James Garriock's Cloudride - Part 2

James is in recovery mode somewhere on the Baltic ...... water treatment for his hands and head it would seem!

He sent me a nice post card and Part 2 of his Cloudride write-up.

In my first instalment we were talking about the bike: bars, suspension, tyres and gears. This time I want to tell you about the three biggest mistakes I made on the Cloudride: wrong bike, wrong eating and wrong stopping. It's going to be great therapy for me, settle in.

PART TWO:

As you might recall, I had a drop bar bike with 45mm tyres and no suspension. The right bike would be a dual sus 29er, or less sus and more rubber, you choose. This doesn’t apply to the Tour Divide or Tour Aotearoa or the Munda Biddi or any other rides though. The Cloudride has more than 20,000m of vert in 1,000 ks. That’s 20m/km. Compare that to Tour Divide at 11m/km or Tour Aotearoa at less than 10m/km. The Cloudride is one hilly walk in the park. Since the ride starts and finishes at the same elevation, there is also 20,000 of descent, some of which you’ll also be walking. So that’s 20,000m of up in just 500km, which is an average or 4%...as long as there’s no flat bits. From Jindy to CBR you’ll spend one sixth of your time over 10%...jus’ sayin.

The other thing that makes a dual sus 29er the right bike for the Cloudride is the surface. The Tour Aotearoa is about 60% sealed, the Cloudride is less than 10% sealed. Moreover, there are hundreds of kilometres of bush tracks and high country tussocks, which will hurt your rear end a lot, but not as much as they’ll hurt your wrists. The reason why this article has taken four months to write is that the sensation is only just returning to all my fingers.

With a full sus 29er, you’ll be slower on the bitumen but faster everywhere else, and there’s not much bitumen. In particular, you’ll be needing traction up hills like out of the Tantawangalo; but you’ll also be faster on bumpy downhills like coming off the Brindabellas, and much faster on rock strewn paths like Island Bend fire trail, Grey Mare fire trail, the Hume and Hovell walking track, or the farm road odyssey from Bomby to Delegate. Who knows how much more power I could have put down if I had a full sus bike with 60mm instead of 45mm tyres. Hours of time savings that’s for sure.

Then there’s the stopping. Once the person in front of you is more than ten hours ahead, and the person behind you is ten hours behind, the urgency kind of goes out of the race. I stopped for more time than was necessary for two reasons: the desire to have a yak, and pure muddle headed dumbarsedness. You meet great people on the way and a chat is so much nicer than facing the road. Then there’s the cloud of stupid that sits above your head when you’re over tired. Like the time I headed into town needing two things, a bathroom and water; and had budgeted 20 minutes to find them, and buy some food. Ninety minutes later I left town with a full stomach, a need for a bathroom and empty water bottles.

My final major time eater was eating. I had a pretty good plan which summarised the food I had to buy in each town, where to buy it, opening hours, the grams of carbohydrates I’d be getting and the grams I’d require.

Fail.

I kept up with the plan on day one, eating two giant burritos, three ham and cheese croissants, six hot cross buns and much more in addition to bars and 200grams of malto, and a big dinner. I was on plan, and flying. But the bulk caught up with me and I just couldn’t face more food. In the end I bonked on the way into Jindabyne, on Island Bend fire trail even though I had a full sized family pizza on board, into Cabramurra, and on my last night over the Brindabellas. Eating is a tough gig.

The first solution is to carry more maltodextrin and to add it to everything so it doesn’t hurt your guts. Secondly, analyse bulk as well as energy in food choices. Thirdly, make it easy to eat once you’ve bought it. For the sake of aero I had no front roll and no chaff bags either, and that made it harder to access food.

The Cloudride runs clockwise in even years and anti-clockwise in odd years. In 2018, I took 48 hours to do the first 500 k then 68 to do the second. Is the western half of the course harder than the eastern, or did I just die a thousand deaths? Fortunately strava and spot trackers are the analyst’s friend. Although the data are imperfect due to course variations, the message is clear. The eastern half of the course is about ten hours quicker, and in addition most riders fatigue by about ten hours in their second half of the race, regardless of their direction.

So I did three big things wrongly, and a myriad of little ones too. But there were a few good choices that maybe you can learn from as well. The first of which was a philosophy of having one item for each job. Glasses are an example; some people take three pairs, sunglasses, clear glasses and reading glasses. I took prescription photochromatic glasses. I walked across the Snowy in socks that I had planned to throw away afterwards. Putting on dry socks after the last major river crossing was a joy. My water strategy also worked well, one large bottle, one small bottle, and a 1 litre plastic bladder which I filled and carried in my jersey ahead of long dry stretches. My lights turned out to be perfect. A dynamo light was complemented by a helmet mounted battery light. The Cloudride is well named, you’ll spend a lot of time riding in cloud. When you are, a helmet light is next to useless, it only illuminates the fog in front of your face. What you need is a light mounted as low down as possible.

Perhaps my best decision was riding with Trevor Fairhurst, four time Cloudrider, hardman triathlete, and his bio also suggests that he’s a decent shot. We rode all the way to the Snowy together. Trev’s superpower is finding high country huts.

On night one we were wandering along at around 11pm when Trev said “apparently there’s a hut just a few hundred meters off the trail around here”. Sure enough, a few minutes later we were cosy and dry and getting a couple of hours of shut eye. In the soft light of morning, only a kilometre or two down the road we found competitor Scotty Preston dragging his sleepy head out of a ditch to rejoin the fight. Nice one Trev. He also showed me where to cross the Delegate River, which could have been treacherous.

Other things that went well included dropping the saddle for the hell descent down Tingaringy. Since most saddle packs don’t play well with dropper posts, I took a tiny torque wrench for the job. Lastly, my warm clothes were also my sleeping clothes, so I only took a +10degree bag, a liner and a bivvy. It worked down to almost freezing.

In the final instalment you’ll read about the race itself, feral horses, a suicidal bunny, a time machine and the dude of the century.

Thanks for reading.