Day Two – A bit longer

It’s been a while since I posted a chapter. My life just got a bit busy and a bit high stress for a while, and I’ve been feeling a bit lost and listless. The stress levels are starting to get under control though and I’m making a few changes and reprioritising a bit. That should mean that the next chapters come a bit faster, especially after I read something the other day that gave me a due date for the complete story. With that due date in mind, I’m now going back to 21st March ’21, which was a pretty good day…

My alarm went off early and straight away I was awake. I knew where I was and I knew why, and I knew I wanted to get up and get moving quickly. Pushing back the flap of my bivy I stopped anyway though. Over the last couple of years it has been especially easy to get caught up in things that don’t matter and forget about the things that do. Waking up that morning under a clear sky filled with a billion stars was beautiful. The race was on, the clock was ticking, but it was very much worth taking just a moment to pause and enjoy that amazing morning. I didn’t take long, but it was absolutely worth taking what time I did take.

I had told myself that I needed to just ride my own race for the first section without even looking at where anyone else was, but as I had a bit of breakfast (half a subway and half a salad that I had left over from the night before) I pulled out my phone anyway, and had a look. I was in the lead! But… only just. While I had chosen to ride out of Merriden before stopping to sleep, Eddie had stopped in Merriden itself, so my lead was around 2km. Best I get going.

Over breakfast I also made a bit of a plan for that day, and it wasn’t a little one – Norseman is a reasonably sized town with a big roadhouse positioned right before the first big jump across to Balladonia, and knew if I could get to Norseman it would set me up for the succession of big jumps coming up between supply points. The only issue was that Norseman was also around 450km away. But that sounded do-able. Maybe.

I packed quickly, and got on the road while it was still dark. Somehow my daily routine at home very seldom allows for riding through the sunrise, which is a shame, because it is an absolutely magical way to start the day. I’d been riding for nearly an hour before the sun was high enough to justify a stop for sunscreen and sunglasses and a quick call home, and although they were still a bit tight my legs were feeling noticeably better than the day before. I figured as long as I kept things steady they should come good. Of course, I didn’t think that until about half an hour in when I felt a cramp coming again, and quickly realised I needed to be a bit more careful!

The terrain was still a bit bumpy but my approach was to watch my heartrate pretty closely and just make sure it never got too high. “Too high” is always a relative number, but today it meant that I was fairly creeping up the hills. I knew it would pay dividends though if it let me settle into the ride and get my legs feeling better, and after all there is no point having low gears if I’m not going to use them!

Coming into Bodallin after around two and a half hours on the bike I stopped at the servo where there was a nice clean toilet that I really appreciated (did I mention that you really don’t want to go to the public toilets in Merriden on a Saturday night?) and some really rather good home-made pies. The morning had been beautiful and crisp, and now it was just starting to warm up but a hot pie was still a good thing.

Back on the bike and rolling nicely I realised how good I was feeling. Yes, my legs were already tired and still on the edge of cramping, but my mind was calm. It is a great feeling once a ride like this starts – the world changes from a terribly complicated place full of last minute plans, logistical challenges, packing problems, and general chaos into the two simple goals of stay alive, and keep moving. The questions and challenges are still hard, but there’s only a few possible answers, and it is so relaxing to just pick the one you want and go with it. At that time I figured Southern Cross should be pretty easy without the need for another stop, so that was the plan I went with.

Southern Cross is a reasonably sized town with quite a few options for food, but I already knew from last time that the BP roadhouse on the road east out of town was pretty good, so I headed there again. I was very glad I did when I rolled up and was immediately greeted by Eddie, who told me he’d give me all the coffee and bananas I wanted! Turns out Eddie is a mate of Callum Henderson (who isn’t a bad bike rider himself – I mean, he’s never won a race across a continent, but he goes ok…😂). Eddie knew all about IndyPac so he’d been watching the dots and was ready for my arrival, which gave me just the mental boost I needed. I took half an hour to fuel up and do some stretching, then grabbed a couple of bananas and hit the road.

The next stop was Yellowdine. My memory of Yellowdine roadhouse from 2018 was of terrible service and starting to eat the last hot sausage roll in the place moments before Sully walked in. Once I realised how bad it tasted I offered to share the remaining part with him (well one has to be practical about these things) but I’m pretty sure he rejected it too. I may be getting confused though because when I stopped there this year the service was great and they had some very good cake! Anyway, I grabbed a few cakes to go and then pretty much kept riding until Coolgardie.

I say pretty much, but there were a few more breaks through the day. Over 155km and a little under 7 hours with the temperature topping out over 40 degrees that’s not surprising or a problem. There are a few things that need to be kept on top of, like applying sunscreen and maintaining the right hydration levels, but I think a key skill of being a great ultra-cyclist (something I aspire to one day be) is to get the balance right between making those essential stops and keeping at an appropriately short duration, and it’s something I still need to work on. You need to look after your body and mind, but spending 20 minutes beside the roadside moaning to yourself about how hot it is is essentially costing you 20 minutes that you could otherwise spend in bed that night!

Anyway, I rolled into Coolgardie at about 7pm, and again went through to the far side before stopping at a roadhouse. They weren’t cooking meals when I got there, but they had a freezer full of meals that they could heat up, so I grabbed a large lasagne and some sort of pie for them to heat, a couple of salads and a whole lot of drinks, and then asked them to make me some sandwiches to take away with me. They looked a bit surprised and confused, and explaining that my plan was to ride through to Norseman (another 170km) that night didn’t seem to clear things up a great deal. They were lovely though and told me to go and sit down and they’d bring the food over, which I did. Choosing to sit outside on the bare concrete also didn’t do much for their confusion, but it meant I could refill my water bottles and lube my chain while I waited, so to me it was the obvious thing to do. All up I spent about 40 minutes stopped in Coolgardie, and left with a belly full of food and a bag full of sandwiches to get me through the night. Things were looking good.

I also had a fall-back plan, just in case Norseman wasn’t going to happen. Widgiemooltha, at about 370km from where I started that morning and only around 80km from Coolgardie had a roadhouse that I expected to be closed, but with the food I had I could get there, camp for the night and get breakfast in the morning. Nothing could go wrong.

Honestly, if it had been a few weeks later into the ride, nothing would have gone wrong, as I would have been a lot less fussy. As it was though, I started on the sandwiches after about 60km, and it seemed like a disaster! I hadn’t been particularly specific about the sandwiches I wanted, thinking more about lasagne at the time. I am pretty sure I had said no salad though, and then changed it to “maybe just a bit of lettuce or something”. Anyway, they had clearly decided I needed my vitamins, because what I had was sandwiches with lettuce, tomato, cucumber and beetroot. If I’d eaten those sandwiches right after they were made then the salad would have been great, but they had been squished into my bag for nearly three hours before I looked at them. At that point I realised that they were made on soggy white bread that had basically been turned to mush (I mean the glue they used to give kids in primary school was basically flour and water, and who (other than the primary school kids, obviously) wants to eat that), and they were extremely unappetising.

So for a moment it seemed like disaster. I told myself that I had no choice but to eat them, and then I argued back and pointed out that the roadhouse at Norseman was 24 hour and I’d be able to get a salad and some separate bread there, with nothing being soggy. I could also get a motel room with a shower where I could wash off the solid crust of salt I had built up. It was a beautiful night, and my legs had actually been feeling better and better all day, and Widgiemooltha had only ever been a fall-back plan anyway. I extracted some of the sandwich filling while carefully avoiding the glue mush bread, put my head down and kept riding.

I ended up arriving at the Norseman Roadhouse bang on 2am. In nearly 21 hours I’d covered 458km. My legs were tight and sore and I knew I needed to spend some time stretching and massaging or I’d suffer the next day, but I got a lot of food and took it to my room, showered then stretched and ate. It was late, but I wasn’t worried. Much as I love riding through a sunrise I knew that for the next few days I would be heading basically due east and the guys driving the road-trains at that time of morning would have the sun in their eyes. That meant that early starts were not a very good idea, so I would take the time for a good sleep and hopefully feel fresh in the morning!