First race, first win - start of the season went great

To start the season with no big team behind me was far from easy. What kept me going over many parts of the preparation was the preparation itself, that was going very well and the perspective to be fit on a starting line. So, I knew I was in good shape and should be able to fight for a good position in the first races. But taking the win in an international race is always something special and something you have to work for really hard through the whole competition. In the end it often is about who really wants it the most, who is digging the deepest, who is willing to take the risks.

I'm really happy that I was able to pull of this first victory with all the things going on around my preparation and it's helping me a lot already to find new partners and keep on pushing for the World Series to start in May.

The second race of this block in Chelva, I started really motivated - maybe to motivated. But you never know how tactical a race really develops and this one developed really much more tactical than I expected, probably due to the heavy wind. So unfortunately, I wasted a lot of energy in the fight for good positions in the first half of the race. With all this power peaks, I found myself unable to keep up with the leading group after 4 laps and had to recover a bit. In the end, I won the fight of the chasing group for P12. Which is still a respectable result in this world class field on a bike that has seen over 10.000 km.

At the moment, I am spending another training week with German Cycling in Girona, before I will be heading home on Monday after 5 weeks of training and racing in Spain. There, I will continue my preparation for the World Series. The next races will be the four XCO races of the Serbia Epic Andrevlje in Novi Sad from the 19th to the 22nd of February.

The current UCI world ranking lists me at P59 with 667 points. So the goal of the next weeks is to make sure that I will be racing short track at the first round of the Whoop UCI Mountain Bike World Series in South Korea on the 1st of May.

A big thanks go to my very supportive family, German Cycling and the partners I already have for this season: Julbo, Zefal, Schwalbe, Galfer & Boa Fit Systems.