May 3, 2012
Grueling Travel through Beautiful Places: the Madness of Extreme Races
These cyclists are enjoying another day on the trail in the Crocodile Trophy, in northeastern Australia, considered one of the most punishing bicycle races in the world. Photo by Regina Stanger/Crocodile Trophy.
As the famed grand tours of summer begin rolling through Europe on carbon frames and ultra-light wheels, a number of lesser known but perhaps much more rigorous races are also gearing to go. They include cycling and foot races that take athletes through some of the world’s most spectacular and rugged country, as well as to the boundaries of what humans can endure, physically and psychologically. The more demanding of them allow no rest or sleep—unlike the more publicized stage races—and amount to nonstop endurance tests lasting as long as a week or more. Some of them also allow almost anyone to enter, in case you’re interested in trying your muscles in what might be the most unenjoyable tour you’ll ever take of the Sierra Nevada, the Rocky Mountains, the American desert or the Australian outback. Here are a few options for your next vacation:
Race Across America. Called RAAM and widely considered the hardest road cycling race in the world, the event starts in mid-June in Oceanside, California and leads several hundred dogged competitors more than 3,000 miles across the entire country to Annapolis, Maryland—without stopping. Last year, Christoph Strasser, now 29, pedaled the distance in eight days, eight hours and six minutes. RAAM soloists (racers in the team divisions take turns riding) may take cat naps totaling an hour of shuteye per day, but the general idea is, you snooze, you lose. The race is so demanding that many cyclists don’t finish at all. Some have died trying. Others begin losing their wits. Some solo riders may even lose their teeth as they eat sugary foods nonstop to replace the 10,000 calories that they burn a day, and for those that don’t brush at each pit stop, teeth may decay rapidly. To get a good taste of what this race offers before you consider attempting it, read Hell on Two Wheels, in which author Amy Snyder elaborates on the many forms of misery that one can expect while pedaling without rest across the continent.
Badwater Ultramarathon. For many foot racers, running one marathon isn’t enough. Nor are two, or three, or even four, and the Badwater Ultramarathon amounts to five—135 miles of trotting through some of the hottest, grittiest country in the world. It begins as low as one can go in the western hemisphere while still keeping your feet dry—at 282 feet below sea level in Death Valley. From there, it only goes up, with runners eventually finishing—or trying to, anyway—at Whitney Portal, 8,360 feet above sea level. As though such mileage and elevation gain weren’t strenuous enough, the race takes place in July, when temperatures may easily exceed 110 degrees. No one has ever died in the Badwater Ultramarathon, but between two and four out of every 10 runners fail to finish each year. The record time of completion is 22 hours, 51 minutes.
Western States Endurance Run. What began in 1955 in the Sierra Nevada as a 100-mile horseback competition shifted to a super-marathon foot race in the mid 1970s as men and women began to wonder if they, too, could trot for some 20 hours and 100 miles nonstop. Today, the “Western States 100” takes place every Saturday of the last full weekend in June as hundreds of the hardest-core runners in the world start on the notorious 2,500-foot climb over the first four miles and proceed on old mining trails that ascend a total of just over 18,000 vertical feet. The route goes from Squaw Valley to Auburn, over country so rough that only horses, hikers and helicopters can come to help, in case runners should fall ill or injured. The race begins at 5 a.m. sharp, and runners must cross the finish line by 11 a.m. The next day.
For many of us, a 30-minute jog will do. But this runner, just finished with the Western States 100, has been trail trotting for over 27 hours. Photo courtesy of Flickr user runnr_az.
Paris-Brest-Paris. Considered the great granddad of ultracycling endurance events, the hallowed Paris-Brest-Paris was first held in 1891, an 800-mile sprint from Paris, out to the coast at Brest and back again. Like the Race Across America, the PBP is a catnapping affair, with cyclists going nonstop and striving to complete the ride in less than the 90-hour time limit. But unlike RAAM, PBP is a ride, not a race—though it once was. The contest took place once a decade, until 1951. Now, the PBP occurs once every four or five years as a recreational ride, or randonnée. The most recent PBP took place in 2011. While the stakes in the PBP are far less than in pro racing events, cyclists must still abide by some rules. Notably, there is generally no vehicle support allowed, and riders are expected to make their own repairs, fix their own flats and, if they need an emergency recharge, stop for croissants and espresso on their own dime, and clock.
Crocodile Trophy. At more than 500 miles and self-touted as “the hardest, longest and most adventurous mountain bike race in the world,” this one just sounds awful. But the Crocodile Trophy, set in the low-latitude tropics in northeast Australia, is a stage race, offering food, rest and plenty of sleep every single day. RAAM cyclists may seem to have it rougher, but if Croc Trophy contenders had to do it all at once, the effort just might kill them. The late-October race is off-road, meaning gravel, rocks, ruts, puddles (potentially containing crocodiles lying in ambush), dust and lots of crashing. If this sounds like a pleasant way to see Australia, then sign up; the race welcomes men and women over 18 years of age and registration for the 2012 event is open until August 20.
And for a race that’s already underway, World Cycle Racing Grand Tour. Jason Woodhouse is burning about 11,000 calories a day—but unlike most pro racers, Woodhouse does not have a van shadowing him with food, gear and mechanical support. The 24-year-old from England is currently racing around the world in an unsupported journey that will cross every line of longitude on Earth, include 18,000 miles of pedaling and finish right where it began, in London. The fastest recorded time for the same ride is currently 164 days, and Woodhouse—who is carrying camping gear and racing against nine others—is planning to demolish that record with a completion time of 130 days. As he goes, Woodhouse is raising funds for Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. He also aims to demonstrate that the bicycle can be adequately used in virtually any trip shorter than five miles. On an itinerary that includes about 130 miles of cycling most days—plus a few airplane trips—his point is well made.
Want to train for an extreme race? Consider the Extreme World Races Adventure Academy, which offers five-day courses in long-distance adventuring in cold, icy, miserable landscapes. The academy is in Norway, and the session includes a three-day mini expedition on the ice and tundra. Bundle up, and enjoy the scenery if you can.
December 1, 2011
Books on Bike Perfection and Women’s Bike-Won Freedom
Sue Macy's Wheels of Change
Sue Macy‘s elaborately illustrated 2011 book, Wheels of Change: How Women Rode the Bicycle to Freedom (With a Few Flat Tires Along the Way), describes the surprising role that the bicycle played in freeing women—both physically and spiritually—from the oppressive and conservative constraints of 19th century America. Bicycles at the time were clumsy, heavy things made of iron and wood and sometimes called “boneshakers” until rubber tires softened the ride. But men were getting a kick out of them, and women wanted in on the fun. Their clothing was a problem, as Macy points out:
Imagine a population imprisoned by their very clothing; the stiff corsets, heavy skirts, and voluminous petticoats that made it difficult to take a deep breath, let alone exercise…How suffocated women must have felt. And how liberated they must have been as they pedaled their wheels toward new horizons.
To efficiently ride a bike there was only one thing to do: Take it off. Skin-tight lycra and tube tops were still some years down the road, but women were, at last, freed from the ridiculous layers that had physically anchored them to house, porch and trimmed Victorian lawn for ages. They swung their legs over the frames of their bikes and pedaled off on adventures, often with male companions. Macy tells of one bitter curmudgeon named Charlotte Smith who said in 1896 that “the alarming increase of immorality among young women in the United States” was a product of the bicycle. Smith also said that the bicycle was “the devil’s advance agent morally and physically.”
Other people, Macy tells us, saw the virtues of the bicycle.
“A girl who rides a wheel is lifted out of herself and her surroundings,” declared one Ellen B. Parkhurst. “She is made to breathe purer air, see fresher and more beautiful scenes, and get an amount of exercise she would not get otherwise.”
(Sounds like Parkhurst had the spirit of a bike tourist.)
The bicycle impacted the world in measurable ways in the 1890s. Cigar sales took a nosedive, Macy reports, as the collective preoccupation with cycling replaced smoking in stodgy reading rooms. Use of morphine, popular at the time as a sleep inducer, declined as people discovered how a little vigorous exercise could induce relaxation and sleep. Pastors and priests even observed that church attendance began dropping as more people opted to spend their Sundays jerseyed up, sipping off their CamelBaks and shredding sweet singletrack.
Well, riding bikes, anyway.
Cycling, unarguably, was fun, and voices of the conservative naysayers were drowned out as the American bicycle industry exploded. For instance, 17 manufacturers and a 40,000-bike output in 1890 increased to 126 manufacturers and the production of nearly a half million bicycles in 1895. Already, in fact, bike builders were customizing designs to accommodate women.
It was official: Ladies were on board. Critical mass had been reached, and there seemed to be no stopping the craze.
Some women engaged in competitions that lasted days as they pedaled hundreds of miles around oval tracks. For other women, just cycling somewhere, anywhere, was enough—and they began touring. In 1894, Annie Londonderry rode 1,300 miles between New Hampshire and Chicago. Later she would travel by boat and bicycle around the world, finishing with a ride from San Francisco to Chicago. Macy doesn’t tell us if lionhearted Londonderry camped out, how much weight she lost, what was the highest pass that she tackled, if she ever ran out of food or if she saw grizzly bears out West, but adventurous spirits, plainly, were taking flight.
Macy’s book ends abruptly and with a sad shocker: The bicycle craze curled up and died, for the automobile had been born. “By the turn of the century,” Macy writes, “the bicycle’s heyday was over and a new mechanical wonder promised to transport men and women faster and farther than ever before.” Great. Cars, traffic and suburbia were coming. But on bicycles, women had gained a huge spurt of momentum in gaining basic rights, and so they stepped off their bikes, straightened their dresses and went off to pursue other liberties.
Free at Last: This Sicilian, touring in Greece, may owe her liberty to the women's independence movement of the 1890s, described in Sue Macy's Wheels of Change.
In another book published this year, It’s All About the Bike: The Pursuit of Happiness on Two Wheels, the history of the bicycle goes on into the 20th century. The book is author Robert Penn’s account of his personal quest to find the perfect bicycle. Along the way he describes some of the same history of which Sue Macy writes. For example, Penn adds to our growing accumulation of bike trivia that Annie Londonderry carried a revolver in her saddlebag. What a lady! But mostly, Penn tells the history of the machine and the development of its many components—complex products of engineering that today allow us to scale mountains, freewheel back down, stop on a dime, keep at it for hours without getting a sore rear end, and so on. He talks frames, wheels, saddles, gears, hubs, derailleurs and chains. He looks at fixed-gear bikes, road bikes, mountain bikes and hand-built bikes so dashing that it seems foolish even to ride them. He chitchats with bike builders who are constantly pushing the improvement of every nook, cranny and corner of the bicycle.
Penn recalls for us, too, a great Ernest Hemingway quote that every cycle tourist should know: “It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them…you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through.” And I’d always taken Hemingway for the sort who just writes short sentences in Parisian cafes. Seems he would have made a fine touring partner.
In one humorous encounter in a Welsh village, where Penn had just moved in, he describes the locals’ inability to comprehend why a man would choose to ride a bike unless he had to. In a pub one evening, a fellow asks Penn if he had lost his driver’s license. Penn tells the man that he simply loves riding and does so by choice. A year later in the same pub, the same man takes Penn aside once more.
“‘I see yor on the bike still, boy,’ he said. ‘A long time to be banned now, see. You can tell me…did you daw something tehr-ribble in a car? Did you kill a child?’”
We’re reminded that many people still regard the bicycle as a toy and by no means a valid form of transportation. But, as Penn writes, “The cultural status of the bicycle is rising again…In fact, there is a whisper that we might today be at the dawn of a new golden age of the bicycle.”
