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bikepacking, bikes, event, MTB, NZ

Post-Kiwi Brevet 2015

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Just a quick post as I sit on the ferry to the North Island to say that I made it and completed the Kiwi Brevet 2015 edition in just over six hours shy of a whole week. Very happy to finish, that was also about twelve hours quicker than I vaguely planned. So that’s nice – but mostly due to a crazed decision to bike through to the finish on the Friday night, rather than being twelve hours faster. That option turned the last day into a nineteen hour day as we finished at 3.40 am Saturday morning.

I had three main reasons for wanting to ride and complete the Kiwi Brevet:

  • To reacquaint myself with NZ countryside & riding after so long away – especially in a part of the country I’ve spent very little time.
  • To meet some like-minded (read: similarly mad) people that would even contemplate doing such a ride.
  • Finally, to challenge myself a little/lot on the bike and put to some use all the riding I’ve been doing since August.

On all three counts the boxes stand firmly ticked.  They were probably checked off after the first day or two. The scenery was stunning for much of the ride, the first five days in particular, and I was happy to stop and take the odd photo. As the ride progressed, naturally the field spread out and I kept seeing and getting to know the same people as we passed each other – that was fantastic.

I did it toughest on the first evening and into the second morning after not drinking enough on a day that was hotter than it seemed – I struggled to even keep water down, let alone my dinner, and was rather nauseated for quite a bit. Once I got that under control, things got a lot better and I could concentrate on simply riding. The all-nighter into Blenheim was also a good challenge and one that I was keen to do mostly just to see if my body could cope with so long on the bike (we had plenty of stops, Oliver & I that is, as we didn’t really plan to ride so long – so were taking it very easy most of the day). Only early in the evening did I feel sleepy for fifteen minutes or so, otherwise the pedals kept going around steadily (mostly slowly) – I was very pleased, & a little surprised, with how well that went.

In some ways we were very lucky with the weather – it was quite unseasonable (January was a particularly hot and dry month) and never really got proper hot, which would have been exhausting. But we did get bouts of very heavy rain and extremely strong winds which were less than ideal (struggling to pedal downhill & only achieving 15 km/hr or pedalling on the flat in an easy gear and only just achieving 8 km/hr for kilometres on end is never fun). Mostly due to the weather, I stayed in hotels/motels for three of the nights and camped the rest. Apart from the last, none of the days were particularly long – three over ten hours, the rest around nine hours (moving time). I managed 1178 kilometres for the week – easily my most intense week of riding ever.

Riding highlights were the top half of the St James Cycleway, riding through McDonald Downs Station in the moist early morning fragrant air, and best of all – the Big River Trail and following long 4WD road out. The Big River Trail, near Reefton, was originally a track to access remote gold mines a hundred-plus years ago. It climbed gradually in very damp and moist conditions – never all that muddy, it was plenty slippery and with a loaded bike it was prudent to dismount at most of the stream crossings or when the rocks and roots got too off-camber. It was one of the few times all week that my big beefy tyres made any sense at all – ten kilometres took me two hours, but I rode the majority and it was so beautiful in there that I never resented the slow progress. By contrast the 4WD road was quite steep (mostly down, but some climbing) and covered with big loose, jagged rocks – I had an absolute blast and arrived in Reefton to find I’d made up a fair bit of time on quite a few, that didn’t happen very often due to there being so much road and my slow tyres/legs.

While we got stuck in many herds on country roads during the week – sheep, cows, hot-rods – the best wildlife sighting was ten minutes spent watching a large pod of dolphins extremely close to the shore at the Anakiwa end of Queen Charlotte Sound at dusk. Unfortunately, my camera was packed away due to the recent heavy rain – so that memory will have stay in my memory bank, but believe me it was astounding.

That’s probably enough for now – as I’m prone to do I’ll post later with too many words about each day. Here are some of my favourite photos of the week as a reward for reading/absently scrolling this far down.

Steadily riding up the Rainbow Valley – Day One.

Getting out of my tent at Lake Tennyson – start of Day Two.

Heading down to the St James Cycleway.

Somewhere after Porters Pass, but before Arthurs – when the wind was still with me.

Would I do it again? While I’m sure I could do it better and faster (carry less, faster tyres and put in longer days), at this stage I have no desire to repeat this route – because now I know what’s there and the sense of discovery of new places would not be there, and that’s a big motivator for me.

bikepacking, bikes, event, NZ

Pre-Kiwi Brevet 2015

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This year the Kiwi Brevet is a 1150 kilometre clockwise loop (over 700 miles) on a mountain bike (for most) around the top half of the South Island in less than eight days. I’m not sure if I signed up for this because I was riding so much, or I thought it would be good motivation to ride a lot over the NZ summer – or maybe I’d temporarily lost my mind.  Either way, my bike is loaded up  and I’m my way to the start in Blenheim.  At the very least, I’ll get to see a lot of beautiful backcountry in a part of NZ that I’ve spent very little time.

This event draws its inspiration from the legendary and epic Tour Divide race in North America (basically a self-supported race following the Continental Divide from Banff, Alberta, to the USA-Mexico border at Antelope Wells, New Mexico, which is over 4400 km long and has over sixty-thousand metres of climbing!). The Kiwi Brevet is a lot tamer – with nowhere near as much climbing; a distinct lack of bears, mountain lions, aggressive packs of dogs, snakes; shorter distances between supply points; little chance of snow and so on. As such, the odd person uses the Kiwi Brevet as a stepping stone to the Tour Divide – still a vague possibility for me if I don’t completely hate the experience and fail to find a suitable job in the coming months…

By no means a competitive racer and really just along for the experience, I’ve not gone all out in trying to lighten the load on my bike by buying expensive new things (not having a job probably pays a part too). In fact, I don’t think I’ve bought anything new and my set-up is pretty similar in the two following photos taken ten months apart. Of course, it’ll cost me a bit of time and probably a lot of energy, especially the ever-reliable (so far) but large & slow tyres – but so be it.

Taken near Portsmouth March 2014 on my first solo overnight bikepacking trip.

All ready for the Kiwi Brevet; the only small changes I can see are an extra bottle & cage, a better pump, the upgraded (under warranty) k-lite dynamo powered light and no mudguards.

The self-supported part of the event means that you can only use what you carry on your own bike (or person I suppose – I’m not taking a backpack) and that which is available to all competitors. So you can carry camping equipment and camp or stay in hotels, motels, B&Bs (or a mix, of course) – but you can’t arrange to stay with friends, for instance. Similarly with food – you can eat what you carry and you can buy food at shops, restaurants, gas stations etc; but you can’t stop in at a friend’s house for a feed, be followed by a car with people giving you food or use food caches. There are few rules, it is rather low-key event (but with still a lot of organisation done by Scott & Jo) – in fact, I can’t even find the rules any more. I do remember reading that one rule is that you must have at least five hours of rest a night (that is not part of the Tour Divide rules) – I don’t think I’m going to come close to breaking that one. Needing to ride about 150 km per day, sleep had better not be a problem.

Here’s the map of the whole course – I’ve put a small amount of time into thinking where I might eat & sleep each night. Only the first night will be in the wilderness, I hope, as we will be in Molesworth Station after 150 km – which I think will be about my limit each day. The GPS file indicates just over nine thousand metres of climbing for the whole course – I’m somewhat skeptical of this, it doesn’t seem very much. It averages out at less than eight metres of climbing per kilometre – most of my rides recently have been more than this, some up to six times more. So I expect a whole lot more climbing than this (on my Garmin) – considering we’re crossing the Southern Alps and all.

So basically I’m going for a long eight day bike ride and don’t really know what I’m getting myself in for. If so inclined, you should be able to follow my progress (we’re all going to be carrying SPOT trackers) on the Map page of this site, or for the blue-dot-watchers: can follow the whole field here. Here’s hoping I make it around OK in less than the allotted time – after all, I have a Picton to Wellington ferry to catch afterwards so I can spend a week visiting good friends and family in and around Wellington (and maybe I’ll still want to ride my bike too).

around home, bikes, combe raiders, event, GPS, MTB, UK

Spam, egg, sausage & spam

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With a name such as the SPAM Winter Challenge, I could hardly miss this for the obvious Python connection.

Now that that’s out of the way, I may continue with a brief summary of what was clearly the last bike event of 2013 for me (I’ve managed seven this year, significantly more than any other year since I left NZ). Just over an hour’s drive north up on Salisbury Plain, a few of the Combe Raiders were coming across from Somerset for this event that tries to deal with the Christmas excesses. With all the storms & rain that we’ve had over the last week, it was just as well this was supposed to be a course that deals with all sorts of weather well.

It’s been a very mild winter so far, so it was with some surprise that I had to scrape a frost off my car as I set off this morning. This did mean that it was a wonderfully clear day – ideal for a ride. Driving up the A360 it was clear that the event was in the middle of the largest MOD training area in the country – there were signs for tanks crossing & signs warning of unexploded ordnance frequently. Unusually, the race briefing warned us to ensure we didn’t ride into any tanks or stray off the trail and do a commendable impression of jumping high into the sky & scattering in thousands of pieces. Eventually the others made it from Somerset – some not quite in the knick of time for the 10 am start.

The first quarter of the fifty kilometre circuit was definitely the best. I really should learn to get a reasonable position mid-field at the start of such events – battling through a surprisingly large field up a long & slow climb is tedious. After that climb there were a few dives down off the ridge & back up again – mostly on rough muddy doubletrack through fields, with a bit of singletrack. The mud was pretty gloopy & horrendous for sticking to everything, but not too difficult to ride through (it did end up taking over an hour to clean my bike properly once home). We then found ourselves on the road for about twenty kilometres as we rode through the army land – boring, but preferable to being blown sky-high. It was a perfect day for riding: extensive views over the beautiful Wiltshire countryside, still, and not too hot or cold (about 5 ºC).

The strangest part of the day was riding through the middle of a fake-village.  There were dozens of house-shells – they seem to have walls, roofs, floors, fences and little else.  Clearly these are used for urban warfare training. The only real thing in the village was the church, which had parishioners walking to it; there were a lot of people around.  [A little research shows that this was the village of Imber – it was evacuated in 1943 for the war effort & the villagers have never been allowed to return as the MOD continues to use the land – a lot like Tyneham which I happened across during another biking weekend in May.  The church is no longer in use, but the roads that we were riding along are open occasionally so the public can have a look around.]

As this was the last event of a year of much biking, I was pretty keen to see how quickly I could get around the course.  So I only stopped for forty seconds on the whole ride to get some food out of my pack; also, this meant I didn’t even carry my camera – so I only have my memory of how splendid the countryside was.  After passing plenty of birdwatchers, derelict tanks, garrisons & barracks we finally got off the road. More short steep ups & downs later we were back along the ridge looking north for a while – I’m a little disturbed at my ability to recognise a cement works from a long distance.  I shouldn’t have been as surprised as I was to ride past a huge hole in the ground shortly after – the limestone had to come from somewhere after all.

We rejoined the two shorter courses for a while before diving off the ridge for one last really steep nasty climb.  With a nice bit of singletrack in some woods, the car park & therefore finish line was tantalisingly close for much too long.  But it was worth getting to the finish line for the cake alone – a local hospice was fundraising and there was a plethora of cakes on offer, there was so much choice it was overwhelming.  So not the most interesting course, but a great day out on the bike to end a pretty big year of riding for me – & a good chance to catch up with mates too.  I was happy with finishing in 2:40, without really pushing myself just not stopping for chats, photos or much food.

Africa, bikes, Canada, city, event, friends, MTB, national park, roadtrip, travel, UK, USA

2013 – a lot more biking than the previous year

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After reading last year’s Christmas letter, I can see just how different 2013 has ended up being.  The main driver for that is that my shoulder is completely normal after last year’s surgery & rehab (so much so that when people occasionally ask after it, I’m always slightly taken aback).  That has meant that excessive travelling fell by the wayside as I spent much time biking.  Before much biking, there was last winter to get through – I escaped to Egypt for sun at Christmas last; Christmas morning at the pyramids was certainly unusual. A country still in a state of upheaval & flux, it was a fascinating trip.

I moved into a new role at work about a year ago, which meant quite a few months of learning plenty while still trying to tidy up things in my previous position.  Along with my car comprehensively failing its annual inspection & many problems with the replacement, what turned out to be some of the best concentrated biking I’ve had was a welcome change.

After a couple of days having a look around Chicago, I met Megan, Alex & their son, Finn, in Utah.  We went to mountain-bike mecca Moab and did little except camp, ride bikes (a lot) and eat. As on my last visit, the scenery was stunning and the riding exceptional. STOP PRESS – Megan has just made a rather fun video that makes me yearn for sun, rocky trails, & great riding – much more interesting than me prattling on about Moab.

The summer was bookended by two big trips biking – Moab being the first.  That meant that I travelled very little during the summer – but that worked out well as we actually had a cracking summer of weather in the UK & the riding was plentiful.  Preparing for a three-day stage race in September I entered a number of longer-distance events around the south-west UK & Wales.  This being about the only photo of I have me “racing” – on a strangely scorching Shropshire day:

The other bookend event for the summer was the three-day Rift Valley Odyssey in Kenya.  Partly an excuse to get back to Africa & visit Adrian and partly a nice big riding adventure to train for & achieve, I was pleased to return to Africa – it’s a fascinating place after all.  The summer of preparation did me well & the only real difficulty in the 5500 metres of climbing over three days and 260 kilometres was a bit of digestive trouble at the top of a huge, hot & humid climb halfway through Day Two – not sure if it was the heat, too much food or the anti-malarial tablets; anyway, I survived the remainder of the day on next to no food and recovered enough that the last day (eighty-odd kilometres) was easy.

I was too busy riding to get many photos, but I quite like these two taken while riding along:

The second week of the trip was spent in Tanzania with Adrian, Carmen & their two children.  As they’d only just moved there, it was a relaxed week as they settled in a bit more and I recovered from the big bike ride.  Adrian & I did grab the chance for an overnight trip to a relatively close national park – there were many more elephants around than I saw on my last safari four years ago; an excellent end to another fantastic trip visiting Adrian & Carm.

Many months before, it seemed a good idea to book a trip to New England in the fall – after a particularly busy return to work, it wasn’t seeming so smart.  Nonetheless, I was pretty sure that I’d enjoy a short road trip around the north-east of North America.  With little biking, beautiful autumnal colours, nice cities (Montreal & Boston particular favourites) and absolutely fabulous food it turned out to be a very relaxing trip which was well worth it.  Although the photos don’t really compare to Utah and Africa – here’s one of Ottawa:

Shortly after my return from Canada, all medium-term plans got thrown to the wind as it was revealed that the plant where I work would close next year.  It was a sudden, but not altogether surprising announcement; things are becoming clearer now & I’m looking forward to a 2014 that will be very different to what I was expecting.  As far as I can tell, I’ll have work for about half the year – during which I will frantically save & prepare for extensive time biking in places yet to be decided.  Mum, & probably Adele, plan on visiting for a cousin’s wedding in May – so I’m well looking forward to that.

Merry Christmas & may the new year be a great one for you.