i get it, but a buff would only serve to make you claustrophobic without helping with smoke.
says the guy who doesnt have to deal with wildfires or ride a bicycle from banff to the us/mexico border
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To be fair, no one has to ride a bicycle from banff to the Mexican border.
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yes, they could go backwards and deal with intractable mud instead
Riding the whole route backwards would probably necessitate more mirrors
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A whole lot of brappin!
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hahahah that rules
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Getting my poop on in a few hours. There has been a lot of changes to the course due to crap weather causing slips, but they were all finished in time… Until a new one. Bridge washout… So we have to ride the first 33 kms neutralised. First day is the easiest with a lot of seal or gravel but after that will mostly be off road. Bike feels pretty sorted. Planning to tent each night and finish in 4 days. JL, Jeff Lyall in the Renegades Muster 2022 event - MAProgress
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Good luck! Send pictures!
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that looks amazing! how much of the kms were offroad?
Probably 100 + on A and N roads into a nasty
headwind. Yesterday was about 230, lots of farm tracks and climbing.
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scenic, scenic, scenic, wretched bog, scenic
it looks like a solid mixture of type 1 and type 2 fun
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You live in what may be the most beautiful country
ohio begs to differ
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Let them beg.
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Just finished. Will share some more pix later. Somehow snuck into the top 10. Driving home just now. Rode from 5:30 or 6 to 11:30 each day. This is my buddies idea of “cruising”. Not sure I’d want to ride any harder than that on that terrain.
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hell yeah! I bet you’re really really sick of the view in the picture there.
This is inspiring me to start doing some of these larger rides
A few more pix. I had to dig a bit deep on this ride. Really feeling my age. I’m not used to being the weakest link. 2 of us wanted to stop and take more photos while the other just was just wanting to roll. So we told him to roll on by himself at about lunch on the last day.
All my kit went well. Edge 130 with a 2x 18650 DIY cache battery for course following with the Etrex back up. Very interesting that my 43 mm gravel kings, which I have always thought were slow anyway, offer no speed advantage over 29x2.1 Race kings my buddies were using. Very robust tho. Next time I would probably use a hardtail or rigid, like my buddies with 2.1s
I had bad advice on my gearing. Was told 34/40 would be low enough. Took 34/42. Probably a very good case for 1x as I hardly ever used my big ring. Reckon a 34/52 would be the go. Buddies were both using their 24/42’ s. I destroyed my legs climbing in my lowest gear a lot.
The 42 Traverse was disappointing. A glorified off-road motorcycle track. I was congratulating myself on my lack of crashes when I high sided off a rut and bent my THL and dropout. Used my spare.
Mileage was around 260, 240, 160, 190 (kms). Day 3 I don’t think I’d ever been so tired when I stopped. We had to push our bikes for quite a while into a shelter where we camped. Beautiful country, in dense bush, but just a shame it was dark, and raining. The shelter was great tho, and the Whakahoro track out, was pretty. So many tracks to mention. Some of them pretty, some of them pretty average. The climbing wasn’t OTT but the tracks were rough in a lot of cases.
Got some minor scuffage on upper left scrotal interface that was a bugging me in the aeros yesterday. No probs today in the bath, so I guess no broken skin. Hard to know how much of that is caused by the skinny tires as my B-17 has always been mint.
We rode with the guy that won, for a bit on day 1 until we dropped him. So these guys just ride long and slow, with hardly any breaks. That’s why I like the format of many of the events we have here where everyone has to stand down for 6 hours a day. Stops it from being a sleep deprivation event.
My feeding technique was rubbish. After abolishing my feedbags due to knee clearance before the start, I had to stop to do major food intakes. Top-tube is not long enough to fit them in comfortablely while I am standing out of the saddle unfortunately.
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wow, that looks amazing and sounds totally brutal. I have no idea how to assess what kind of bike to bring for something like that, do people pre-ride, or is it just make a guess and hope for the best?
You can go by what people used in previous versions. But 9 times out the 10 the answer is a hardtail, or a rigid, if you have young nerves and a good set-up. I kept noticing that this course was 100% safely doable on my gravel bike. But if comfort is important then my 650b would have been wiser. My Dyno is 29er hence I rode the skinny wheels. I have some buddies doing it and taking 10 days, but the downside to that is you get more weather… EDIT: Bill Dabbles in carbon fibre.
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