The Everything Race
A finisher of the 2016 ABSA Cape Epic remembers how a helping hand from the late Gugu Zulu turned her world around .
Philosophers believe we suffer to stop fearing failure. What’s a woman to do, stuck in a dark pit with no hope because she’s failed so badly? Perhaps a helping hand from an Epic legend was all she needed.
TThe MacBook Pro under my wrists hums in the heat as sweat droplets bead on my chest and back. The glowing screen is the only light in the room. The temperature’s 40°C outside, 35 inside. It’s August 2015, one of the hottest summers in recent history in Girona, Spain, and I’m about to pull the plug on my failing start-up.
An email pings: “An invitation to ride the Absa Cape Epic, the 8-Day Untamed African MountainBike Race, in March 2016.” Heralded by many as the world’s toughest mountain bike race, it’s 647 kilometres through the steep, rocky mountains in South Africa’s Cape wine region. Temperatures climb to 40-plus degrees, the hot air is thick with fine red dust, and riders, competing in teams of two, spend each night camping in the elements. Delete. A new email pings: Another polite decline from a prospective investor. For years I’d dreamed of creating an outdoor clothing company for women. Bowndling Adventurewear was my Mars mission – crazy, yes, but attainable. The company had launched eight months earlier with
I’d got into mountain biking because it seemed like lunacy.
all the fanfare reserved for Next Big Things. We had a team of A-list players from Net- a-Porter, Maharishi, Burberry, and Rapha. But by August, everything had changed. The company was just me. Everyone else had been laid off or decided to leave months before. There was no more money, just a mountain of debt.
I wipe the sweat from my face. Or is it tears? I thought I’d become numb to the feeling of rejection. Here are the reasons we think your business isn’t a viable investment. Three pages later, I close my computer and shut my eyes.
Failure has a distinct temperature. It sweeps from the back of your body, wrapping around your legs and hands, filling them with blood, rising to hit your sternum. Your chest feels like it’s flooding, and heat rises in your throat and finally reaches your eyes and nose and then your forehead. I deserve to fail. I’m worthless, a fraud, desperate and alone.
Once upon a time I’d been something of an athlete. An amateur road and mountainbike racer, I’d ridden the Cape Epic twice before, finishing in 2012 and pulling out on the fifth stage in 2013 with insurmountable knee pain. Unlike road cycling, a sport I’d done my whole life, mountain biking was something I undertook to push myself beyond what I thought I was capable of. I’d gotten into it partly because it seemed like lunacy in the first place. I wasn’t very fast, but I became stronger, quicker to react, more physically and mentally resilient to crashes. In many ways it was a lot like founding a start-up. Eighteen months in and I find myself doing things I never dreamed I’d be able to do.
I open my computer and go to my trash folder: “An invitation to ride the Absa Cape Epic in 2016.”
The words buzz around my head as they have all year: Get up. Try again. Just say yes.
WWhen you’re trying to create a business, very little else matters. Everything falls away. Food, sleep, relationships, everything that is important to you… gone. By the time I start training for the Cape Epic a few weeks later, I’ve hardly touched my bicycles in 15 months, despite moving from London to Girona, the heartland of European cycling.
Every training ride is hard. Just getting on the bike is hard. Three years behind a computer screen have left me with lingering back pain. My feet hurt, squeezed into too-tight
Quitting isn’t an option for me – but it’s the devil on my shoulder, jeering me with every pedal stroke.
shoes. Barely able to fit into my old cycling clothing, I’m limited to one or two old polyester team kits that were at one time too baggy. I’m angry at everyone every time I try to ride, but mostly I’m angry at myself. How did I believe I could make Bowndling a success?
My good friend Luke Batten, founder of the cycling website and clothing company Tenspeed Hero and a photography professor at the University of Illinois, has agreed to be my race partner. He faces many of the same challenges I do. But despite working long hours, spending a third of his life on aeroplanes, and absorbing the stress of wanting to make it all work, Luke manages to always exude joy.
I’m going to need that balance. Admitting failure and learning to move on isn’t a switch you can flip. Finding a first rung on the ladder out of despair and personal worthlessness is hard to do. You’re blind down there. Fear and emptiness flood in daily.
In her book Rising Strong, social scientist Brene Brown describes this hole of failure as the ‘ rumble’. It’s the thing that happens while you’re fighting to get out.
KKeep going. When you think you might not make it, just don’t stop pedalling.
389 metres left. 388. 387. 386… I’m alone on the rocky final ascent into Boschendal on the sixth day of the 2016 Cape Epic. Luke pulled out three days earlier with a back injury. It’s the first time during the race that I’ve felt the creeping heat of failure pry its way around my legs. I didn’t even have the things I’d counted as a success the previous times I’d trained for and done the race. I never got really fast. I didn’t fit into smaller kit. I’d been plagued by injuries and illness right up until a few weeks before the race.
I count down the metres of climbing, my legs aching with that distant but somehow familiar pain brought on by hundreds of kilometres in the saddle. My 2013 Cape Epic teammate, Rachel Fenton, used to remind me that a mountain bike has a way of rolling over everything as long as you keep moving. It only gets dangerous when you start pulling the brakes or putting a foot down.
Giving up isn’t an option for me – this race is my atonement for so many failures – but it’s the devil on my shoulder, jeering me in its nasty, familiar voice with every pedal stroke.
227, 226, 225… F*ck this sh* t. My fingers and toes have lost full sensation, and trapped nerves in my back wreak havoc on my limbs. When you finally start climbing out of the hole of worthlessness, every step risks dropping you back down. What makes you think you can do this? Who do you think you are? I look around. I’m probably seven or eight riders from the back, one of the foolish few who ride the Cape Epic simply on mental grit. If you can run a business and survive when it fails, you can do this. This is nothing. 217, 216, 215… 214… 213. What do I have to prove? Failing at something big strips you of any care you have for the opinions of others. I could be half-naked in the middle of the rider tents and if someone wants to comment on my bulging midriff or cellulitepocked thighs, let them. I’m still going to finish this race.
I see a solo rider from Mauritius ahead of me, his neon-yellow kit inching closer as I make my way along the jeep track. More than a thousand riders blasted over these hills hours before. We’re the people who simply want to finish. Without Luke, I’ve been riding with a couple of teams near the back, mostly the duo of the Gugu Zulu and Maurice Mdlolo. Gugu was a professional rally car driver in South Africa. Every time a fan of his passes us, whoops and shouts greet our tiny peloton of survivors. It keeps us going that day.
But on the next stage, I slip riding over a wooden river crossing, and land hard on my right side. It reopens a cut on my wrist and leaves enormous bruises up my right hip and arm. My bike’s brake levers are knocked 90 degrees out of place, rendering them unusable. Tears well in my eyes as they have almost every day for the last week. I can’t fight them this time.
You don’t deserve to finish. You are deluded. You’re a fraud. Another failure, as usual.
No- one will be surprised.
I climb off my bike, sobbing. I’m swept back to August in that dark room, reading those searing words: “We just don’t see the potential.”
A hand reaches out and grabs my bike. It’s Gugu’s, and he pushes my bike up the hill in front of me. I chase after, shouting at him to stop. I’m done. “Don’t do this to me!”
“If you can’t ride, you walk,” Gugu says. “But you
will finish. You have to.” I make the cut- off time by 10 minutes. The next and final day, we all ride into Meerendal Wine Estate. The crowds have started to dissipate. The DJ is still playing but there’s no fanfare as we cross the line. Many riders are showered and packing to go home. I finish the race in 57 hours, second-to-last overall – one spot ahead of the person who refused to let me rumble in my darkness alone.
Why do we suffer? Why do we choose this path? The Stoic philosophers believed practising hardship brings everything into perspective: we suffer to stop being afraid of failure, to learn how to get back up. And when you’re at the back or at the bottom, getting back up isn’t an end point. It’s the first step out of a much greater darkness. Collyn Ahart is a British-American writer and brand strategist. Gugu Zulu died in July 2016, climbing Mount Kilimanjaro to raise funds for 350 000 girls living in poverty.