First it was IPWR, then it was Basil, then TCR for a while, and now it’s back to being IPWR!
Well, I made it! I had a great trip, saw some fantastic things and met some wonderful people. Right now though I’m thoroughly enjoying being ridiculously well looked after by some wonderful friends, old and new, so the stories will have to wait. Shouldn’t be long though!
Not staying here though, sounds like someone got robbed last night!
Right, made it to SA. The wind has not been kind, but it hasn’t been kind to anyone else either. Well needed lunch break right now though. I’m well behind schedule, and the areas giving me issues include:
They are all a bit inter-related, and I’m really not sure which is the biggest issue right now, but so far none of them have actually stopped me, so time to get back on the road!
Right, day 1 is pretty much over. Didn’t go perfectly to plan, beginning with knee pain less than an hour in, and then having my light mounting bracket snap a few hours after that, and then realising that the charge cable that has worked perfectly for years and still did last week had chosen today to fail.
There should be a light in this picture…
Happily though the knee seemed to stabilise with a bit of nursing, and I was able the reattach the light with a special high tech engineering solution, known to those of us in the industry as “zip-ties”, and I had another option for charging cables, so with a bit of stuffing around I managed to get 428km in today. I’ve just stopped for dinner and am basically done, I will just roll down the road to find somewhere to sleep.
Coverage is pretty patchy here, so posts might be few and far between!
Rowan
Ok, it’s time. We dipped some wheels in the Indian Ocean today. Now it’s just one quick sleep, a moment of silence to show respect to a great man, and I and 50-odd other riders will head out of Fremantle, aiming for the Pacific. Maybe I’ll see you on the road!
It’s nearly time! Less than two days and I’ll be heading off. Been enjoying WA in the meantime, but now it is time to move into panicked packing mode! Happily, things are pretty close to ready…
The bit that I like though is looking at the tracking page. A few days ago if you looked at https://indianpacificwheelrace2018.maprogress.com/ you saw a map of the world, because riders were spread everywhere. Check it now though and it is centered tightly around Fremantle. It’s getting exciting!
That is of course the link to follow the ride, so I hope you’ll all check it regularly and come out to wave if I happen to be riding by your house!
If you don’t know the background, back in 2016 a product called LVL appeared on Kickstarter. It promised to actively measure hydration levels and give alerts when you needed to drink, amongst other things. I’m a big believer in the benefits of proper hydration, and I think a big part of my quite reasonable result in IPWR was because I drank more than most as we raced our way across the dry plains of Australia. For the sort of non-stop unsupported races that I like to do (as well as a whole host of other uses in health and well-being) this little device offered significant benefits. There was just one problem… Continue reading “LVL Owners Sharing Thread”
The Indian Pacific Wheel Race 2018 has been cancelled. This made me very sad, and so in its place I shall be doing a very similar ride, that I shall simply call Basil.
If you want to read about other rides I have done, with less interesting names like “Tour de France” or “The PeDal Ed Transcontinental Race No. 5”, then there are links to them at tourletour.com. If you want to read about Basil though, you are in the right place, as the following pages shall chronicle Basil. Enjoy!