45 Southwest - Into Day 2 and a Town called Dad

Time and Distance* – Into Day 2, 280 to 440km; Town and Country – somewhere near Revistske Podzamcie in Slovakia to… well, Dad, in Hungary; Kilos (with apologies to Bridget Jones) – 85, no change... yet; Coffee stops – 0; Ice creams and cakes – 0; Injuries – right knee, worryingly, ankle quiet; Close Shaves on the Steed – none really, just another short section of busy road, buffeted again by lorries.

* I have changed the format of these notes to reflect the race itself, rather than those of my leisurely writer’s life leafing through fusty documents and tapping my way to knowledge on the electric internet.

As I headed south off the Tatras, the mountainous border between Poland and Slovakia, I dropped into the agricultural flatlands of eastern Central Europe, where the Danube River has whiplashed left and right for millennia on its journey to the Black Sea. At this stage I was following a tributary, the suitably-named Grain River; suitable in English at any rate, because around me were endless fields of wheat, corn (on the cob) and sunflowers – also a leafy, darker green crop, I assumed tobacco – interspersed with villages. Superb flat riding into sunset.

Seen somewhere in Slovakia…

After a stop for supper, a burger at a stand in a rather lonely car park marooned in a grid-iron, relentlessly concrete town, Ziar nad Hronom I think it was, I rode off into dusk. And into one of the other regular concerns that face the bikepacker, where to spend the night. Some people prefer a place that is visibly part of the local social structure, a bus stop or a park, but generally I prefer to hide myself away, somewhere discreet where I am unlikely to be found. There just didn’t seem to be much around.

In the end I decided on a tiny roadside copse in the darkness between the lights of two villages; it had perhaps five trees, which I discovered were sheltering a cross to the Virgin Mary. It seemed like a good place to stop as any, partly for the implied protection of the traveller and didn’t feel too much like an imposition - I would be gone with the daylight.

As I sorted my kit – laying out my miniature sleeping mat, bivvi bag, removing rocks, donning warm jacket, wrapping shoes in spare clothes for a pillow, food, head-torch and water within reach of my right hand for a few last-minute carbs before sleep - I spotted the light of another cyclist heading along the road. As agreed earlier in the day with Slovak Pieter - that because there were so many Peters in the race there was a good chance of getting someone’s name right merely by using the name - I shouted “Peter!” into the darkness. The rider came to a halt. It was in fact Slovak Pieter (I had been thinking of a different Peter, because Slovak Pieter should have been miles ahead of me by now – in fact he had stopped for dinner with some mates, which had delayed him for a while). He decided to stop for the night in the same place. Despite the extremely hot day, my night wasn’t quite warm enough, so I shivered a little until I fell asleep.

We were back on the road shortly after five am, just as the light of Day 2 rose around us, riding easily and chatting. Our route continued along the Grain river, cool now in the low early morning sun, momentarily chilly as we ran through mist gathered in wooded sections. There was just one noisy interruption to this peaceful ride, a short stretch on a big road, where lorries thundered by, but after three miles we were once again in pastoral silence, interrupted only by birds and insects and the ticking of my derailleur.

At 10 am the first of our checkpoints rose on the horizon, the famous dome of Esztergom Cathedral, which sat in our third country, Hungary, on the far side of the River Danube. We were expected to photograph it across the river from Slovakia and as I turned into a riverside park, Pieter seemed enlivened by a sign for a Lidl supermarket, shouting “Ah, Lidl, I shall go there for breakfast…” and he was gone.

Our instructions at checkpoints - to prove to the organiser of 45 South-West that we had visited - were to photograph ourselves, with our bicycle and the Checkpoint building in the background. Eventually I understood that collaring a passer-by to take the photo is the easiest method for doing this, but on this first attempt I contorted myself, squinting into the sun, and catching only an aerobar and the hood of a handlebar. Oh well.

There was second stage to Checkpoint 1, a marine industrial building at a riverside wharf just outside the town, presumably because organiser Andy Buchs enjoyed the irony in the difference between a Cathedral and such a functional monster in its bucolic river setting. I certainly wouldn’t disagree. After a quick run out of Esztergom, I turned down to the river…

Where my Wahoo device chirruped and a chequered flag appeared on its screen – the end of the first leg of 45 SouthWest, pretty much exactly 250 miles or 400km, or slightly less than one thirteenth of the full distance. It was a small cause for celebration. It was also extremely hot, so I retreated to the shade of an abandoned building, munching on a few nuts. A cyclist, not part of the race, arrived and left, then another, Pieter the Slovak.

I mused on 45 South-West 2023. It was just 11.30 am and it was already stifling and it looked as though this would be the ‘signature’ of the 2023 race (later, in Spain, the heat wave would be nicknamed Cerberus…). Then I mused on what this meant. Part of my reason for taking part in 45-Southwest was research for the gerontology chapter of a book about endurance - old bloke (sorry, senior), goes out and tries to do it all again – so I wondered to what extent heat tolerance might be reduced in ageing sportspeople. Probably quite a lot, I decided (more to be revealed later, as I get to the research). And for that matter, how is the desire for sleep affected in exercise in older age? We expect older people to sleep less in life generally, but dozing was endemic as far as I was concerned… My first snooze had been on Day 1 at about 2pm, just 10 hours into the race, somewhere near the Slovak border, where I took a 10 minute nap in a field, head back and playing with the floaters on my eyeballs against the perfectly blue sky… So, I mused at the riverside, are heat and the need for sleep connected in exercise? Then I promptly fell asleep again.

And so into Hungary… The language had changed – from the clustered Slavic consonants to tortuous Magyar utterances - Szomod, Baj and Naszaly. All quite alien somehow – until, reassuringly, I found myself turning towards a small town, with the familiar name of, well… Dad.

45 South-West 2023 Recalled

Time this article was written – 11 am, well slept; Units of alcohol this week – 12, Oh dear; Kilos (with apologies to Bridget Jones) – 85, that’s pretty stable, but might belie a depressing story; Cigarettes – 0 (but then I don’t smoke, not even on occasional work trips to the Caribbean); Number of close shaves on the steed – one, not even on the steed this time, but a Santander bike, unbelievably a van driver who looked me straight in the eye at a junction and airily drove out into my path; Injuries– tingling fingers and toes, chronic ankle problem

The wakeful anguished nights of earlier in the year (described in previous Journal entries), are now banished - angst salved by an adventure, of course - and life has settled into a sedentary phase. I spend my time desk-bound, reading academic papers about the muscles of endurance and about the mindset of endurance. And occasionally I indulge in a little endurance itself, by cycling off to interview someone on the subject.

And yes, the adventure was 45 South-West. I managed to get to Krakow on time, with most of the requisite kit. The race had all the elements of an adventure – forests, mountains and sea views, with waves of physical exhaustion and surges of life-affirming energy, of challenge and commitment… the not knowing what’s to come, and the overcoming of the problems when they do. And the delight, at moments of simple pleasure along the way.

At this point I should say that getting to the start-line was almost as much of a challenge as the race itself… There were all the usual preparatory concerns, a bike fit, a crank fit, an insole fit, with an ‘Oh, just a few hundred pounds, sir’, at every turn… but it all got a bit close for comfort. For all my efforts to be ready three months in advance, it was only about four weeks before departure that I managed to fit my aero-bars. (They look more the like the head of a triceratops than aerobars, really, with two twisted horns protruding from among an array of hoods and some springy, self-raising, arm pads.)

And there was a last minute surprise – a medical fitness certificate, something I hadn’t seen reference to in six months of collecting stuff together… They’re not as easy to come by as you might think for an old knacker, so many thanks to Dr Hugh Coyne of Fulham, who took his courage in his hands and backed me to manage 4300 kilometres with 47,000 metres of climbing…

Except that then, at the very last minute, the organiser Andy Buchs upped the distance - from 4300 kilometres to nearly 4400 kilometres - and he admitted that the climbing had increased probably to something like 50,000… or was it… 55,000… metres?. He is disarmingly nonchalant about these things, which from the outside looks a little hard-headed, but then he’s right, not because his style is hard-headed (he’s quite the opposite), but because that’s his style of race. Once you’re out on the course, the positives speak for themselves, and most of his riders tend to agree with him (as do I. Well, except for one moment).

Nonetheless, this ramped up further the sense of nerves and not knowing, of staring into an abyss, a threatening landscape of obstacles, pitfalls and the whistling wind of what’s now called… jeopardy. What would it be like? How would I cope? Would I, ultimately, manage to finish? Would I die (to be explained later)? Am I too old for this sort of thing? (Plenty of people were happy to assure me yes on that last one.)

But these flippancies are merely the indulgences of an idle mind, as they evaporate the moment you set off, when there are far too many things to be thinking about to waste energy on worry. And too much to enjoy.

We left the main square of Krakow at 4.30 am one morning, just 17 of us, weaving among the revellers from the night before, eventually heading south and west towards the Slovak border. It was the height of summer, so the nights were short and the fields were in harvest. Grapes were gathering on the vine, plums falling to the ground and nectarines ripening as the verges around us turned from green in Slovakia and Slovenia to a parched yellow in Spain, where the Cerberus heatwave was ratcheting down into a lock.

There was nature that we never see from a car, deer skipping away at our silent approach, dragonflies darting in shaded waterways, small mammals sadly crushed by life’s remorseless rubber-driven progress. And insects that hovered... and then for some reason darted across my path at the last moment, often hitting me directly in the face (instead of splodging our windscreens, I guess).

There were the different physical characters of seven European countries: the vast skies of open flatlands of Hungary, rivers to follow and mountains that glared on the horizon in Slovakia and Italy, and at least seven major - Tour-de-France-standard – cols. There were delightful towns and cities – Lubljana, Mantua, Piacenza – lovely walled hilltop towns, gorges, canals and escarpments. There were ice creams in Italy, pain au chocolat in France, and coffee in them all: caffe latte, café au lait and, in Spain, the finest caffeine shot of all, café con leche con hielo, coffee over a block of ice.

Did I make it? Yes, I made it… I took a while, and it became complicated, but I got there, to the sculpture of a tuna that marks Tarifa at the very southern tip of Europe. I was smelly, exhausted, with no sensation remaining in most of my fingers and hands, and a festering backside, and eight kilogrammes lighter, but satisfied… to the core, or possibly to the (spinal) cord, given how basic and physical all this stuff is. Someone described 45 South-West as ‘a handsome challenge, honourably defeated’ - ok, that might have been me - but so it was. And in my case really the only words that fully describe it, with all its complication and endeavour and, after all, advanced age, were … Not Fast, But Far.