This little pearl comes from the daily newspaper for the Munich Six-Day, where we’ve just finished our first day of racing. Things were mediocre for us on the first night. The track is a huge improvement over Dortmund, though it’s a touch slippery because the entire surface is painted. I’m not sure what they have against just leaving the wood exposed, except perhaps to try to match it to the rest of Munich which has a very apocalyptic, industrial feel to it. Anyway, due to circumstances outside of our control we weren’t able to ride for two days going into the race so we both felt like crap. Brian was bonking because we thought we’d be fed dinner before the race, but it turned out to be after so he was racing on a seven-hour fast. I store enough food from breakfast in my cheeks to make it through, but I felt like someone was choking me the whole race since it was the first time I used my lungs in a few days. The field here is much more level though, and last night was still an improvement for us in our riding partnership, so hopefully we’ll pull it together and get a result one night.
Our accommodations are a bit of a step down from the Hilton from last week, but they’re still pretty cool. We’re staying north of town in a little place called Oberschleißheim, which at first sounded like a cartoon caricature of German name, but in fact turns out to be a real place. The “facility” is a dorm built next to a 2km man-made lake that was used for the crew events at the 1972 Olympics, so the rooms are hotel-sized but have 4-6 beds each. We were a bit worried they’d all be occupied at first, but it’s just one team to a room so there’s plenty of space. Our biggest complication is that there is one bathroom on the floor for each sex, and we were all swinging both ways until an unfortunate incident in the shower when one rider discovered that someone brought his mother along. So now one end of the hallway smells like an open sewer and those of us on the other end of the long, un-lit, horror-movie hallway pee out of our second story windows. I should perhaps note that I don’t actually have any evidence that anyone other than me has peed out the window, but it’s just so much fun and so logical that I can only imagine everyone else is doing it.
Taking a step back, we left Dortmund on Wednesday morning for the six hour drive to Munich. It was a little sad to leave our new buddies in Dortmund, not like sappy-sad but more just that we had a lot of fun and sitting in the back of a cargo van for a few hours isn’t. That said, one perk of our few days of debauchery is I slept the entire way on an ill-fashioned bed of wheel bags and bike cases. Then, in perhaps the most disorienting three minutes of my life, I awoke inside the Munich Velodrome, about 30ft underground, to bright blue lights, industrial/apocalyptic music playing in the giant hall, and some guy riding a 85cc dirtbike inside a giant steel freedom ball. Why can’t bike racing be like this at home?
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