, Januar 2nd, 2010 at 19:02 and is filed under Beijing, Cycling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.