Wendelsteinrundfahrt -

On saturday, I rode the Wendelsteinrundfahrt. It's a cycling event with routes of different lengths going through southern bavaria (and shortly through austria).

I orginally registered for the second-longest route (165 km / 102 mi) but had so much fun cycling that I decided to tackle the "marathon"-route (205 km / 127 mi) when the routes diverged. The routes are set up so that they share parts of their distance and then start to split up at certain lengths.

The event is organized very well, with multiple feeding stations throughout the routes. They have lots of stuff to choose from: warm meals like scrambled eggs or "Kässpatzen", cereal bars, fruit, sandwiches and also various beverages for refilling your bottles.

This was my first organized cycling event, so I was a bit surprised about the size of the crowd gathering at the start at such an early hour. They opened the route at 7:00 am and we arrived a bit before that, having gotten up at 5 o'clock and driven there from munich. After getting ourselves ready the first thing to do was picking up the start numbers. There were already very long lines and we had to wait quite a bit. Which had the nice side effect of us meeting some colleagues that we then grouped up with.

The first 120 km were pretty busy. Lots of slipstream riding behind large groups which practically allows you to kind of roll along at 40 km/h (25 mph) without much effort. It also included the biggest kind-of-continuous climb with 630 meters (2000 feet) of vertical ascent for a length of 15 km (9 mi).

After that the route got progressively more quiet with the two of us being able to enjoy large parts of it by ourselves during the last leg of the marathon-tour.

The route is very nice and rewards you with beautiful pre-alpine views and exhilarating descents. The vast majority of it is on bike lanes or streets
with not a lot of cars driving around. They even put someone next to a larger street that we had to cross who regulated the traffic for us.

I'll definitely attend again next year if at all possible.