My legs are sore, uncomfortably sore in fact. It’s not the sharp pain of recent injury but rather the deep throb of unfitness. Earlier this evening I bent to pick up a dropped set of keys. About halfway down my hammies went into mild spasm and I was drawn to the painful realization that there was no going back, well at least not the way I had come. I crab shuffled across my room ‘downward-dog‘ style and used the leg of my desk to leverage myself vertically inch-by-inch. Apparently this is the price of the ‘off season.’ My off season has evolved into the time period between adventures, the last one of which was way back in November which I guess makes kick-starting the pins that much more interesting.
Thankfully though, blowing out the muscular cobwebs is not all sore muscles and slow rides. It’s strange how regularly I forget that there is nothing that makes me smile as often and as genuinely as being back on the bike, be it that I’ve had to adjust to my training schedule to include the notoriously poor hours of a candidate attorney. Gone are the inter-lecture mid-morning rides, replaced instead by a high percentage of late night and extraordinarily early morning rides. Fortunately the roads are quiet and though I hate to brag, for a sizable city Cape Town has an impressive array of visible stars to lose one’s thoughts amongst.
So, why the need for late nights and stiff legs? The answer lies in the title; because we (the super ballie and I) just could not let sleeping dogs lie. With the Freedom Challenge and Tour Divide complaint boxes ticked one might have thought that we would be content to return to the shorter more intense format of racing. That, however, would be like asking a heroine addict to quit and start smoking cigarettes. I’ve spoken at length previously about the addictive nature of cycling, and specifically, of challenging oneself to go further and at greater speed. The time for denial is long past, I’ve drifted through anger, bargaining, guilt, depression, and have come to accept that I am addicted to ultra endurance racing.
This year we’re choosing to sate our addiction by entering the The Transcontinental Race. In my opinion the format and organisation of the Transcontinental is such that it will soon surpass The Tour Divide as the benchmark for self supported ultra-endurance racing. In only its third edition the 220 (180 single and 25 or so pairs) entries were sold out in days, although if my information is correct, we will be the first Africans to compete.
This 4300km journey will take us from a mid-night start on the Muur Van Geraardsbergen (oh ye of Tour of Flanders infamy) in Belgium, zig-zagging across Europe to the very borders of Asia on the Bosphorus Strait, Istanbul. The race differs from our previous experience in that it will be completed on road bikes – although not all on tar roads – and the route will be planned entirely by ourselves. The rules are simple; no support, no riding on roads that would normally be illegal to cycle on, no thumbing lifts, taking trains or ferries, and you have 16 days to reach the finish (working out to around 300km a day) ticking off four checkpoints en route to the finish, namely; Mount Ventoux in France, the Strada Del Assietta in Italy, Vukovar in Croatia, and Mount Lovcen in Montenegro.
Follow me as I update both interested and uninterested parties on my progress and the art of bike-packing as we gear up for a winter of training, racing, and general admin preparation ahead of our biggest adventure yet.
Next time I talk bikes and how to choose the perfect bike-packing steed.
Bruce
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