Indian Pacific Wheel Race - IndyPac - IPWR

Come back to me when you just walk into the kitchen and serve your own food.

Or you could just avoid the wait by grabbing someone else's order if it comes out before yours - like some bastard did to me once in a cafe on Bryan Chapman

Serve my own food?! Are you quite mad? Even at service stations I just ride my bike to the pumps and then wait until they bring me ice creams. ;)

That seems quite common when the bigger audaxes have the same stops. I was in no rush so let some bsatards take 'mine'.

It actually worked like somewhere in the mountains in Greece. The guy brang me what I asked and also a chair. Seemed like there's usually not much customers.

Kristoff is a Secondary school teacher, not an english teacher. As a spaniard that has been using english on a daily basis at work for 5+ years... You can be sure I stick with the minimum amount of words to communicate, out of fear of saying/spelling something wrong, or not using the correct analogies or localism (I still can't distinguish the british version of a concept from the american one, because TV/Series don't teach you that). Not only me, any other co-worker, even the ones that actually lived on your country.. would expand much further on spanish since they still can throw with it a ton more words & quicker.

Also whenever I've been in a bar/shop/restaurant with sleep depravation, yes I've just ignored bored staff asking for the 100th time "where you coming from?" he's time-efficient... kudos for him about that.

BTW Carlos Mazon as well told me Kristof wasn't talking as much about detailed things, but I'm okey with that. He's the best on time and sleep depravation handling, I don't need to know all the details ... in fact I would love to discover things by myself sometimes rather than getting someone to explain it.

I would love to discover things by myself sometimes rather than getting someone to explain it.

This. I read very little about riding Tour Divide before I did it. I saw the movie, and had a few rides with a friend who'd ridden it the year before me. That was it.

well said

I really enjoyed Kristof's presence in the documentary. Didn't find him a bad guy or inarticulate, he's just a relentless rider so it seems. He and Mike came across as different characters, but also very similar in other ways was my impression.

Come back to me when you just walk into the kitchen and serve your own food.

Different circumstances but my mum did that once when we were kids. We were in a hotel and she ordered an omelette for breakfast. Everyone else's food came out pretty quickly but an hour and multiple requests later and still no omelette so she just walked into the kitchen and made herself one.

What a boss.

https://allegaertk.wordpress.com/2017/09/14/2017-the-indian-pacific-wheelrace/ Kristof Allegaert has posted his story of the IPWR on his weblog.

Ta

Just read it. Very interesting to see his daily distances. One of his days took me 2.5 days to cover!

In the neighbourhood of Knob, the pleasure of cycling had disappeared

Yeah he means Iron Knob. It's basically a great red mountain of iron ore that they are mining away.

I remember it being shit around there. You go up hill to it, then round a corner and the wind got up, and it was one of those long shallow descents into the wind where you have to pedal hard to go downhill. Went on for ages. And I had scare there with a car doing an overtake.

And I had scare there with a car doing an overtake.

Sounds like the story of cycling in Australia.

The thing that scares me about riding in Australia is when I realise that virtually all the riding I did was in the bit where no-one lives so there is hardly any traffic. The scare I had by iron knob was from the first car to pass in maybe half an hour.

Just thinking back to iron knob, it was one of the places where it was hard to work out what was going on in the sense that the road was straight and flat, (or downhill slightly at uniform gradient). There were no landmarks ahead. So you pedal and your legs tell you that you're moving, but your eyes say, 'no I'm not, it still looks the same as it did half an hour ago.' So your brain tries to settle the argument. But it's not really sure who to believe. Because it's 45 minutes now and everything still looks exactly the same...

Know that feeling.

Strange experience watching that documentary. I agree the editing was odd and that the inclusion of Mark (?) seemed awkward. I suppose the film maker had to work with what they shot, dealing with a very different story to the one expected.

I think KA didn't come across too badly - just a little awkward expressing himself in a second language, and with a fair bit of dry humour that maybe wasn't shown to best effect. He's clearly an incredible natural athlete, with an innate sense of his own limits, either way.

I didn't actually know too much about Mike before the race but watching the film left me with a quite sharp sense of loss. I'm not a huge fan of watching other people dealing with grief or the 'epicly epic suffering' school of cycling documentaries but this managed to transcend it. I hope people are inspired by his story, I certainly have been.

Looks like next year's is going to be announced next week...

Monday by the looks of it. Anyone initially keen?

Not me.
New baby + desire to live longer + no desire to ride 6 days across Nullarbor into a headwind ever again make it not so appealing.
But I really hope it is a success, as Jesse and his team are great and they did a super job organising it last time.

No baby + moderate death wish + self abuse tendencies make it kinda appealing.

£££ though