Real mountain bike pros hardly ever complain about weather conditions. Therefore Søren Nissen, 2015 Danish national champion, stayed motivated when it was pouring heavily for two days before UCI marathon of La Forestiere in France.

“This race was one of my big goals from the beginning of the year on”, says Nissen who did not want to finish somewhere in midfield despite – or rather: because of – the strong line-up of competitors including former European champions and members of World Tour teams.

The cold as executioner
This is why he kept going in spite of only nine degrees Celsius and continuing rain that poured down when riders gathered at the starting line of the UCI XCM World Series race covering 100 kilometers and 2,900 vertical meters. He managed to keep up with the high pace of a group of 20 that broke away from the field on the first kilometers, but was further reduced when halfway through the race the course led riders up to 1,500 meters of height.

“Some riders called it quits because of the very low temperatures and climbed into their team cars”, says Nissen who also had a hard time on the saddle, but at the same time realized that this was his chance to get further to the head of the field.

Attack on second half
30 kilometers before the finish line, on a muddy ascent, he caught two riders of team Trek-Selle San Marco that has been dominating the season so far and continued the race on third place on STEVENS Sonora SL. He also managed to catch and overtake Russian national champion Dimitry Medvedev who had been riding on second place up to then. “With ten kilometers to go, the leader was 2:30 minutes ahead of me.

I thought that I could catch him. But the course was extremely muddy because of the weather and I had to push my bike a lot which made it impossible to win time on him”, Nissen recounts who is, however, extremely happy with his runner-up place behind Italian Damiano Ferraro: “This is a great result in a field as strong as this.”