Rain in Morzine. Again.

So after a pretty disappointing stay in Les Deux Alpes, we headed to Morzine. Probably one of my favorite places to ride. When living in Portes Du Soleil you have access to so many different parks, Morzine, Les  Gets, Avoriaz, Châtel, Champery and a couple of others.
We were in Morzine just to chill and have fun on our bikes.

We lived in a awesome apartment just in the middle of Morzine. Morzine do not only have some pretty fun official trails, but the pirate trails is probably the ones most people come for. Super fun, steep and rooty.

I have been to Morzine two times before and both times it has rained a lot. Of course this year was no exception. Luckily I had my IXS full rain suit a.k.a The Steeze Killer to keep me nice an dry.
I switched to flat pedal on this special occasion and it was actually really fun to ride downhill with some flats again. And even though the Steeze Killer held me pretty dry, the shoes were soaked within two runs. This needed some alternative methods to get dry shoes on in the morning. Luckily the hair blower did a great job for us.

I have always loved riding in the rain. Not just a little rain but a lot. So the tracks get really slippery and the mud packs and maybe there is a little river down the track. At first it is just really awkward and then after that phase you get a little more loosened up and then the fun begins. You get a bit more loose on the bike. The bike goes one direction and you the other, but no panic, the bike comes in again and you continue riding.






On the regular Morzine side (Le Pleney) There is a lot of pirate trails parallel to the regular tracks. You kind of switch between pirate and regular all the way down. It is really fun and there is so many different sections you can link together to make a full run down.

We stayed an rode in Morzine and Super Morzine most of the time. One day we went to Chatel but the trails were even slower over there than in Morzine, so we quickly found our way back to Morzine.

Most of the days we only rode about three hours because of the weather, so we had a lot on down time in the apartment. The time went with drinking beer and surfing the internet.

On the last day the weather was really good. 25 degrees and full sun. This made the tracks really bad. Big holes and no speed was the key word on our last day in Morzine.

After a great week in Morzine with bit of riding we headed to Spicak for the IXS European cup.

Cheers,
Frederik Leth

Heading to Les Deux Alpes

So, after our stay in Val Di Sole, we headed to Les Deux Alpes for Crankworx Europe.
I have been to Les2Alpes before and knew that it was not really my favorite place. I kind of don't love all the high way tracks with a lot of burms. Maybe it's because I'm a bit afraid to slip in the burm and just fall down a cliff behind it. But even though it didn't suit me well, we had a lot of fun there.

We arrived at Les2Alpes on Tuesday, way before the race. Les2Alpes is a pretty cool city. It's not very big, and we were located right in the middle, just beside the slopestyle course.

We rode both Wednesday and Thursday on the regular tracks. It turned out to be really fun. They had built some new stuff, which was pretty fun. On the Diable trail, they had built some fun jumps, and in the small wood section there was a couple of good ones in a row. They were quite small so you had to brake into them, but they were fun anyway.


Coming into Les2Alpes my main focus was of course the downhill race, but not a race I would consider myself at my fullest. Therefore I had also planned to ride the Pumptrack competition, a thing I really looked forward to. I have won a couple of Pumptrack competitions at home, so I knew that I would have a fair chance of qualifying in, and be one of the 16 best.

On friday there was supposed to be both trackwalk, training, and Pumptrack. We came to the lift early to get the most out of it. Sad news, "closed for the day". The whole practice was cancelled because of strong wind at the top. I there fore looked forward to Pumptrack in the evening after a day of doing nothing. The evening came, and so did the rain. After walking a bit around asking people out, I found out that Pumptrack was postponed to Saturday.

When I woke up on Saturday I felt really bad and decided to wait a couple of hours before going to practice. Unfortunately it only got worse and I missed both the race and Pumptrack challenge. Quite a bummer, but what can you do.
On Monday the lifts to the big mountain was closed again and we decide to chill, wash some clothes and go to the driving range to play a bit of Golf.

Tuesday morning we drove to Morzine, after a rather disappointing stay in Les Deux Alpes.

Bike Life, catching up

So it's been a while since I've written. But I'm trying to get started again.
So this season started with the Dirmasters race in Winterberg. Not a great succes as I crashed to times in my racerun.
Next race was the World Cup in Leogang. I can't believe that I got to race a World Cup soo soon. Well or at least train for it. Just a couple of hours before my qualification run I saw that one of the bearings in the rocker link was pretty much gone. In the trying to get the bearings out the rocker link broke and put me out for the qualifying. Pretty sad, but it was an awesome experience to be at the World Cup.

When I came home from Leogang I had a busy couple of days. I had to get a new frame for our one month long roadtrip that was coming up in just 9 days. Also at had to finish my last two exams before being done with the gymnasium.

Luckily it all fell into place, I got my frame (Transition TR450) just the day before we took of and finished my exams with okay grades.

Then it became Wednesday and Sebastian Jensen, Jeppe Bob and Myself were on out way for our first European Cup of the year, Val Di Sole.
The track was perfect, just my kind of track. A really loamy track in the forest, can it be any better?
I was pretty exited to try out the new bike, and to use Val Di Sole as a test track for a brand new bike, seemed like a god way to start. And it Was. I was really impressed by the bike. It is so easy to maneuver and it's a awesome jump bike as well.
I will come as no surprise when I say that the Val Di Sole track is rough. It's 4-5 minutes of pure downhill, no pedally bits to get a break on at all.

I took a couple of big crashes in practice and in my seeding run, but I was so ready for the finals anyway.

On finals day it began to rain a bit, which suited me pretty well,  I love riding in the rain.

I found out pretty fast on my finals run that it was really slippery. I made a couple of big mistakes at the first section in the woods, but I thought that if I could just get down without any crashes it might be good anyway. But the did not happen. I took two crashes, one of the was pretty big and resulted in a concussion.
I ended up in 139th. Not at all what I was looking for, but with two crashes, a handfull of mistakes and a concussion, I might not have been that bad. But anyway it was a shame, because I really liked the track.

We stayed in Val Di Sole until Tuesday, so I spend the Monday filming a bit with Jeppe and Sebastian. Here is the result:



We then headed to Crankworkx Europe in Les 2 Alpes. Update will come soon.