Hi,
I got an email the other day asking for some of the more detailed statistics of the ride. Now of course the big problem is that I don’t actually know what they are. For a start, I don’t yet have the exact location of the control points or the required sections. I’m expecting that these will be announced sometime in April or May (last year it was towards the end of May), mainly because for a big chunk of March the guy who created the race, Mike Hall, will actually be racing in the Indian Pacific Wheel Race and won’t be working on this. But they will be announced eventually. When they are announced I will be able to decide on the route I will take, work out just how much climbing there will be and how long it should take me all together in riding time, make some decisions regarding sleeping and stopping time, and figure out riding times and distances for each day. Maybe even make some plans about stopping points, but that might be a bit much!
I do have some constraints. There is a finisher party in Meteora on 12th of August that I would love to be at. Unfortunately, some dear friends are getting married in Frankfurt on 12th of August and I am not missing that, so no finisher party this year for me. That obviously means that I will need to do it again later so I can attend the finisher party, and to ensure myself an entry in the future I probably need to finish at least top 20 this year. Now last year, finishing in less than 12 days, 14 hours and 30 minutes would have got me into the top 20. So that is the goal. Of course, faster is better.
But this will have me arriving in Meteora around lunchtime on Thursday. From there it is around 280km (so an easy day’s ride) to Thessaloniki Airport, where you can get a pretty good flight to Frankfurt. So that sounds like the go.
In terms of distance, that works out to be about 321km per full day. Of course, that isn’t how it will go, because some days will have a lot of climbing, some days a lot of wind, some days terrible weather and some days all of the above! Some days will be perfect though, so there will be a fair variation in the distance covered each day. You usually go a lot faster across a plain than up a hill! I tend to think that this year the times might be a little faster as well, so I will probably be aiming for slightly over 321km, on average. Now that I see the number written down I have to say that it seems like a lot – I am pretty sure that I can count the number of days I have ridden further than that on one hand, and the only two specific examples I can think of had me finishing pretty well exhausted. Happily though I still have around 19 weeks to train…
I also got asked to put up a picture of myself, so here is me thinking about riding 321km a day…
…every day…
…for 12 days…
…over mountains and through the driving rain…
I’m sure it’ll be fun!
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