Xterra Germany – Confused and Crashed

Richard Ussher (Team Subway) / 15.08.2012

It’s hard to believe how quickly our time in Europe is passing this year, Xterra Germany marked just 2 weeks left of our 7 weeks in Europe which has provided both Elina and I with a welcome respite from the NZ winter and some great training.

We had a great week in Vence in France on the bikes where we clocked up some good miles in what effectively seems like a giant bike park, so many climbs and routes where you barely see a car, it is incredible.

The training for me has all been about preparing for the Xterra World Champs in Maui in October, hence a lot of swimming to improve my weakest discipline and at this stage mainly a lot of base work on the running and biking to prepare for the hard work in the next two months.

Xterra Germany was the only race in the schedule for Europe this year and more than a result orientated trip it was also about trying to gauge where I was at compared to the top Europeans. I was hopeful that despite being a bit tired I’d still be somewhere close to in the mix.

Germany is an interesting place to race, the German tri union (DTU) has it’s own set of rules and they differ from many other places. What makes it more interesting is the translations to English – there were multiple occasions where one minute one thing was being said and the next time it was announced it appeared t be the opposite.  In any case it meant just having to take a deep breath and roll with it.

Two such rules set the tone for a confusing day. There was the normal discussion about whether it would be a wetsuit swim or a non wetsuit swim, the water was pretty warm so it was a fair assumption that it would be non, what I didn’t realize was the DTU doesn’t allow even textile swim skins so unless you have a fancy ITU style suit you are at a big disadvantage.

I decided the only option would be to wear my Blue Seventy swim skin as my race suit, which wasn’t a big deal until I was informed by an official that yes I could use my swim skin over my normal tri gear and take it off after the swim – sweet, no issues then.

Until I was on the start line and a different official came up and said that no the rule had been changed back to the original and now no changing was allowed.

A bit of public nudity followed on the start line as I quickly changed out of my tri gear and into only my swim skin – I was just waiting for penalty for that!

The other thing that didn’t set my day up so well was the ruling on the swimming before the start, the translation seemed to be saying you couldn’t enter the water before 20 minutes prior to the race but I thought maybe it was meant to be you couldn’t swim within the 20 minutes before the race. So I checked and was told yes you can only swim in the 20 minutes prior to the start, cool.