Kitzbuhel – Day 4

Day 4 of my trip to Kitzbuhel was here and with my race over and my ascent of the Kitzbuheler Horn complete, it was time to relax some more and support Helen and Andrea in their races. I started the day nice and early with a few geocaches in the town of Kitzbuhel before having a huge breakfast at the hotel.

Next I took a walk up to Lake Schwarzsee to watch the racing and support the girls. It was another glorious day and getting quite warm already. As per usual the views were astounding.

Schwarzsee View

Andrea and Helen had good races, with Helen coming 10th in her age-group and 5th Brit, and Andrea coming 18th and 9th Brit. Both seemed happy with these results. I had half expected Helen to get a medal, but as with my race, the quality of the competition here was extremely high. This made me feel a little better about my results too as I hadn’t been outclassed by Helen and we had both represented Team GB well. It’s actually good to see such a strong field of competitors and to know that you really are racing against the best in Europe. Team GB may have been the biggest team here still, but others European countries were all well-represented too which is great to see.

After the races I headed back into town and went for a stroll along the river, before having a huge dinner at the hotel. Today’s dinner was an Italian Buffet, so I had no choice really except to try everything on offer!

We were then supposed to go to the closing ceremony which was being held on top of the Hahnenkaam and should have included free food and drinks. We arrived at the cable car fashionably late as it the way with such things, only to be told that it was full and we couldn’t go up. This didn’t seem fair as we had tickets and surely they had only given out tickets for the number of people they could accommodate. Clearly this wasn’t the case. Eventually we persuaded them to let us go up on the cable car to admire the views, but our drinks and meal vouchers were taken away.

The cable car trip and views from the top were good, but it’s a shame we couldn’t eat, drinka nd make merry up there. Frank and Andrea had yet to eat either, so after a few photos we headed back down and off to a restaurant where we sat outside whilst Frank and Andrea had a pizza. We then headed off to another bar in search of Kaisserschmarren, but were too late for that so I had an Apple Strudel instead… As if I needed more food after my huge dinner!

Tags: KitzbuhelTriathlon