# Salzkammergut trophy



## Damitletsride! (Feb 4, 2004)

Anyone here ridden it?? All i know about it is that it's 209km and has about 7000m of climbing, and that Tinker Juarez said it's one of the toughest races he's ever done. Can anyone else put it into words? I'm thinking of doing it this summer, it looks like quite a nice challenge. I also heard that theres about a 50% dropout rate, don't know how true this is though.
I've seen the profile for the 209km on the website and i get fired up looking at it, maybe i'm biting off more than i can chew though. How hard is this course does anyone know?


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## eric (Jan 22, 2004)

This is probably a way too late reply, but I've spent quite some time off MTBr (and now some time on as I'm stuck home with pneumonia ;-))

I've done the 200 lap a couple of times, finishing only once. The first time our was a pretty pathetic attempt: it was my second endurance race... ever. The second time around I rode with my ex - she finished just within the time limit with me dangling behind for moral support.

By far the most fun time I had was riding in '07. That time around it was a single lap event. The view over the Dachstein were breathtaking. Most of the climbing is on fire roads, but in some spots the gravel is closer to loose rock, and the climbing is in 22:32 for close half an hour at a time.

There are three long descents which are good fun: one high speed run over rocks and gravel along a river, a steep, twisty singletrack stretch (some corners are really tight) on a ridge, and another high-speed run that ends with about 3 miles of sharp rocks and gravel on a nasty off-camber hillside. The rest of the descents are relatively straight-forward fire-roads and such.

The all time killer (IMHO) has to be the climb from Hallstat to the Gosausee. It's a couple of miles on tarmac in the granny, then at least as far on fireroads of the same caliber. It's the last climb of the day as well.

Providing you're in reasonable racing shape (and not sick or injured like I was 2 years ago) it's a challenge, but a realistic and certainly fun one. Austrians are friendly people and great supporters as well. The only issue is the weather. A couple of buddies raced the Salzkammergut a few years ago and the weather was awful: it was pouring rain the whole day, and the summit temperatures were around 6 C.


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