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Day Nine – Half Way!

It’s IndyPac season! As I write this, I have one monitor tuned to the 2022 race, and I’m watching the facebook feed on my phone. I know a lot of the dots, and I really wish I was one of them. I’m not, so I’m compensating, by writing about my own adventures. Next up is Day Nine.

It was dark, when the alarm went off. I lay in bed for a moment, appreciating having gotten a good night’s sleep in a comfortable bed, then I threw back the covers and got up to greet the day. I’d saved a slice of pizza from the night before to get me started on breakfast, so I gulped that down as I got dressed then I rolled out into the pre-dawn light.

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Day Eight – A Dark Day

The next day dawned… well, grey and overcast to be honest. I headed out of the hotel and went straight to get breakfast. Someone decided at some point that Kimba is halfway across Australia, and to celebrate that they (or someone else) erected a giant Galah. I really can’t think of a better way of marking the halfway point, even if it is actually only the halfway point if you are taking a specific route from Perth through to Sydney. Well, to be honest, I can think of one better way, but happily they also built a bakery, so they had all bases covered, and I had breakfast covered.

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Day 7 – A Lazy Day

Kristoff Alleghert is a legend in ultra-cycling. He has won some of the toughest races in the world with huge margins, and had a solid lead in IPWR 2017 when it was halted. He doesn’t write nearly as much as I do, but he does write a bit (and what he does write, he surely writes quicker), and one thing I remember reading from him is “Standing around waiting for the rain to stop is not a solution”. In my defence, I was not standing.

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Day Six – Including Bonus Rant

Other than the Yalata Aboriginal Community, which had access restrictions because of Covid19, there isn’t a whole lot between Nullarbor Roadhouse and Nundroo. What there is, though, is quite beautiful. I had deliberately slept pretty late because I didn’t want to be riding into the morning sun (or more to the point I didn’t want the cars and trucks behind me driving into it), and then I accidentally had a very slow breakfast. It was a compromised breakfast, too.

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Day Five – Time for Some Pictures

A good night’s sleep would have done me good. I was exhausted, and when I had climbed into my bivvy I had pretty much just closed my eyes and been instantly asleep, but now my eyes snapped open and although it was pitch dark I was wide awake, and I was worried.

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Day Four – Race for the Border

It was grey. That was the first thing that struck me when I woke – the sky was grey. Given that I was about to ride a couple of hundred kilometres through basically desert, a grey sky wasn’t a bad thing. Clear skies and baking sun make for a tough day on the bike. Lower temperatures would make it much more pleasant. Driving torrential rain, on the other hand, would make it less pleasant. So for the first moments as I lay in my bivvy looking up at the grey sky I was wondering which of those it would turn out to be. Then I realised that whichever it was going to be, right now it was actually pretty good for riding, so best I get up and do so.

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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.

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Day One

Day One: Leaving Freo

There we stood, lined up in front of the lighthouse, in total silence as we paid our respects to the late, great, Mike Hall. I was thinking about Mike’s approach to life and what he would have done with the opportunity before us all now, when suddenly a voice broke into my thoughts. Damian was saying “See you in Sydney”. It was time to go. IPWR 2021 had started.

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The road to the finish line is seldom straight…

…so just before we head there, here’s a short little detour, in case you were worried that there wouldn’t be more racing!

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Cloud Ride Prologue

Ok, if you haven’t already heard the news, I’m heading back for another crack at the Transcontinental. I’m all signed up and will be heading off from Bulgaria in late July. I know I can ride that far, so the aim for this time is to do it quickly. I developed a great training plan, and have totally failed to stick to it, but hopefully things will pick up in the next few weeks.

Anyway, with that in mind it seemed like time to do another long race, so I did. There is a great off-road race called the Cloudride that starts and finishes in Canberra that I’ve thought about doing for a long time, and I’m not doing it this year either.

What I did do though was the Cloudride Prologue, a 500km race designed as an entry into bikepacking and/or a testing ground for gear and set-up.

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