Location: Right across Wales (literally)
Event: Trans Cambrian Way ITT
Weapon of choice: Rigid 26" singlespeed
Result: Find out in Part 2 (oh, the suspense)
I'd like to start with a word of advice for anyone else thinking of having a crack at the Trans Cambrian Way record: DON'T!
Racing the TCW goes against everything the route is about, namely meandering through beautiful, wild, unspoilt countryside, savouring views, getting closer to nature and sharing picnics and beers and laughs with mates in the sunshine. It's not supposed to be about tunnel vision and average speed and energy gels and hours fighting the urge to puke. If ever a journey was supposed to be all about the journey...
But then I knew all that, and I still raced it.
The Trans Cambrian Way
Devised by IMBA in 2006, the TCW is a mostly offroad cycle route that meanders for just over 100 miles across Wales from Knighton on the English border to the Dovey Estuary, taking in as much wilderness as possible while still being 99% rideable all year round.
Essentially, as you can see, it runs from the middle of nowhere to the back of beyond via the land that time forgot:
It's not a waymarked route, making navigation an added challenge. Cunningly, though, it starts and finishes at railway stations, so you don't have to pedal back again afterwards (phew!), and is divided into three bite-sized chunks for normal people, each ending in or vaguely near what passes round here for civilisation so that you can overnight at a local B&B/Bates Motel:
Day 1: Knighton to Rhayader (50 km)
Day 2: Rhayader to Llangurig via Ysbyty Ystwyth (70 km)
Day 3: Llangurig to Dovey Junction (50 km)
Devised by IMBA in 2006, the TCW is a mostly offroad cycle route that meanders for just over 100 miles across Wales from Knighton on the English border to the Dovey Estuary, taking in as much wilderness as possible while still being 99% rideable all year round.
Essentially, as you can see, it runs from the middle of nowhere to the back of beyond via the land that time forgot:
It's not a waymarked route, making navigation an added challenge. Cunningly, though, it starts and finishes at railway stations, so you don't have to pedal back again afterwards (phew!), and is divided into three bite-sized chunks for normal people, each ending in or vaguely near what passes round here for civilisation so that you can overnight at a local B&B/Bates Motel:
Day 1: Knighton to Rhayader (50 km)
Day 2: Rhayader to Llangurig via Ysbyty Ystwyth (70 km)
Day 3: Llangurig to Dovey Junction (50 km)
Red rag to a bull, really. It didn't take long for some nutter to do it all in one day... and then another, and another, and another.
When I first heard about the route earlier this year, I knew straight away I had to ride it. For me the undeniable allure of organised ultra-endurance racing has always been trumped by the tedious prospect of riding round and round in small circles the whole time. The TCW, on the other hand, is a point-to-point. It actually goes somewhere, even if that happens to be nowhere, which makes it more of an adventure. Plus it's pretty much on my doorstep.
And when I saw that the overall record was a whopping 10h58m and the singlespeed record 11h44m - an average speed of only 9-10 miles an hour - I knew straight away I had to race it. It was like it was meant to be.
The independent time trial (ITT) concept
Devised by beardy nerds doubtless brought together by a love of real ales and old trains, offroad ITTs are a way of allowing dysfunctional loners like me to compete against each other cycling solo along a set route without ever having to meet in person. (Or was it to circumvent the law that says you can ride but not race bicycles on bridleways? I never can remember.)
The fastest times confirmed by GPS tracking are then listed online, making it rather like a super-sized Strava segment. But unlike Strava, where anything goes (I mostly get my KOMs on a moped), ITTs have a strict code of conduct:
Devised by beardy nerds doubtless brought together by a love of real ales and old trains, offroad ITTs are a way of allowing dysfunctional loners like me to compete against each other cycling solo along a set route without ever having to meet in person. (Or was it to circumvent the law that says you can ride but not race bicycles on bridleways? I never can remember.)
The fastest times confirmed by GPS tracking are then listed online, making it rather like a super-sized Strava segment. But unlike Strava, where anything goes (I mostly get my KOMs on a moped), ITTs have a strict code of conduct:
- No outside help
- No stashes of food/water/tools/spares/clothing
- Popping into pubs and shops along the way for sustenance
- GPS mapping (like Sat Nav for boy scouts)
- Gears, although they so-like-totally undermine your achievement
- Riding with a friend, if you have one, which is unusual, and frowned upon, and your time will then always have that social stigma attached
Of course, this e=mc2 moment conveniently overlooked a number of blindingly obvious issues:
1. Baggage
Mobile coverage in Mid Wales being more elusive than even the legendary Beast of Bont, there are parts of the route where getting help can mean a two-hour walk or an even longer crawl. You therefore need to be prepared for every eventuality short of full-scale nuclear war. The Cambrians also have a nasty habit of turning cold, wet and windy without notice on even the fairest of days. Trust me, the combined weight of foul-weather gear, tools, parts, first aid, maps, food, water, 59 varieties of overpriced hi-tech sugar, a useless mobile phone and a possibly even more useless whistle, plus a head of garlic and a silver bullet to ward off the natives, clothing for the train and a cuddly toy is enough to break even a seasoned SAS commando.
2. Navigation
Consider this. Most ITT aficionados are also "bikepackers" - bushcraft nuts who happily camp in January living off roadkill and lighting fires with nothing more than a lump of sheep poo and a toothpick. Try to imagine a stick-thin Ray Mears. They could probably therefore navigate the Kalahari using scent and spoor alone - yet they all use GPS mapping to do the TCW. It doesn't help that the official route guide is more interested in listing B&Bs that are now cheesed-off ex-B&Bs than in providing clear directions. Whether instructions like "take the faint path" (which one, dammit?!) and "do not take the obvious path" (none of them are obvious, dammit!) strike you as intriguingly or worryingly vague depends on how much of a hurry you're in. The bottom line is that checking paper maps and taking compass bearings can make for painfully slow progress.
3. Gates
1 million gates @ 20 seconds = forever, especially in dog years.
4. Fatigue
Whether you call it 169 km or 106 miles, it's a bloody long way to cycle non-stop, much of it on rough terrain and with four Snowdons' worth of climbing en route, and a lot further than I've ever ridden before (or ever plan to ride again*).
*Subject to change.
5. Mechanicals
Shit happens.
Mobile coverage in Mid Wales being more elusive than even the legendary Beast of Bont, there are parts of the route where getting help can mean a two-hour walk or an even longer crawl. You therefore need to be prepared for every eventuality short of full-scale nuclear war. The Cambrians also have a nasty habit of turning cold, wet and windy without notice on even the fairest of days. Trust me, the combined weight of foul-weather gear, tools, parts, first aid, maps, food, water, 59 varieties of overpriced hi-tech sugar, a useless mobile phone and a possibly even more useless whistle, plus a head of garlic and a silver bullet to ward off the natives, clothing for the train and a cuddly toy is enough to break even a seasoned SAS commando.
2. Navigation
Consider this. Most ITT aficionados are also "bikepackers" - bushcraft nuts who happily camp in January living off roadkill and lighting fires with nothing more than a lump of sheep poo and a toothpick. Try to imagine a stick-thin Ray Mears. They could probably therefore navigate the Kalahari using scent and spoor alone - yet they all use GPS mapping to do the TCW. It doesn't help that the official route guide is more interested in listing B&Bs that are now cheesed-off ex-B&Bs than in providing clear directions. Whether instructions like "take the faint path" (which one, dammit?!) and "do not take the obvious path" (none of them are obvious, dammit!) strike you as intriguingly or worryingly vague depends on how much of a hurry you're in. The bottom line is that checking paper maps and taking compass bearings can make for painfully slow progress.
3. Gates
1 million gates @ 20 seconds = forever, especially in dog years.
4. Fatigue
Whether you call it 169 km or 106 miles, it's a bloody long way to cycle non-stop, much of it on rough terrain and with four Snowdons' worth of climbing en route, and a lot further than I've ever ridden before (or ever plan to ride again*).
*Subject to change.
5. Mechanicals
Shit happens.
Followed by a mad last-minute panic dealing with the baffling logistics of it all. I decided to leave the car at Dovey Junction and take the train to Knighton the afternoon before the ride, rather than subject a whole carriageload of passengers to technical-fabric-induced Zyklon B on my return. That might not have been a bad idea in hindsight, though, as finding space for your bike on a train these days is not without its challenges. If you don't book one of the two allotted bicycle spaces per train (complete with diddy little clunk-click seatbelts) more than 24 hours in advance, you're at the mercy of the guard's goodwill. Bizarrely, the first one let me on but then chucked me off again at the following station... Stress Central, I think it was called. Luckily, though, the cycling gods were smiling on me and the next train had plenty of space. And the guard's ticket machine had a flat battery - result!
And so, after a hastily arranged night in the one B&B in Knighton that is still in business (handily close to the station but so over-Lenored I barely slept), it came to pass that at the unholy hour of 6.40 a.m., stuffed silly with my traditional slow-burning endurance breakfast of five Shredded Wheat, I crossed the road to the station for the obligatory pre-departure selfie.
Yep, that's pretty much how I was feeling.
Day 1
The first few miles along a flat country lane in enemy territory would normally be a nice warm-up, but it was freezing. Not literally, but enough for me to don my coat and regret fingerless gloves as my digits quickly turned numb. Good job I didn't have any gears to change! But soon it was back over the border into sunny Wales and time for a serious wake-up call in the form of Goytre Hill: a half-mile hike up an only-rideable-if-you-can-be-arsed green lane followed by an unrideable-under-any-circumstances sheep track up a big fuck-off grassy slope that then gets even steeper, making a carry more efficient than a push and taking even my SS-attuned calves to breaking point. On the plus side, I was no longer cold but dripping with sweat, and the view that emerged was worth every step, with the sun breaking through the haze behind me, mist lingering in the valleys, dew glistening on the grass, the dawn chorus tweeting (#anothersinglespeednutter?).
There followed about ten miles of moorland riding, mostly not the boggy black smelly kind but the smooth heavenly grassy kind, a broad rolling moorland superhighway mown to perfection (and freshly fertilised) by a million sheep and rabbits. Coming the other way, the first few miles make a wonderful long descent with countless humps and bumps to pop the bike off BMX-style. Ridden forwards, it was steadily uphill but far from arduous, winding through swathes of bracken peppered with the woolly arses that donate the free gifts constantly spattering my shins and face along with the ice-cold dew. Trust me, though, it was spellbinding.
Before I knew it I was whizzing down the steep road descent to Llanbadarn Fynydd (yes, climbing on grass, descending on tarmac, it's all wrong - in fact the whole of the first day is better ridden in reverse) and the first proper ford of the day across the River Ithon. I thought I might get away with dry feet, but at the last moment the river had other thoughts. All the fords on the route come with the option of a detour to a bridge, but unless the river's in spate that's hardly in the spirit of things, is it?
The second half of Day 1 is fairly easy riding but rather short on thrills (other than one cheeky descent through the forestry at Brondre Fawr, which really ought to be the Welsh for "teenage sex" - fun but over in a flash). It was still very quiet and remote, though. Not until around the two-hour mark did I finally spy my first human being of the day, none other than the little old lady who lives in a car (yes, really), whose disturbingly lewd grin certainly helped keep my legs spinning. In fact the closest I got to a conversation the whole ride came not long after when I treated a farmer to some choice language for pulling straight out in front of me without looking on the four-mile road section freewheeling down to Rhayader (an awful waste of hard-won elevation but a great chance for a breather while still making up precious time). After all this solitude, the early-morning bustle of the small market town that is Rhayader felt oddly alien, wrong almost... But I was feeling strong and upbeat and finished the 50km of Day 1 comfortably in 3h3m, more or less on schedule.
The 29 Gears Guide to Mid Wales
Nestling perfectly logically between North Wales, home to Snowdonia, and South Wales, home to the Brecon Beacons, the less heralded region of Mid Wales is home to the optimistically monickered Cambrian Mountains. Not as tall or dramatic as their neighbours, but then not crawling with tourists either, they are stunning in their own right.
At their heart is the venue for Day 2 of the ride, Elenydd, an area that used to be known as the Desert of Wales, because there was nothing there. And it's still basically a whole lotta nothingness, the only real signs of human activity being a scattering of disused silver and lead mines and the odd pocket of forestry. One species that does still thrive there is Teletubbies (as evidenced by growing numbers of wind turbines) but they only come out when it's sunny.
Which isn't often. Bathed in permacloud and dowsed with permarain for a good 12 months of the year, the area gives birth to more major rivers than you can shake a stick at (Severn, Wye, Danube, to name a few) which carve stunning gorges as they wend their way down between endless swathes of squelchy stinking bog. Above the valley floors, it's so bleak that not even the English want to live there and the smart sheep wear Sou'westers.
Catch it on the right day, though, as I did, and it's rather splendid.
Nestling perfectly logically between North Wales, home to Snowdonia, and South Wales, home to the Brecon Beacons, the less heralded region of Mid Wales is home to the optimistically monickered Cambrian Mountains. Not as tall or dramatic as their neighbours, but then not crawling with tourists either, they are stunning in their own right.
At their heart is the venue for Day 2 of the ride, Elenydd, an area that used to be known as the Desert of Wales, because there was nothing there. And it's still basically a whole lotta nothingness, the only real signs of human activity being a scattering of disused silver and lead mines and the odd pocket of forestry. One species that does still thrive there is Teletubbies (as evidenced by growing numbers of wind turbines) but they only come out when it's sunny.
Which isn't often. Bathed in permacloud and dowsed with permarain for a good 12 months of the year, the area gives birth to more major rivers than you can shake a stick at (Severn, Wye, Danube, to name a few) which carve stunning gorges as they wend their way down between endless swathes of squelchy stinking bog. Above the valley floors, it's so bleak that not even the English want to live there and the smart sheep wear Sou'westers.
Catch it on the right day, though, as I did, and it's rather splendid.
Day 2
The longest of the three days at 70km, Day 2 is mostly easy riding bracketed by two very nasty climbs. A few miles of easy tarmac spinning to Elan Village, home to the first of a series of impressive Victorian dams, an oh-so-tempting café and possibly the world's most out-of-the-way public lavs (it's a Welsh thing), leads to the first of these climbs, fondly known by cyclists as Puke Hill. It's a rideable 1-in-5, but 60km into a 170km ride on a singlespeed in what was now blazing sunshine? Er, no thanks, walked the lot. Still left me dripping with sweat and gasping for water - cue stop at the next passably clear stream to fill my already empty bottles and gobble down first lunch (BLT sandwich - I know, but that's what I fancied when I stocked up at Knighton Spar the evening before). I have to say this was the most idyllic moment of the entire ride, a whole moorland valley to myself, no sign of human anything, not a cloud in the sky, just the sound of the birds and the burbling brook...
The next 15 miles climbing very gradually up to, around and past the Claerwen reservoir and on to the Teifi Pools offer something of a history lesson in the evolution of the road. You start with the roughest track known to mankind - proper moon buggy stuff - before switching to increasingly smooth gravel and eventually (and, in context, improbably) tarmac.
The lumpy bit up to the dam is a personal favourite. Rocky, rough, techy. Unavoidable wetness despite a long, hot summer. Some seriously tricky steps to climb up. Trials bike stuff. Perfect territory for a rigid singlespeed. Love it. Will be jumping off phone boxes next. The canal section pictured above in gloomier conditions was only wet in places - but the big ford at the end was still a big ford. Whoever wanted dry feet anyway?
Next up, though, is the Interminable Track from Hell, 10km into a permanent headwind around the bleakest of reservoirs in the most featureless of landscapes. Bare, remote, monochrome moorland with not a hint of civilisation: no fields, no fences, no gates, no wind turbines, no forestry plantations - hell, no trees at all. Deepest, darkest nowhere. This could very well be where they faked the moon landings. Only for once there was just the gentlest of breezes and the sun actually shone, transforming the Claerwen into the most beautiful crystal-clear lake just for me and the red kites. Magical.
Climbing away from the reservoir and hitting the choppy hills of the tarmac lane above the Teifi Pools, I noticed that my legs were starting to feel a bit heavy - but also that this was the halfway point for both Day 2 and the whole ride! So it was with a somewhat maniacal grin that I flew along the fun double-track that meanders gently down towards the village of Ysbyty Ystwyth (there are actually six vowels but only 12 letters in that, language fans), most of the usual lake-sized puddles now shrivelled into bite-sized hippo-wallows, one of which provided my only near-off of the day. I was really enjoying myself in the sun, aware that the clock was ticking but still only a few minutes behind schedule and confident that I could make up the difference.
Time, then, for disaster to strike and punish such hubris!
Find out how in Part 2, coming soon to an Internet near you...
