Day Three – A Second Time for Everything

I woke up early. That wasn’t the plan, so I went back to sleep. I was pretty keen to avoid missing too much sleep through the race, and I knew if I ran myself to exhaustion at the start it would take a really long time to recover and start feeling good again, so I went back to sleep.

The next time I woke up the sun was high and it was already warm. I got up.

I went and got some breakfast from the roadhouse, and then headed out of town. This for me felt like the point where the race really begins. Until here supplies had been plentiful and it never really felt like you were alone, but from Norseman it is about 186km to Balladonia, and there’s not a great deal between them, so along with my breakfast I’d bought some supplies of food and extra water to get me through.

I figured 9 hours should be a fairly conservative estimate for how long it would take me to get to Balladonia, and I didn’t want to have to stop before then, so I took a whole lot of water. I usually drink from my hydration pack, which I noticed actually sparked a bit of discussion on the dotwatcher facebook group with people saying it was insane to ride with a pack on. I’ve got a great one from Source Hydration that is nice and stable, sits comfortably and is designed for ventilation. When it’s stable, comfortable, cool and means you stay much better hydrated than you otherwise would I would say it would be insane to not ride with it! But each to their own. It is only three litres though, which meant I needed to buy an extra couple of large bottles and strap them onto my Tailfin. It worked, but there are some much better ways to do it available now, so I will be improving the system before the next race!

I managed to get travel the 189km to Balladonia with only six stops… It is funny to look back and see how many stops I had as I rode – the plan was to just ride and not stop, because that is the way to be fast, but in fact I was sometimes stopping multiple times in an hour. The quick stops of a few minutes are not a problem – it takes a few minutes to put on sunscreen, maybe clean your sunglass or apply some chamois cream or have a pee, refill your hydration pack, and those things need to be done, so a short stop every couple of hours makes sense. One of these stops was over half an hour though, and there really isn’t much to do for over half an hour on the roadside between Norseman and Balladonia.

Despite the stops, I rolled into Balladonia in the end, as the sun was getting low in the sky. That was absolutely not to be the end of my day, but was a great stop for dinner and supplies. So great that I ended up staying for nearly an hour and a half…

I used that time wisely – I was basically eating and drinking for all of it. My legs were finally starting to feel good and the cramps seemed to have gone away, so I was planning for some good progress across the Nullarbor. That takes fuel though, so I ate a lot. It was a beautiful sunset and I sat outside to watch it while I ate, and as I did so various locals came by and said g’day.

A lot of Aussies tend to react with hostility to something they don’t understand. A disappointingly high number don’t understand using your own energy to move you somewhere, and a higher number don’t understand why you’d ride across a continent. When one of the people who reacts with hostility is also one of the people who doesn’t understand why you’d ride a bike the conversation almost always starts off with an aggressive tone. Tonight was no different.

The aggression is gone. Curiosity and even a touch of respect have replaced it. He looks to his mates.

“Hey guys, come over here and meet this crazy bastard, he reckons he’s riding to Sydney!”

It was a conversation I had countless times across the country. The aggression wasn’t always there, but the amazement basically always was. Which is odd, because people have been riding across Australia for a really long time, and in any given year hundreds of people do it. It isn’t easy, but it isn’t that hard either, and with enough time a huge proportion of the population could do it. But still, the people who have never consider it are amazed. I like to think that in a small way maybe I help those people to think maybe they could do more than they had realised.

We ended up having a good chat, but then I realised I really did have to go. I knew the roadhouse at Caiguna would be closed, but thanks a certain lucky legend (g’day, Legend) I knew the code to get into the toilets. That’s quite important because firstly you need to go to the toilet even if you’re doing IndyPac, and secondly a nice warm and spacious toilet block makes a great place to do any stretching you need to do and to get changed into something warmer for the night-time. So I was keen to get there and stop just after it, rather than stopping before, which meant I needed to keep moving today.

It’s about 180km from Balladonia to Caiguna, and on average it’s downhill. It’s also pretty straight. In fact, you pretty much ride straight out of Balladonia for about 25km, take a little left turn, and then keep going until you reach Caiguna. There might be  few extra wiggles in there but it does include the “90 Mile Straight”, which is the longest stretch of straight road in Australia (and something like the sixth longest in the world, I think). Lots of people tell me they would get bored doing a ride like this, and I tell them there is always something to think about, but this section is different.

Now in 2018 I hit the start of the 90 Mile Straight as the sun was going down. There is a sort of barren beauty about the country around there, and for a while I was watching that as I rode, until the sun set. With no moon to speak of I spent the next 100km or so riding along a straight road with nothing but the patch of road illuminated by my headlights to entertain me. Every now and then the road widens out to allow for use as an emergency runway if needed and that gave me something to think about, but with no aeroplanes to be seen even that novelty eventually wore thin. I pretty much never listen to music while I’m riding outdoors, but that night in 2018, after around 80km of straight road and knowing I had another 20km to get to a place with food and a bed I could feel that I was falling into a slump. I was, in fact, getting bored. I was out too late, and I had nothing in my brain. To get free I turned to the playlist that one of my favourite people in the world had put together for me, and with a bit of help I managed to shake the slump off (shake it off, Whoo-hoo-hoo!) and rolled in to Caiguna exhausted but satisfied.

In 2021, the sun set while I was in Balladonia. I headed out, turned left, and again, no moon, again, no aeroplanes, again, no corners. I actually knew Caiguna roadhouse would be closed and was much better prepared this time, not needing or wanting a bed there, but I wanted to be there when I got up the next morning for breakfast, so I still had a 160km to ride without so much as a corner. The one consolation was that my rear end was starting to get sore. Granted, not much of a consolation, but at least it gave me something to think about.

Leading up to the race I had planned to get new riding kit for the race. I had started working with one supplier who used to make kit I really liked, but then I got some of their stuff and tried it, and it turned out I hated the new version. I started talking to someone else who was saying yes, they could definitely make me what I wanted, and then they suddenly got shut down by Covid. In the meantime I had started hearing things about a Sydney company called Prism. With only a couple of weeks before the start I got in touch to find out what their knicks were like. Initially I ordered the wrong size, and by the time I had the right size I basically only had time for two rides in it before the race started. Those two rides were a track session of about 12km in total, followed by the 500km Cloud Ride Prologue. The knicks impressed me on both of those rides, so I decided their third use would be the 5,500km IPWR. Seemed like a reasonable progression.

Of course, I only had one set of them, so the other set I took were an old set I had – thoroughly worn in and great for a couple of hundred kilometres but not wonderful beyond that, and some essentially brand new knicks with the chamois still stiff and not even slightly softened through use, that I had never even tried with the saddle I was riding on.

The good news is that the new knicks are great, but it turns out that the saddle just isn’t working for me these days (I’m working on what to do about it at the moment – tried a few positional tweaks but it might end up getting replaced) and I was getting pretty sore in some pretty important locations. I spent quite a while thinking about what I could do, and eventually decided to try both sets of knicks simultaneously.

All of that took me a couple of hours to slowly work through in my head, and I was still a long way from Caiguna. For the second time in my life I was bored on my bike. One of the reasons I never used to ride with headphones was that they block your hearing, which I regard as important for safety, but I ride with bone conduction headphones these days that leave my ears clear. There was nothing else for it – on went the headphones, and it was me and Tay-Tay, rolling through the night.

I reached Caiguna about 3am and remembered why I hadn’t been keen to stop at the roadhouse that night anyway. I did some stretching and massage and ate some of the food I had with me and then headed up the road a few hundred meters to sleep. If I needed to go back for breakfast in the morning it wouldn’t be too far to head back. On the other hand, it was only another 65km to Cocklebiddy… I’d see how I felt.