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Road rash and mash

On 25 May, I crashed on my road bike, which came as an unpleasant surprise because I had always felt so safe riding it. After a great ride with lots of climbing we were almost at home when I must have hit a pothole on the last descent and my rear wheel went up. I flew over the handlebars and landed on my chin. People driving past immediately stopped, took care of me and called an ambulance. I’d been riding with my boyfriend Niels, so he was with me the whole time as well and didn’t only support Read more
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Training for this year’s races: Rund um Köln and Rad am Ring

On 11 June 2017, I'm going to take part in Rund um Köln, a 68-kilometre road bike race in Cologne, on 29 July 2017 I’m going to enter Rad am Ring, a 75-kilometre road bike race around the famous Nürburgring race track. If you have also signed up for one of these races or a similar event for the first time, you might be asking yourselves how to prepare for them. There certainly isn't a one-size-fits-all approach to the right preparation – which kind of preparation makes sense always depends Read more
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Cycling – an individual sport you can (best) practise as a team

Is cycling an individual or a team sport? Looking at race results, the answer to this question would be that it’s an individual sport – except for team time trials. As everyone knows, though, even the best riders don’t stand a chance without their team. A good thing about cycling as a hobby is that you can easily practise it by yourself. You don’t necessarily need to know people with the same interest or stick to training schedules, as is the case with classic team sports. Even if you Read more
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Finding the perfect saddle

A topic that can be very frustrating. During my first ride with my road bike, my butt suffered a lot. And that didn’t change during the second, third…, twentieth ride, either. In the beginning, I thought my body just needed to deal with it and I shouldn’t be such a baby. But one day, I realized I simply had the wrong saddle and started looking for the right one. The first saddle I bought because I thought it was the right one was the Selle Italia SLS Max Flow. It has a cut-out in the centre Read more
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To use clipless pedals or not to use clipless pedals? That is the question.

Clipless pedals – a topic I had thought about a lot since the idea of buying a road bike first entered my mind. The predominant thought was, “Do you really need them?” Today, my answer is a definite “yes”! Without them, you make life unnecessarily hard. I didn’t really make the choice to switch to clipless pedals myself, since my boyfriend saw mountain bike shoes in my size that were on sale, bought them and installed clipless pedals on my bike as well. At first, I didn’t really Read more
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The Ponale Road – from Lago di Garda to Lago di Ledro

My biggest mountain biking highlight was following the Ponale Road from Torbole on the shore of Lake Garda to Lake Ledro – a real classic, as I know now. During the same holiday that my boyfriend and I climbed the Passo dello Stelvio on our road bikes, we rented mountain bikes in Torbole on Lake Garda a couple of days later. Due to lack of space, we had had to decide whether we would take our road bikes or our mountain bikes with us and had opted for the road bikes because we thought we would Read more
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Passo dello Stelvio

To motivate those of you who have just started road biking or who are still thinking about whether they should start, I’d like to tell you about one of my highlights today: the Passo dello Stelvio. Last year, my boyfriend and I rented a camper van to travel through Germany, Austria and Italy. We hadn’t mapped out a detailed route, but we already knew we definitely wanted to climb the Stelvio Pass by bike before we set out. Until I went on this holiday, my only mountain experience was a hiking Read more
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Zwift – indoor training that will get you hooked

If someone had told me last year it would be hard for me not to use my turbo trainer every day, I would have thought they were crazy. I’ve had Zwift for three months now, though, and it has completely changed the way I think about indoor training. Before I had heard of Zwift, I actually wouldn’t even have thought about buying an indoor trainer, as I couldn’t imagine that I would enjoy cycling while staring at the wall. Although I knew that indoor training was helpful and made sense, especially Read more
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As a spectator at Paris-Roubaix 2017

The week before Easter, we went on our well-deserved spring holiday, which was all about cycling. It started with a visit to the museum of the Tour of Flanders (Centrum Ronde van Vlaanderen) in Oudenaarde, and during the days that followed, we spent a lot of time in the saddle as well. As in the year before, Paris-Roubaix was the uncontested highlight of our holiday, though! In 2016, it was more or less by chance that we ended up going to Carrefour de l’Arbre to watch the race – the main Read more