A two day road ride to Innsbruck to watch the road cycling world championships

Having visited the cyclocross world champs a few years ago I pitched the idea to Torben that we should have a look at the road cycling world championship in Innsbruck in October 2018. And being who we are we decided to ride there on our bikes from Munich. Two bike nerds riding to look at 200 bike nerds riding...

The direct way to Innsbruck from Munich by bike is roughly 150km. However why take the shortest route if there are mountain passes to cross if you just go a bit further? Our planned route would take us to from the center of Munich to the foot of the Alps, over the Hahntennjoch (1.800m n.n.), to Imst and on the next day over the Kühtai (2.020m n.n.) down to Innsbruck to watch the final of the Mens road race. The emphasis here is on the word “planned”...

100km into the ride on the first day we had to deal with a broken derailleur cable - a 5 minute job under normal circumstances - however as we learned internally routed cables look cool and are aero but almost impossible to fix on the road. After much fiddling we re-routed and rode the 15km to Garmisch-Partenkirchen (Torben “Rigoberto for a day” riding a solid 53/11 due to the broken cable).

The one open bike repair shop in town did not want to help at first - it being Saturday afternoon. However one of the guys mercifully told us to come back in half an hour after his boss was gone. So we grabbed something to eat and where almost set on the trip being over - but the dude in the shop actually kept his promise and fixed the bike.

As the afternoon was progressing and we had to get to Imst that evening we took the way over the Fernpass and reached Imst shortly before dusk. We had dinner in a local Gasthaus and set off to ride the 4km to our hotel - which was in Hochimst. “Hoch” is high in German and the last 2km climbed almost 250m (e.g. 13% average) - what a fitting end for this eventful day.

The second  day to started with a cold decent and a super nice small road down the Ötz-Valley. We left the valley to ride up the Kühtai taking the northern approach over the Sattler pass. Austrians are quite “direct” in building their mountain roads and this one climbs exactly 1.000m in 9.2km. After a short 2km descent to Ochsengarten (Public service announcement: The horses here look like the want to get petted but the bite you and your bike!!!). From there we took on the final 7km up to the Kühtai pass itself. Off the top of Kühtai it was be almost all the way downhill to Innsbruck and the weather was looking better and better.

The Kühtai descent is famous for being ridiculously fast as it goes straight most of the time and is quite steep. There are reports of people reaching up to 120km/h on skinny road bike tyres here. We topped out at around 80km/h that day - more than enough on a loaded bike if you ask me.

Arriving in Innsbruck we went right to the city center and to the course that looped in and around in the city and started to nerd out on the racing. The streets were filled with people from all over the world and the overall vibe was really great. The race in the end was won by Alejandro Valverde, a 38 year of Spaniard (giving Torben more than 10 years to get become world champ).

After the race ended we jumped between the barriers to ride the final 10km of the race course. This part went up the Höll climb with stretches of 28% incline. So we slugged up there with cheers from fans coming down the road urging us on. Unfortunately the final 500m to the finish line were closed of but we did have our nerdy fun!

The 2020 road worlds will be in Switzerland and 2021 will be in Flanders - I can smell a repeat of the fun little trip coming up.

Adventurers: Torben and Bengt