Kammgarn Kriterium: Course, Route Profile & Map

Course & Elevation

The race runs on the perimeter road of the works site, a closed rectangle of roughly 650 metres wrapping the old spinning hall on all four sides. Start and finish sit at its north-west corner by the Spinnereistraße entrance. The adult classes ride 30 laps, a little over 19 kilometres.

Elevation is irrelevant here. The circuit stays between 400 and 402 metres, and the 66 metres the profile reports across the full distance amount to a barely perceptible two metres per lap. What shapes the race are the corners: roughly every 160 metres you have to brake, hit the line and accelerate again, around 120 times over the race.

Scoring is laps gained first, total points second. Points are awarded on laps 5, 10, 15, 20 and 25 on a seven, five, three, two, one scale, explicitly not doubled on the last lap. That pulls the decision away from the finishing straight and spreads it across the whole race: let the intermediate sprints go and you can still lose while crossing the line first. The site itself is now half industrial estate, half arts venue, and the race opens the three-part series of RV DJ's Bikeshop Simplon Hard on the Saturday morning.

Pacing Strategy

For the adult classes, 30 laps take around 25 to 30 minutes. Average power says little about it; the pattern says everything. On a flat circuit you barely pedal where it rolls and go hard where you come off a corner. Expect roughly 120 accelerations, each short and well above threshold.

The race is decided at the five points laps, not in the finishing straight. Because the last lap pays no double points, it can be won on the early sprints without contesting the finish at all. Decide before the start whether you are riding for points or for a lap, and place yourself in the bunch accordingly: going into a points lap you belong in the first five wheels, not in the back third.

That position is also the most common trap on a circuit this short. At the back you brake harder into every corner and accelerate harder out of it than the riders at the front, and over 30 laps that surcharge adds up to a load nobody sustains. It costs fewer matches to stay near the front than to get back there.

Training plan for Kammgarn Kriterium: 12-week build

Expect a race of about 25 to 30 minutes. The demand is emphatically intervallic: not a steady threshold effort but a constant alternation between rolling and short, hard accelerations. The profile lists 18 percent of the course as rising, but those are centimetres, not ramps. What tires you here are the corners.

The race turns on points laps 5, 10, 15, 20 and 25, and above all on the laps just before them, where the fight for position happens. Train repeated sprints from a moderate rolling speed with incomplete recovery, say ten to 15 efforts of ten to 20 seconds with one to two minutes between them, and put some of them at the end of a long ride so you can still produce them on tired legs.

The other half of the preparation is bike handling. A 650-metre circuit with four corners demands a consistent line, fixed braking points and the ability to sit calmly in a tight bunch. Find an empty car park or industrial estate and ride figure-of-eights and tight laps until braking and accelerating out become automatic. On this course, handling saves more energy than any extra watts.

Conditions in early September are kind: the start is at ten in the morning, before the day's heat builds, and the works site is far more sheltered than the open delta plain of the time trial course a few kilometres to the west. Anyone riding the full series should plan for the time trial that same evening and the hill climb on the Sunday.