This weekend was the first round of the Bundesliga in Paderborn Germany.  I decided last year that I’d like to compete in the Bundesliga after 6 years of competing in mostly the same races.  I’m really pleased I did because I really enjoyed this weekend and it was awesome to experience new races.

Rainer & Sabine picked me up from Cologne airport and after a short but delicious lunch as their house we drove down to meet the team (Maik Petzold, Steffen Justus, Johnny Zipf and Marek Jaskolka) We had a awesome dinner that evening at the buffet where i got my first taste of German food! My conclusion was that it was all gorgeous food but it comes at a price because it wasn’t that healthy! You can’t have it all

Fortunately for us we had a big weekend of racing ahead of us to burn off the calories!  Saturday was a super short, sprint style of racing…basically heats!  I was in the 4th wave and hammered the swim (as much as i could)got onto the bike and put down as much power as possible for 8mins and ran out my skin…totalling 20 minutes of pain!  I tell you my lungs never burnt so much!  I had a good race and ranked 3rd over all.

The significance of the Saturday race is that for Sundays race your start position is determined by your qualifying time from Saturday so I was off in 3rd place behind Sebastian Rank and Johnny Zipf with lots of other good athletes behind me!

All the main contenders were within 30 seconds of each other so we started the swim and basically all caught each other and went onto the bike in a group of 7 athletes.  I felt good on the bike and bided my time till the beginning of the last lap where I attacked into a technical section taking just Steffen Justus with me.  We rode hard for the last lap and I was happy to take a lead of 15 seconds into the last lap with me!

Steffen and I ran together for the first lap but unfortunately I had to let him go as the big effort effort on the bike plus a bit of fatigue carried over made me tie up.  I was really happy to just lose one position though to Johnny Zipf who was running really well and crossed the line in 3rd place with a cartwheel to keep the kids happy

My team EJOT Buschutten won so we were really happy as a team to take out a win in the first race.

it’s all about Madrid now and I hope the race didn’t take too much energy from me because it’s going to be really hard there!  I’ve done everything I could to recover including warm down, Multipower Protein Bar, Bratwurst, compression socks, Compex and massage so hopefully it’s enough to regenerate:)

Its gotta be the hardest Olympic Team to qualify for, as well as Jan Frodeno and Daniel Unger there are these hitters as well, a different german wins every week!

Steffen Justus, Maik Petzold, Sebastian Rank, Johnny Zipf, Sebastian Dehmer, Thomas Springer, Christian Prochnow, Franz Loschke…

See the German triathletes video at triathlon.org.