RIDE ACROSS BRITAIN
It’s not just 1000 miles of cycling that the 817 riders of the Deloitte Ride Across Britain must overcome, but nine consecutive nights under canvas. We meet the riders going the distance in the country’s biggest Land’s End to John O’Groats sportive…
Behind the scenes at the country’s biggest and best Land’s End to John O’Groats bike ride.
"I’m hurting, mate. Hurting in places I didn’t even know existed,” admits a frayed-around-the-edges Kurt Homewood from his London office, two days since returning home from John O’Groats.
Having had time to get his bearings, to decompress and catch up on the sleep and sanity he’d lost over the preceding 10 days, Kurt was ready to reflect on what was comfortably the most uncomfortable endurance challenge of his life. In boxing parlance, he’d gone all 12 rounds. “It’s completely bashed me up.”
I’d met Kurt at dinner in the Ludlow basecamp, three stages and over 300 miles into the country-spanning ride. I was here for just a few days in a non-riding capacity, having been ruled out through injury, and my lucidity as an observer helped me see just how much some were losing theirs. Riders packed the massage and medical area within the clubhouse of Ludlow racecourse, injecting life into their ailing bodies, reduced not just through three days of tough West Country riding but three days of living at close quarters in tents. The energy of day one in Land’s End had given way, in some, to exhaustion, with some facing up to the consequences of putting their bodies through something unprecedented.
“My friend who’s with me on this really suffered on day three,” said Simon Parton, a software engineer from the southwest and experienced multi-day cyclist. “A lot got hit the same way. We’d done three centuries on the trot by the time we got to Ludlow. People will train at the weekends on Saturdays and Sundays, but rarely do three days in a row. The first thing they hit coming out of Bath on day three was Bannerdown Hill (2.74km @ 5.9 per cent). It was a shock.”
Kurt fell into this category. Wide-eyed, and furiously tapping his leg under the dinner table, he wasn’t shy in sharing his suffering. Sure, there was the riding bit. “Nothing could prepare for me for those first two days in Cornwall. 16,000ft of climbing, hill after hill. Those hills down there aren’t exactly sleeping policemen…”
Night terrors
But Kurt’s real problems were of the nocturnal variety. At 47, this was his camping debut. With nine days straight sleeping under the stars on the cards, on top of 100-mile days in the saddle, this wasn’t so much dipping his toe in the water as hurling himself off the high board.
In Ludlow, he reckoned he’d had four hours’ sleep combined across the three previous nights at camp, as his body was simply unable to shut down from the rigours and adrenaline of the road. Once he got past the halfway mark he settled into a routine and started to get more sleep, but one gets the impression it would take a hefty sum to get him under canvas again for any stretch of time, particularly if it involves bikes.
“You get to camp, you’re sweaty, you’re exhausted, you need to get your tent, lug
“MASTER YOUR PREPARATION AND THE STRESSES OF BASE CAMP LIFE DON’ T SEEM QUITE SO ARDUOUS”
your bag across a field, queue for a shower. It could be raining. Little things become a big deal when you’re knackered.”
The camping seemed to be a near universal problem for RAB riders, even if there’s a sliding scale of discontent.
“You’re almost guaranteed to have a snorer within five metres,” says Simon. And because tents are randomly assigned, “you’d experience a load of different snores. I had ear plugs and headphones over the top, so I went prepared but it’s still tough.”
“It’s the camping part of the RAB that makes it such a challenge,” Simon reckons. As a veteran of several Haute Routes, the seven-day races in the Alps and Pyrenees, he doesn’t believe the riding of the RAB comes close to being as tough.
“On the Haute Route, you finish a stage, explode your bag in your hotel room, and you can easily dry your wet clothes. That’s really not an option here. They have a dry room but it’s a real fight for space!”
As the RAB’s CEO Nick Tuppen told me in our preview feature earlier this year, your tolerance for camping on the RAB, indeed, tolerance in general, is often proportional to how well trained you are. Master your preparation and the stresses of basecamp life don’t seem quite so arduous.
That was certainly true for Paul German, 51, who, to get from his Maidstone home to the start in Land’s End, had taken the unconventional step of driving to John O’Groats and cycling down solo, in just seven days, carrying 15kg of kit and sleeping in B&Bs.
His reasons were two-fold: firstly, he’d done the RAB in 2014 and wanted to push his limits. “I didn’t find it massively hard the first time around, so I came up with this mad idea to do the double. Once I’d planted the seed I couldn’t think of anything else.”
He also wanted to ride in memory of his sister, whom he lost to secondary breast cancer last year, and to raise money for the Second Hope charity. “After seeing what she went through, a little bit of pain going up a few hills is nothing.”
For Paul, if riding it solo and mapping his own route felt like more of an achievement, the return leg with the RAB was more enjoyable.
“There’s great camaraderie with Threshold [the organisers], a great experience that I’d recommend to anyone.” And he includes the camping in that. “If you did it in hotels it wouldn’t be the same experience. I actually like camping, I did it a lot as a kid. We all hate snoring but if I took the ‘Plus’ package [sleeping in hotels, and limited to 80 places in 2018] I’d feel like an outsider. Camping is part and parcel of the event. My ear plugs weren’t good enough to block out the noise but when you’re as knackered as I was you’d sleep on a bed of nails.”
A ride for all
Like any cycling event, the RAB attracts riders from right across the fitness and experience spectrum, from the rider on the heavy fat bike coming home in the front group in the early afternoon – and dropping the two visiting Team Dimension Data pro riders on various descents – to the person who took three hours to make it 20 miles on the first stage, then blamed their performance on the first feed station being too far away. I didn’t get chance to speak to the chap on the fat bike, but the smart money is on him sleeping like a baby.
The same goes, tangentially, for the 15 hard-working members of staff in charge of the 2800 Quechua tents. While there’s half this number in terms of riders and staff, such is the challenge of erecting and packing the tents that they have to split them between basecamps. By the time riders got to the Ludlow basecamp, they were already setting up another 1400 tents for the end of the
next stage at Haydock. After the riders left Ludlow, the tents would be packed away and shipped straight to Penrith, and so on. The sheer number of tents, lined up with such precision, was impressive, even if their proximity, come nightfall, necessitates industrial-grade ear protection to quell the operatic orchestra of snores.
Anyone who’s toured by bike and endured the frustration of putting up even a single tent would have nothing but admiration for a group averaging around a hundred each per day. That, however, wasn’t the only impressive aspect of the RAB’s infrastructure. It’s really a travelling town, bowling into its destination in a hurry and leaving just as fast without a trace. Because basecamps are often on race courses or green spaces they can be miles from civilisation, so the food needs to be good and plentiful as there’s little alternative. Provided, for the most part, by Lulu’s of Frome, it’s superb, and comes by the bucket load. Cyclists have healthy appetites, but the volume of desserts in Ludlow during our evening there was overwhelming.
Riding centuries, one after another, without rest, for nine days is something many of these 800 riders won’t have done in the past, or will do again. Nothing comes easy on a Land’s End to John O’Groats ride, particularly when done over such a short period of time, and separated by nights in tents. To hit such lofty goals, you have to, at times, dig very deep.
“You finish a stage and want to chuck the bike in a hedge, but you’re back in love with it by morning,” one rider said at the finish in Ludlow, after nine hours in the saddle.
Like any endurance sport, for the well-trained, the RAB is much less of an ordeal. See the numbers nerd walking up and down the finish area in Ludlow to punch his Garmin stage distance up to 100 miles, or the group plotting to add another 20 miles on to the John O’Groats stage to boost their overall mileage to a satisfyingly tidy thousand.
Simon was in the enviable position, fitness-wise, to soak in the ride and not get frazzled by the “little things”, as Kurt described it. Where other major multi-day cycling events share the hallmarks of races, the RAB’s challenge, and one that is actively encouraged, is to merely complete this iconic cycling journey. ‘Breathless sightseeing,’ Threshold calls it.
Beautiful country
“We were often taking 10 hours to do a stage,” says Simon. “Not because we struggled but because we’d take long breaks in coffee shops, stop to take photos and enjoy the scenery.”
What did he learn about his country? “You realise how big and beautiful Scotland is. You get north of Edinburgh and there are still three full days of riding left. The scenery up there is the equal of anything I’ve seen in the Alps. Scotland’s gone straight onto my to-do list, to revisit the climbs we saw but didn’t get the chance to do.”
Even Kurt could appreciate Scotland, finally settling into the ride north of the border. Not that he wasn’t happy for it to finish, joking that he chucked his bike into the North Sea when he arrived in John O’Groats.
“Highlights? I met some lovely people. It’s a shame as I’m normally a very social person, but I just wasn’t myself. At dinner, or on the bike, I was just in my own little world, and I regret that.”
What did he learn about himself? “That I’m not a camper. And that I showed grit in the face of adversity. I battled through some dark times, when nothing was making me happy, but I held on in there.”
“I BATTLED THROUGH SOME DARK TIMES, WHEN NOTHING WAS MAKING ME HAPPY, BUT I HELD ON IN THERE”
Paul, who had as good a look at Britain over his 16 days in the saddle, singled out the Cairngorms for praise. Having ridden the western side of Scotland on his way down, through Glencoe and what was the old RAB route until this year, the fabulous scenery of the new route, through the ski centres of Glenshee and the Lecht, lifted his spirits at a time when he was starting to suffer.
How could he possibly top things after this year’s heroics? While his next target is ticking off his 100th running marathon (he’s on 81), he’s content to leave his LEJOG PB at seven days. “I don’t see myself as an ultra-endurance athlete, as someone who could do it in five days. I’m married and if I started training for that sort of thing, I soon wouldn’t be.”