Giving up for a Good reason
Waving goodbye to multi-day ultra-endurance events
It is Thursday morning. All my gear is ready, I just need to figure out where to mount my brand new one-person tent. Tomorrow, I will take a train to Scotland, get a good night’s sleep and embark on a 1,600km journey to Gloucestershire via the Lake District, the Peak District, and Wales. The Perfidious Albion is the first ultra-endurance cycling event I ever signed up to, initially hoping to be part of the 2023 cohort.
After a few 300km and 400km events later on that spring, I had totalled my knees and emailed the organiser to say that I could no longer participate. This was it. I would not be making my grand debut in ultra-endurance cycling, discovering that I am a natural, that I was born for this. I would not be the first woman ever to complete that course. My best bet was to make a come back the following year, bigger and better.
My training regime and much of my life since then had revolved around my preparation for the 2024 edition: intense physiotherapy, a paid coach to support me into preparing for the specificities of ultra-endurance racing, and a new bike with a custom frame.
This Thursday morning, I swing my legs over the edge of the bed and a wave of stress immediately burns my insides from my stomach to my brain. I feel nauseous, exhausted, and anxious. In the two weeks leading up to the big event, I had been remarkably calm. I have all the kit I need and a packing spreadsheet to make sure that I do not forget any of it. I have tried and tested every step of the process during my 800km event in May. But today, I do not care how well prepared I am or whether I have it in me to complete the event. All I see in my future is one big cloud of dread, physical pain and lack of sleep. I close my eyes and remember how puffy my face gets after a night of light dehydration and four hours of sleep in a field. This will likely be the first sensation I will experience every morning upon awakening for the next week: lifting my eyelids to feel the podgy resistance of my flesh asking for mercy.
I love bivvying. I love cycling. I love eating all things nice, sweet and savoury. So why am I dreading a week of my three favourite things? I have never felt anxious before Audaxes, events that range between 200km and 1000km. I once cycled 400km in one go, 200km of which were under a pitch-black moonless sky, another 100km in thick fog, and the last 100km pressing on increasingly painful knees, and although it was somewhat of an ordeal at times, I do not have a bad memory of it. I have an infinite sweet tooth, something that comes in handy when you need to ingest 6,000kcal a day. I spend all of my free time wild camping and bikepacking. So what is wrong with me? Why do I not want to get on the train tomorrow?
I know why. Pushing my three top hobbies to the extreme (yes, eating cake can be a hobby) has ruined all of them.
My idea of a dream night is pitching my tent by a lake, eating whatever I carried in my bag for dinner while gazing into the sunset, shaking off dew off my cycling cap in the morning and wondering what view I will get from my camping spot the following day. Sometimes, I ask locals whether they know of a place I could pitch my tent and they invite me in for a cup of tea or even into their spare room. From my wild camping spots, I discover local plants. From the spare bedroom of a random lady’s house, I discover the local fashion for wedding dresses in 1930s Spain by looking at family photos hanging on the wall.
When I complete ultra-endurance events, I sleep over three hours a night, putting me in the heavy sleeper category. I look for an open field after nightfall, lay my bivvy bag on the ground, scoff down the leftover rice from a takeaway tupperware while sitting on my inflatable mattress, and close my eyes feeling under pressure to fall asleep quickly so that I can break the barrier of four hours of rest. I wake up before sunrise, pack my bags and ride off, sometimes not really knowing what the landscape was like where I slept.
It is October 2021. I arrive in Valencia, Spain, on my heavily laden touring bike. It hurts to smile because my sun-damaged lips are cracked right down the middle but I cannot stop myself. The person behind the ice cream counter tells me they serve two vegan ice creams: pure chocolate and chufa. I do not have the first clue what chufa (tiger nut) is, but I cannot wait to try it.
It is May 2024. I have just crossed Dartmoor, a beautiful place I tried to appreciate despite my extreme tiredness after three days of non-stop hilly cycling during the Wild West Country event. I enter a supermarket to get some much needed nourishment. I apply my latest technique to choose my meals: I look at an item for two seconds, and if I do not gag, I purchase it. Three days of force-feeding myself every half hour on the bike, plus about five small meals a day, have turned everything I love to eat into repulsive-looking blobs of potential energy. A Calyppo ice lolly passes the two-second test. I raise an eyebrow. I was the child who could destroy a pack of sweets in a few minutes but who would always leave the orange-flavoured ones behind, but I do not question my refined selection process. The next victorious item is a chicken wrap. I have been vegetarian for years. I try to give another stare at the egg mayo sandwich, which would be the tenth egg sandwich I eat since the start of the event. I trust my guts and get the chicken wrap. I eat it without gagging, but feeling sad.
It is May 2017 and I am making my way up a Bolivian mountain on a heavy steel frame touring bike laden with 20kg of luggage. One of my cycling partners is short of breath due to asthma, the other is battling a splitting headache due to our newly-achieved altitude of 4,000m. Turning back to lose elevation is not an option as it involves several mountain passes, which would not spare anyone. We need to finish our big climb to get to the other side of the mountain and then we should be able to go back down to a bit over 3,000m, where my pals’ symptoms are usually better. My struggles are moderate compared to the rest of the team, so I pick up a bag off my friend’s bike and strap it onto mine in the hope that the lighter load will help her get to the top. I sprint ahead at a lightning speed of 9km/h, the maximum speed the gradient and the lack of oxygen let me achieve, to see whether the top is around the corner and so that I can deliver the good news to the others. We have an unusually late lunch at 4p.m. once we are all lower down and pain-free. There was no option to stop to have a meal before getting ourselves out of the uncomfortable section of mountain passes. I would not swap this moment for any other. It was tough at the time but the only tears I had to shed were driven by how incredibly beautiful the landscape was.
It is May 2024 in the West Country, on the fourth and hopefully last day of my first official ultra-endurance event. I am pedalling away on my expensive, light and stylish road bike. Every bit of kit I have is the highest quality and the lowest weight you can find.
I have 150km left to complete the course, it is 7.30p.m., and I do not care whether I finish in the middle of the night or tomorrow morning. I do not care whether the villages I am crossing are cute, nor whether there are any small lambs in the fields. I feel the crushing weight of time passing as I alternate between looking at the time on my cycle computer and the tarmac ahead of me. I keep my eyes on the tarmac because all I want to do is ride another 10 metres, and another 10 metres after that, and so on. I find myself in a heavy downpour. I start thinking that if I did hit a giant pothole at high speed, mistaking it for just another puddle, it could bend one of my wheels, forcing me to forfeit the event, and I would get to stop the charade. I do not have the energy to cry, plus it would further dehydrate me.
It is July 2020. On our way between Paris and Prague, my friend and I have given ourselves an ambitious target of 110km a day for ten days, including two half-days of visiting local sites, riding the heavy hybrid bikes we used in South America. The heat wave has turned us into sticky messes, but we keep ticking along, admiring the kilometres adding up on our gps. We will be very tired upon our arrival in Prague, but what a luxury it is to be able to enjoy this time together and discover three countries thanks only to the power of our modest leg muscles.
It is July 2024. I am cycling the West Atlantic Way in Ireland as training for my big event, aiming to cover 250km a day. It is 7.30a.m. and I am 20km in. Every pedal stroke, I look at my cycling computer with disgust. Why are the numbers not going up? If I have taken an hour to do 20km, with the feeling that three hours have passed, how am I going to drag myself all the way around the coast? Do I care? Why am I here? Do I even like cycling if this is not making me happy right now?
The top tips I have been given to ride ultras are to remember to have fun and to enjoy the landscape. I do not have an on-switch for happiness when I am tired and in pain. I am a nature lover but 400km in, my eyes are tethered to the tarmac and no cute tree will cheer me up. I am no stranger to type-two fun, the kind of fun that is not fun at the time of the event but that your remember fondly shortly after: I felt that way about my eight-minute long intense rowing races, my Audaxes, my solo long runs and hikes.
The memory of the Wild West Country evokes no fun. Of course I have times of enjoyment during these events, but the share is small. In comparison, I have very few bad moments when I go bikepacking. I can cover 150km a day and it feels like a wonderful holiday, because I make my own decision and I can rest as much as I wish, accept hospitality from locals (a disqualifying factor in an ultra-endurance event). Increase the distance to over 200km and tell me I have to do them, cannot accept a free cup of tea, and cannot pitch my tent in a garden, and the fun stops.
This Thursday, I want to be my friend, not my executioner. I get up, pitch my shiny new tent in the middle of my living room, sling my inflatable mattress inside, and start reading a book from my little cocoon. My breathing is lighter and besides feeling like a child in a pillow fort, I feel like I am embracing my own type of adventure, which does not include a sense of competition. Today, my adventure is to read a chapter under a glorified tarp, one metre away from my sofa. That is enough for me. I call off the event and my appetite suddenly makes a come-back.
A week later, do I regret my decision? No. Did I shut off my means of following the race as a way to protect myself from crippling ‘what ifs’? Yes. Five days after the start of the event, the first female finisher’s instagram story read ‘I enjoyed every moment of it’ and my first thought was ‘How is that possible? Ultra-endurance is only pain and suffering’. There was my answer. For me, the setting of ultra-endurance events is no fun, or at least nowhere near the fun I thought it would be, or the fun I experience when I explore freely on my own. As much as I tried to apply tips to enjoy it, it did not work. I was so determined to be determined that I did not pause to ask myself whether I was enjoying it. My big breakthrough never was, and maybe it will never see the light of day, and that is alright. My appetite for discovering new places by bike has been salvaged from a slippery slope of making cycling into an ordeal, and that is all that matters for now.
