To clarify: this happened within a week after my failed attempt to ride up the Fichtelberg with Max.
The Plan was to take a full day and ride up the Brocken which is the highest mountain in the north-east of Germany. Since the north is very flat, we would have needed to ride about 350km that day going to the mountain and back home to Leipzig.
We started early and the weather was quite okay. A little windy, a little cloudy, a little bit of sun but not too much of everything. More or less good conditions for such a long day. When I came to the meeting spot where Ben was already waiting (as always I was some minutes late and Ben was there 10min before the time) I was quite confused about that big and fully loaded backpack Ben was carrying. He was a little "over-equipped" with two pumps, multiple tools and a gigantic bento-box for lunch.
Anyways we started going and the first sixty or seventy kilometers went quite good but then the bad luck started striking. Ben's bike was a used one he just recently bought and didn't properly check or even clean before starting to ride it. So fixing the first puncture already took way too long, cleaning jokey-wheels from dirt and grease on that occasion. The tubeless-ready tires didn't want to slip into position due to the fucked up rim-tape. A couple kilometers later the next puncture. The rim-tape was basically unusable at this point which was the reason for the second puncture.
After temporarily fixing all the problems on Ben's bike and dropping him off at the nearest train-station (because it wasn't really smart to keep riding with a bike in that condition) I kept going back direction Leipzig. Some time later my stomach started hurting really bad for no reason. I couldn't really tell what the problem was but in within the last twenty kilometers I spend more time in the bushes then actually riding my bike. Coming home pretty late for the 240km I did that day everything just felt really crappy. My body felt shit, my bike didn't work properly (still the problem with the broken chain), I got the feeling that every time I try to do cool stuff I get stopped by misfortune.
Looking at it from todays point of view, I probably had worse days on my bike. Nothing super bad happened and I might seem a little bit over dramatic in the video. But sometimes it's not one major incidence but just being overwhelmed by so many small things that don't work out or go as planned and this feeling was consistent for me during the first lock down after I had to come back from Mallorca. Now that this is a distant memory I'd like to share this video with you. A video of misfortune. Because not everything always goes as planned.
