New Country, New language, and a very exciting season ahead.

I finally made it to Germany and had a very relaxing off season.  The few times that I was required to go for a bike ride just blew my mind.  My backyard is basically the Schönbuch Forest. Which is a large forested area similar to the Black Forest, and large enough that I can do a 4 hr ride in the forest and not have to deal with any car traffic, it’s great!  It’s mostly all double track gravel roads, so I’ve been spending a whole lot of time on my cyclocross bike.  One of the major differences in terms of training out here that is different from Edmonton is all the climbing.  Switchback gravel climbs up the ying yang!  I’ve been doing my best to learn and speak as much German as possible, but the overwhelming new words and phrases are sometimes hard to manage with.  Lucky, but not good for my German language progression, is the fact that when I try to speak German to locals, they sense the bad accent and immediately switch to English.  My incredibly talented wife is having the other issue because when she picks up languages, she picks them up with a flawless accent, so locals look at her funny when she asks them if they understand English in near perfect German.  But we have been attending German classes twice a week which is what I need and it’s a bit too slow for Emily but it was important that we would be able to do them together.  On the other hand, my role here aside from training like a professional cyclist is to do all the shopping, cooking, and cleaning around the house, or the house-husband.

A typical weekday of shopping with the new German Steed.

I’ve been getting pretty good at it and am getting really good at sourcing really cheap things that we need around the house and for my training needs.  For example, last week I found a lady on E-bay-Kleinanzeigen (which is basically the Germany Kijiji) for a weigh scale I needed who was in Stuttgart (40km’s away) so I made one of my training days go long and headed up to see if I could find her house.  Thankfully I have a GPS directions app on my phone that tells me where to go otherwise I would have definitely been lost in the forest and small towns.  It’s pretty hard to navigate around here over long distances because of all the hills and all the small towns look so similar.  Anyways, all that and the weight scale only cost me 2 Euro.  Totally worth the trip.

Sunday is a fun day to head out adventuring because it’s the one day per week that people have nothing to do.  Literally all the food shops are closed and most family’s head out doing family things, so I see a lot of smiling family’s out on the trails.  Today I figured I’d head out in the other direction on my ride and head towards the Schwabische Alb.  I found the coolest looking tower thing on the top of the nearest mountain and headed straight for it.  With a few detours, I eventually found it (along with some very rare single track)…

The riding here has been phenomenal, and I can’t wait until my rides get up to 4 hrs in length because it would open my reach to some very cool options in the distance.  For right now I’ve been keeping most of my rides close by Tübingen in order to keep the expenses to a minimum, but on the rare occasion I’ve head out on a bit of a travelling adventure.  A few weeks ago Emily and I headed out in search of snow and found Davos.  Very cool place to be skiing that’s for sure!  I can’t imagine what the downhill skiing must be like there!

Emily and I skiing (Langlaufen) in Davos-Klosters.

Speaking of that photo, I’m definitely going to have trouble regulating my chocolate intake in Germany here.  Emily took me to the Ritter Sport factory in Waldenbuch (about an hr ride away) last weekend and we rode away with probably 4 kg’s of chocolate in our bag.  In order to keep the intake to a minimum, we have implemented a 4 square per day rule for me and Emily hid the chocolate somewhere in the apartment so I can’t find it and randomly chow down on a whole bar… or two…

In team news, I have been able to hook up with a local MTB team for the summer so I’ll be doing a mix of marathon races with some Olympic races thrown in for good measure as I try to do my best job at transitioning from roadie-CXer to MTB-CXer.  Check out the website!  http://www.haico-racing.de/  Haider’s shop is very cool.  I have a feeling I’ll enjoy this summer!

 

School of Cross European Adventure p/b FSA

As I sit here on the cramped plane ride over the Atlantic Ocean, headed into a sea of unknowns, I can’t help but think of all the various things that I have ability to do without having to head to work for 8 hrs a day 5 days a week. My plan: To become a professional Cyclist, or more specifically, a pro cyclocrosser.

You see, this is the beginning of my 2 year European journey. A journey that 3 years ago I never expected would even be a possibility and I owe all of it to one cold day in Edmonton 2.5 years ago at the Strathcona Wilderness Park (a popular park outside Edmonton, AB, Canada where cross country skiers enjoy the freshly groomed daily trails and cyclists train in the ‘off-season’. This is where I met my wife, Emily Lynes. She was in Edmonton completing her PHD at the University of Alberta, an avid cross country skier from Ottawa, was out skiing with her uncle. I had seen her out before, but never been introduced. Little did I know that our paths had crossed many times before at various sporting events, and bike races. She asked me out skiing on facebook, as she didn’t have a car and needed someone to drive her, and just over 2 years later, I asked her to marry me.

Where to go from here?

What would be the most mutually beneficial place to move for a young professional couple looking to gain experience in their respective careers; Myself splitting my time between my engineering career in the oil and gas industry as a piping designer, and the other half and main focus to an ever growing semi-pro cycling career and Emily researching in Cell Biology and wanting to specialize into the Neurology field?

Europe! Where else?

There are many reasons why we settled on Europe:

* Great opportunity for Emily to find a well paying Post-Doctoral job.

* Cost of living relative to income is much more manageable on one income.

* Give us one last Europe trip before we settle down and start a family.

* Would allow me to, for the first time in my cycling career, focus my attention to cycling as a profession without the need for a full time job to keep afloat and see where it can take me.

The later point being what I was most excited about. After we decided this, all other options were off the table, and the hunt for a job began. Took a while, but Emily found a post-doc in Tuebingen, Germany at the Centre for Neurodegenerative Diseases. Then, the real planning started.

Where are we going to live, how do we get visas, what paperwork do we need, how do I learn German, etc…

Before this, the only second language I had any encounter with was French. Growing up in Canada, it’s mandatory to take French as a second language for a certain portion of your grade schooling. It was ok with teaching me some of the words, grammar, got me familiar with understanding the occasional sentence, but I had no clue how to actually converse with someone. After a gracious package came from a new friend in a similar situation with the move to Germany, I had the Pimsleur method of teaching ‘books on tape’ and off I went trying to learn everything I could. Unfortunately, I was still working, racing, and training at the time so the first lesson sunk in and the rest were postponed until a later date. I’m beginning to find that taking these lessons are good, but the easiest way to learn the language (from what I’ve been told anyways), is being in the country struggling through the words with a native speaker correcting you along the way. And from what I hear, the Germans will always correct you.

Now, to get back on track with the cycling part:

I am a cyclocrosser from Canada. I started racing in 2006 after I graduated from college and had my first summer off of full time Army work since I graduated High School. I got into the sport late as I was 21 at the time and with my sporting experience in downhill skiing, cycling as a hobby, and other various sports, I took to it quite quickly. My first race was in May on the road bike, and by the fall I had discovered cyclocross. Using old worn out parts from my road bike and a new cross frame, I was ready to race my first National Championships where I came 2nd as an Espoir (U-23) and made the selection to go to Worlds. At worlds I had my worst race ever, but from then on I was hooked. I proceeded to make the National Team again in my first year as an Elite and the following year after that. Given the state of cyclocross in Canada and with it not being an Olympic event, I had to pay for everything myself, and thankfully I had enough income to do so with my engineering job. Although I had to take some time off during the global recession in 2008/2009, I eventually returned after focusing on the road season with Team H&R BLOCK for a couple years in the lead up to the World Championships in Louisville, KY only to dislocate my shoulder in a training crash while in Belgium.

Finally I can Bunny Hop Barriers! Only took me the entire 2010 season!

Now I’m headed across the pond again to spend the winter cyclocross season in Belgium with the eventual move to Germany happening after the World Championships in Hoogerheide, NL in February.

* What will I do in Germany? Ride my bike and keep house for Emily.

* Who will I ride for in Germany? I don’t know yet, I think that might end up sorting itself out.

* What will I do in the summer time when I’m not racing cyclocross? I may race MTB’s, road, travel a bit, whatever will keep me fit and allow me to enjoy the culture and surroundings.

* What are my goals while I’m there?

o Learn German

o Experience the German/European culture

o Get to a point where I no longer have to spend money to race my bike (ie: become a professional cyclist)

With my latest results at the National Championships (2nd only to Geoff Kabush), I think I’m headed in the right direction…

Canadian National Cyclocross Championships 2013

Next up: The Belgian Holy week of cyclocross starting with GP De Ster in St. Niklaas