Transcontinental Race No. 5 - TCR5 - #TCRN05 - 2017

Week in Corfu, has been fun.

Tonight in Corfu airport will not be fun

Jo Burt's write up;

http://road.cc/content/blog/227874-transcontinentall-tale

I'm reading a few reports but I'm failing to understand why people are scratching.

Poor guy obviously hated it. But reading that article, it somehow doesn't add up. They are on the time limit, yet they are only sleeping 2.5 hours per day. As long as you keep moving in some way that shouldn't happen. Are they faffing away loads of time or what?

Five course, sit-down lunches followed by a trip to the strippers like everyone else...

2.5 days to do the first checkpoint? 600k? I took 1.5 and that was slow, with a sleep, etc.

Read it now. One of them was sick so maybe they were poorly matched come race day.

I need to find all of the places my route was an issue and update OSM.
Is there any easy way to do that?

Looks like you can do it right on the OSM website - zoom in then hit Edit link at the top. Have to authenticate. Not sure how to split a way (road) which would be useful to update segments.

Semi-related.. just added an option to routecheck.cc to show unpaved roads on the map.

Only skimmed it, but it read to me as though he didn't hate it as such and would consider it again as a solo rider and genuinely racing it? Have read a few LEL and TCR accounts recently and they are all starting to merge.

Yes, maybe that's right, he certainly wasn't enjoying the pair thing.

Generally people's accounts are a bit better written than the stuff you get in arrivee where it is too much 'we rode up a hill then we rode down the other side then stopped for lunch' but they do miss out some of the key info which, sometimes, we need!

http://www.graceqom.com/the-transnontinental-i-failed/

Does there need to be some sort of entry qualification for TCR? Bit like how you need to have done a SR series for PBP.

From that ^

you’d probably be hard-pushed to find someone who invested so much into the last six months as I did

Is 6 months enough?

I love to read about the drama that's supposed to be eastern europe. Reminds me of:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwDrHqNZ9lo

Yes, there's a selection process.

I'm not sure about what he means by invested. Time? Effort?

I bet my CTL was higher and I spent more money time and life points last year, then TABR then this.

From following TABR and TCR this year, there does seem to be a few levels of racing going on out there. Ultra-racers (skinny, hippy, samuli et al., know what they are letting themselves in for and stop to "grab and go" as skinny said), semi-ultra (checked off the aero gear list and have a plan that is then challenged by lack of strategy, endurance or the harsh reality of it), fast touring (people pushing personal goals while aiming to meet time cut-offs and stopping at times to enjoy the surroundings) - some of the most fun to follow!

There was a top ten racer in TABR who said he couldn't understand people still 1,000 miles back posting Instagrams because "it's a fucking race, man!" and you also have a rider like Grace who, from reading that, gains a huge amount of credit for going beyond what she thought previously impossible:

I probably should be proud. I rode 1700km in one week in six different countries without a single mechanical or tumble.

And it sounds she really attacked the challenge in the right spirit. If there was a qualification then you would lose some of the human element, but you might have more of a tighter 'race' instead. In the best scenario maybe all these different racer types can co-exist?

The qualification isn't "I have raced xyz" it's a judgement call from race organisers based on a multitude of factors. There's a whole article Mike wrote about it.

http://www.transcontinental.cc/blog/2016/10/27/things-that-will-be-different-for-race-no5

Or was it...
https://reportage.transcontinental.cc/?p=2587

It always seemed to me that Mike intended to have the race like this. Having such a broad depth of types of riders makes it such a special race. I would personally never tour something like the TCR - I was at checkpoints before they closed and still think that, physically I could have made the finish in under 14 days. But a competition which allows people like David coulon to ride definitely has its charms.

E.g. TABR is just about to finish... http://trackleaders.com/transam17

That all the riders are of such different abilities and itineraries is essential to the race. It would be much more boring if it was just contested by racing snakes like skinny and hippy and racing lindworms like hippy.

Was me.

Ha, silly us. See you some other time. :)

Just watching some TCR vids and found this one. It's the truck I sheltered under briefly during the big electrical storm up Transfargaran, before I bivvied under a snow tunnel thing.

https://youtu.be/031ziyotUIc?t=2m

People who rode the TCR, interested to know what your worst moment/day was in the race?

being sure i was about to die, descending monte grappa and coming round corner to see two cars, one overtaking the other, coming at me.

second worst part was deciding to scratch - felt like a total failure.

It's the truck I sheltered under briefly during the big electrical storm up Transfăgărășan

The bee truck?

Yeah, really liked that video when they put it out.

The day it finished.