The long race home

Checkpoint sequence that never made it. Would have been longer and bigger climbs.

The basis of this event was very simple: several years ago I started reading blogs about long distance cycling and was amazed by the distances normal humans could apparantly cover in one day. Paris-Brest-Paris, Oslo-Trontheim and London-Edinburgh-London, it all sounded to crazy to be true. Then I discovered the Transcontinental Race, a race that apart from being extreme long distance, widened the concept of racing by allowing different routes and having very few other limitations. A few checkpoints between London and Istanbul was all the riders got, everything else was up to themselves.

Maybe the fact that the first editions were dominated by Kristof Allegaert a fellow Belgian, contributed to my appreciation of this event. But hey, I am definitly not a asphalt-eating machine like the TCR riders, so I limited myself to dotwatching.

I am not a sportsman. I run occasionaly and I ride my bike on a daily basis. I have several "projects" in life that I find to important to narrow my focus only on cycling. Yet I wondered whether those long distances would be achievable for my mediocre body. I'd had to device a test to find out...

Participants

I am no terminator. If I would decide to cycle 400k on my own, I'd probably stop at a hotel after 300k ,as by then my motivation would have dropped below zero. So I needed to consolidate my challenge by making it public, and what better way to do that then to motivate some friends to do the same? Contrary to what seems logical, it didn't take me very long to gather a small testing-cohort: 1 brothter in law, 2 colleages, 1 friend of one brother in law, two former boyscout-friends and one slightly accidental friend and I was off.

Distance

First thing I needed was a plan: the idea was to have a time limit of 24 hours. So, what distance can an average cyclist cover in that time? I asked all the participants and most estimates were between 350 and 400kms so I aimed for something close to 400.
A good guess apparently as all riders declared afterwards that it "was long enough", but was challenging. The fastest riders needed 19 hours while the slowest, me, needed the full 23:50 hours. With on average fast riders a distance of 450 k seems to be more appropriate. For slower riders 350-400 will do the trick. (on average the riders climbed only 2500 meters over that distance).

CP selection

The timing of the event was quite bad in terms of wheather potential, but I didn't want to wait, so bad weather it would be. I used more checkpoints then I originally wanted, because I was afraid a rider might take to many risks and take a dangerous route. So after some fidling around I chose five checkpoints that were chosen as such that the route options were limited to smaller roads and paths. In hindsight this may have been an overly cautious approach, as none of the riders demonstrated any suicidal tendency.

Rules

Very easy this, I used the rules as written on the brevet card of the TCR, slightly adapted to Belgian legislation.

So there was the challenge, now on to making it accessible for non-riders...