The Transcontinental Race 2017

28 July

 

So this is it then, finally. Today is the day I had been hoping to see and have planned for, on and off, for the best part of two years. I’m sat having breakfast in a Belgian guesthouse amongst some other people who are about to embark on the same journey as me.  I’m here to take part in the Transcontinental Race, an approximately 4000km unsupported cycle race across Europe to finish in Greece. Unsupported meaning I have to be self-sufficient the whole way and am unable to seek outside help that wouldn’t be available to other racers.

 

The friendly greetings and chats from the night before have been replaced by a quiet sense of foreboding alongside a big dose nervous tension. The other riders here already seem as though they are lot more experienced (almost definitely) and adept (maybe) than me. My inferiority complex starts to kick in, have I trained enough? Is my route a viable one? Have my equipment choices been good ones?

 

I nervously roll down to registration in Geraardsbergen, which is in a large hall, I fail to take in the instructions upon entry so sit down for half an hour trying to figure out what’s going on before I realise I have to collect a numbered ticket from the front desk to begin the registration process. This then takes up most of the day as you’re mostly sat around waiting for your number to be called for the next part to be completed. Much needed carbs are grabbed from the takeaway pasta joint (how convenient!) just 200m down from the venue; they must be having their best day of the year!

 

Eventually, after endless hours waiting, chatting to other racers about strategies and trying to eat as much as possible (difficult given the nerves), we all gather in Geraardsbergen Town Square for the start formalities which include a minutes silence and then a minutes noise for Race founder and ultra endurance cyclist extraordinaire Mike Hall who was tragically killed earlier this year competing in the Indian Pacific Wheel Race. Mike was a real cornerstone of this fledgling sport and unbeknownst to him, I think it’s fair to say, a real hero to many of us, as apart from being a super talented rider and race organiser, he came across as being a thoroughly decent and humble human being. It’s fair to say that if it weren’t for him I wouldn’t be where I found myself this evening. I, like many others here regret not having had the chance to meet him.

 

The atmosphere at the start was fantastic and half the town seemed to have turned out to see us off, a lot of them brandishing flaming torches to further enhance the occasion. The Belgians sure do love their cycling.

 

The countdown commences and then we’re off for a parade lap around the town before the race will commence properly with an ascent of one of the most famous climbs in cycling, the Muur Van Geraardsbergen, much used in the Tour of Flanders. I didn’t really have a clue where I was in the field as we set off but at points I could see the lead car in front which probably meant I was in the upper third of the field (having since seen a video on Youtube taken by Kajsa Tylen, this assumption seemed about right), which was good news as I’d read about, and heard first hand about nervous riders wobbling, unclipping or even falling over on the steep narrow climb, which then has the knock on effect of slowing or stopping the riders behind.

 

As we came back into the square the race was on and up the Muur we went. We were all cheered in huge numbers from either side of the road up the climb and for that one moment, I had a small inkling as to what it would be like to be a pro bike rider. A lot of riders had chosen to recce the climb during their stay here and I was starting to wish I had too as it went on a lot longer than I had been anticipating (the pro’s seem to zip up it in the matter of a couple of minutes) due to our fully loaded bikes. It was also bloody steep and I found I had to get out of the saddle in my lowest gear to grind up it. There was no way I wanted to be the one who had to get off and walk and slow down those behind me so by the time I was blowing a bit from the effort to say the least. Thankfully once at the top I was able to peel away into the night trouble free.

 

This is it then, we’re underway. Adrenaline was running quite high after the climbing to start and though I wasn’t hanging around coming down off the Muur, loads more people passed me than I managed to pass. I was aiming to go for at least six hours before resting my head for a bit. After all, this was bonus distance time providing you didn’t plan on sleeping that much. Surprisingly quickly the field thinned and the string of blinking red lights in front of me had turned into a few due to different route choices and rider speeds. One Belgian town was ticked off after another and there wasn’t much traffic on the roads to have to think about at this time of night.

 

My route to the first checkpoint (CP1) was the most direct one I could come up with which pointed me straight in the direction of the hilly Ardennes region. This first bit was easy though with fresh legs and relatively few hills, although I did gradually gain altitude throughout the night.

 

At one point during these first hours though, this could all of been over. I came across a roadblock on my route and, after spotting a pedestrian route was still open down the side, I thought I’d chance it. The road works only seemed to be at the top of this road so I jumped back on the road as it headed downhill. The road surface wasn’t the best but was nothing untoward, until out of the darkness, cobbles with an old tram track down the middle suddenly appeared in my light beams. Before I knew it I found myself on the wrong side of the tracks as they gradually merged with the gutter on the right so I clumsily attempted to bunny hop over them, got it wrong and caught my front wheel in the gap resulting in me falling off. To my great relief, on initial inspection both myself, and my bike were undamaged, some grazing on the handlebar tape and me apart. I was extremely lucky as it could have been a lot lot worse. A broken collarbone could easily have been the result of this silly tumble and that would have finished my race. With a mixture of relief and personal admonishment I carried on.

 

I rolled down towards my first border crossing, a brief foray into France before returning back to Belgium. By this point rider meetings were getting rarer as we were scattered throughout southern Belgium / northern France with a few hours on the race clock. I did bump into a rider from my neck of the woods (Bristol) at this point, TCR veteran and previous high finisher Gareth Baines. My immediate thought was either that I was going better than expected at this point or he wasn’t going as well as expected. It was probably a bit of both. We had a brief chat before he eased away from me into the distance.

 

My initial plan was to keep going until 4am, or whenever I became tired. Sure enough around 4 I started yawning on the bike so started looking for a place to bivvy down. Typically, having seen plenty of sites already throughout the night, which looked ideal, when I needed to find somewhere, nothing was forthcoming. After several stops when I thought I’d found a candidate, but then decided the spot was no good after all (mainly because I could still be seen from the road), I eventually pulled off the road, walked down a grassy bank and laid my bike at the base of a fence. It was pretty much obscured, still running dynamo lights apart, so I hopped over the farmers fence and bedded down in a field behind a bush. I was pleased with my nights work, nearly 140km in 6 and a half hours and I managed to cycle for all but 20 minutes of that. Oh to have that kind of on/off the bike ratio for the rest of the race, it’d be nowhere near that again.

 

29 July

 

I’d intended to get three hours sleep but only managed about one I think before my alarm went off. It was now daylight and I could now see that the upcoming landscape was pretty hilly so this must be the start of the Ardennes. Sure enough, within ten minutes of getting going I was puffing up a pretty steady incline and was starting to think that going through the Ardennes may not have been the optimum route after all. It was at this point that one of the media cars pulled up alongside me and conducted a short interview whilst still moving. Funnily enough, this gave me a bit of a boost. I was glad that I had the foresight to buy two Danish pastries from Geraardsbergen’s Lidl before the start as the first shop I found that morning didn’t have a great selection of snacks, though thankfully it did have a coffee machine so I was able to have a pretty decent breakfast. Alas, sitting outside devouring pastries had the side effect of raising the hopes of next rider I saw (who I later discovered was Caroline Item) of what goods were available inside, though thankfully for her, a proper Spar was just a bit further on.

 

The passage through the Ardennes was all up and down and the roads mostly were dead straight. There seemed to be some kind of big agricultural show on that day too as there was a lot of traffic queued up at one point. With the Ardennes out of the way, Luxembourg appeared on the horizon before too long and it was good to progress into another country. It was also beginning to get quite warm though this was nothing compared to what would be experienced later.

 

Luxembourg would come and go pretty quickly and uneventfully (it was pleasant enough though) and by mid afternoon I was back in France. I feel at home cycling in France (despite sometimes finding shops/restaurants that are open hard to find) and this partly influenced my route choice with the aim to ease myself (relatively) into the race. But from this point on for the rest of the day I would see no other riders, which I found quite disconcerting so I was questioning my choice of route constantly.

 

It was during the late afternoon whilst rolling through the French countryside that I received an expletive laden text from my girlfriend telling me to be careful out there. I immediately sensed something wasn’t right and so I then heard about the death during the previous night of Frank Simons, the oldest competitor in the race who was hit by a drunk driver in Belgium. This news really hit me for six and my enthusiasm for the race, which had been holding up quite well, almost completely disappeared. I carried on in a dazed and distracted state and thoughts turned to how awful it must’ve been at that very moment for Frank’s family. I also knew this news would have hit the race organisation really hard, especially considering the loss they’d already had to bear this year. I, like I’m sure every other racer did at this point, also thought about my loved ones and the worry I was potentially putting them through whilst undertaking this race. It was up in the air as to whether the race would continue and my motivation for doing so was also questionable. I just kept on going in the end because I didn’t really know what else to do.

 

As well as my will, my energy levels also dipped around this point and pedalling was harder work than ever. I’d eaten enough so I put this down to the lack of sleep from the previous night. The early evening terrain in this corner of France was rolling in a similar way to that in the Ardennes so it was a bit more arduous than I was expecting. I seemed to find myself on a road that, whilst relatively quiet, seemed to attract drivers who blazed along it at some speed.

 

It was turning out to be a long evening what with thoughts of Frank, tiredness and the nature of the terrain. By the time I had decided to call it a day I found myself on a pitch black descent in the middle of a forest in the Northern Vosges, which wasn’t much fun as just staying on the road at this point took a lot of concentration. Once on flatter ground I again had a job to find a decent bivvy spot, rejecting one potential one quickly when a dog in an adjacent yard started barking. Eventually I thought I’d just nip into the woods at the side of the road. Thanks to my still running dynamo light I was seen and beeped at by a passing motorist as I struggled to find a way through some low hanging branches (I then discovered the trick of placing my cycling mitts over the lights to be less conspicuous in future), I was too tired to care though and bedded down about 10m into the woods and set my alarm for five hours hence.

 

30 July

 

I had no trouble at all sleeping this time and I was jarred awake by my alarm to find a still very dark wooded scene. I felt like I could have easily slept for another five hours. The realisation that being jolted awake on less than optimal sleep durations and getting up and ready to ride asap after, was what my life was going to be like for the next two weeks, didn’t sit particularly well with me at this point (I’ve never been a morning person). It seemed to take me forever to get packed and going, far longer than it had the previous morning, but whilst doing so I saw another rider go past on the road, my first sighting of a fellow competitor (I was sure of this as who else in their right mind would be up and cycling at this time on a Sunday morning with a packed bike) since the previous lunch time so I wasn’t the only one who had chosen this particular route. At this point I still hadn’t checked the tracker since starting the race so was unaware of where I was in the field or how my routing compared to others.

 

The first hour of pedalling was hard, I felt very sluggish and my average speed was not what it would normally be. I also found it difficult to find a comfortable position on the bike.  This was an early morning pattern that I would find repeating throughout the race to a greater or lesser extent. Thoughts about quitting the race started running through my mind at this point as I was questioning how much I was actually enjoying this, the last twelve hours had been hard. I was thinking this journey would be much more pleasant going at a steady touring pace.

 

Then, unbelievably, considering it was 6.30am on a Sunday in France, I suddenly found a boulangerie that was open! Hallelujah! My mood switched instantly as I gorged on hot coffee and pastries. Twenty minutes later, whilst not fully refreshed, I felt an awful lot better about things and started to focus on the task in hand, namely, reaching CP1 by early evening. I had in my mind a 6pm target. I then also noticed that I was only 10km or so from the border with Germany, another mental lift! This distance then disappeared in no time where I then had the welcome novelty of taking the ferry across the Rhein into Germany, giving me a nice bonus ten minute break.

 

After having had a flat run through the Rhein Valley so far this day, I could see in the distance this was about to change, and quite dramatically too as pointy peaks became apparent. The morning temperature was also increasing quite rapidly now and I was starting to sweat profusely despite it not yet being 9am. Once the climbing started I took the opportunity of nipping into the public loos by a tourist information centre to wash my jersey, which was already quite heavily salt encrusted. A wet clean jersey was super refreshing to put back on in this heat.

 

A little further up the climb I came to a junction where I was supposed to go straight on but the bloody mountain pass I had chosen to aid my passage across this range was closed. Bollocks. I had no back-up route planned so I spent the next half hour faffing trying to find an alternative route, and subsequently getting annoyed with myself for doing so, before commencing on a detour. This would add another 10km or so to my route, which, while not that long in the grand scheme of things did involve more climbing. This pass was the first proper bit of climbing in the TCR (up to around 1000m in altitude) and despite the heat and hard work, I was afforded a spectacular view across the Rhein Valley at one point.

 

I spent the latter part of the climb fantasising about food and cold drinks at the top, and lo and behold, a restaurant with lots of outside seating appeared at the summit of the pass, what luck! As it was now midday, I had no hesitation in stopping there for lunch where I proceeded to order a large beer and a coca cola alongside a fantastic wiener schnitzel and chips, all of which disappeared in very quick order!

 

After lunch I was flying and really enjoying myself on the great German roads. This was a part of Germany (The Black Forest I subsequently found out) I would never have thought to come to before but the scenery on show was fantastic. I remember thinking I would definitely like to come back here at some point. I was also buoyed by the fact that I was now back on my route after my detour and it hadn’t proved too costly. I knew now I was only a few hours away from the first checkpoint at Schloss Lichtenstein so needed no more motivation.  

 

After the glorious scenery of the Black Forest region, this afternoons route gradually became more urbanised in the run up to CP1. It wasn’t that long before I could actually see what looked like the likely mountains that held the obligatory parcours within them in the distance. The weather, since the heat of the morning, had turned quite overcast, which I was not too disappointed about as my temperature regulation became a lot easier.

 

I cycled through the towns of Tubingen and Reutlingen in the Neckar valley before starting the steady climb up cycle tracks and back roads towards the mandatory parcours up to Schloss Lichtenstein castle. It was here I started to see the first riders I’d come across since I saw that ghostly figure swooping through the forest in the dark this morning whilst I was getting up. Soon enough I started the climb proper, which quickly ramped up to 10% plus gradients. I was joined by an Irish rider and we rode up the rest of the climb together swapping stories of our race experience so far, which undoubtedly made the ascent go a bit quicker. Once in the castle grounds there was a bit of confusion as to where the official parcours finished, so to be safe we rode up to the highest point possible where we then saw some other riders. After a short chat I set off to descend down to the first checkpoint, I was feeling pretty pleased with myself as despite the bit of rerouting I had to do earlier, I was still going to get there at about 7pm so not far off my initial target.

 

Ten or so minutes later I rolled into the rear garden of the hotel that housed the first checkpoint (66th place, 7:02pm) and was greeted by a round of applause from the twenty or so other riders who were already gathered there, which was nice. I got my brevet card stamped whereupon one of the wonderful volunteers manning the checkpoint commented that I was the first person to arrive with a salt encrusted jersey implying to the others that they weren’t putting as much effort in! To my surprise the previous years women’s race winner Emily Chappell was also there, Christ, I must be doing alright I thought!

 

I suspect at this point this hotel was wondering what they had let themselves in for, it was quite a decent establishment and the difference between people dressed up smartly for an evening meal and a bunch of smelly cyclists draping various bits of kit around the al fresco restaurant dining area was pretty stark! Food of course was uppermost on my mind now and having lost any self consciousness about how I looked or smelled back somewhere in the first few hours of the race I immediately sought a place to sit down. I gatecrashed a table of fellow racers, Pairs team Ian Tosh and Neil Lauder and another guy called Arron and proceeded to order a beer and a trout main. It was nice to chat and relax for a little bit after what had been a pretty full on two days. Soon we could see some pretty threatening clouds gathering behind the mountain we’d just cycled up accompanied by the ominous distant rumbles of thunder. Sure enough, half an hour or so later the heavily laden and darkened skies opened and we witnessed one of the most intense thunderstorms I had ever seen, thankfully our table was under an awning. Riders were of course still coming in during this and I thanked my lucky stars that I had avoided such a dousing.

 

The thunderstorm seemed to last forever and it wasn’t long before standing water became evident. The subject of conversation at our table turned to whether it would be wise to carry on cycling tonight. The pairs team wasted no time in booking themselves into a hotel room. Arron and myself though had other thoughts. I assumed that a deluge that was this heavy wouldn’t last all evening and I still wanted to do another 40km or so before calling it a day. Arron still had to go up the mandatory parcours which meant he too was keen to get going so we held out before making a decision. Sure enough, after about an hour or so the weather started to look a bit more promising, whilst it was still raining it was a lot lighter now and the sky was markedly brighter. That was all the encouragement I needed so I got going again (following a vain attempt to put my brand new rubber overshoes on, much to the amusement of the checkpoint volunteers!) after a two hour stop.

 

A steep rather testy climb up the cycle path out of town followed before the gradient flattened out. Whilst the rain wasn’t heavy, it was now starting to get dark and at one point a concerned German guy pulled over and started saying I shouldn’t be out in this weather and offered to give me a lift to wherever I was going. I had mixed feelings about this, whilst I’m sure his intentions were good, I thought that, as I was not that far away from civilisation that it was pretty obvious that it was already my choice to be on this road at this point. I did then explain that I was in a race and was unable to accept offers of outside assistance so could not take him up on his offer.

 

As darkness drew, flashes of lightning could still be seen from afar emanating from the earlier storm. I had hoped that this would be the only one this evening but I could now see in the distance that another storm was brewing on the horizon from the direction the previous one had come. I needed to find shelter before this one was on top of me. There was practically no traffic around now and with the heavy atmospheric conditions present, it was feeling pretty eerie out here. I still wanted to get as near to my 250km daily target so in a way I was now playing a game of chicken with the skies. I could see a couple of small towns were ahead of me so I was fairly confident of finding somewhere to squirrel myself away in time.

 

The upcoming thunderstorm was moving ever closer and a small town was just a few km ahead, so I made it my goal to get there in time to find shelter. As I entered the town it was starting to spit with rain. I searched around for a suitable place to bivvy but typically nothing seemed to be suitable. Dejectedly I rolled out out the other side of town on a cycle path alongside a river (unbeknownst to me at the time this was my first encounter with the mighty Danube in its infancy). I had pretty much resigned myself to an uncomfortably wet outdoor bivvy until I came across a footpath junctioning off. I stopped to flash a light to see where it went and saw that it entered a small tunnel underneath the adjacent railway line. My heart leapt with joy at this discovery as the thunderstorm was now right on top of me. I quickly scuttled down it to investigate further and happily I could see the floor inside was dry, this was perfect! Germany again had come up trumps for me just when I needed it too.

 

As I started to lay my bedding out the rain really started to hammer down again like before, what luck! My gamble to leave the confines of CP1 earlier had paid off and I’d managed a 249km day whilst staying dry for the most part. I set my alarm for 5 hours hence and fell asleep contentedly to the sound of the rain and thunder.