Transcontinental Race No. 6 - TCR6 - #TCRN06 - 2018

Missus just mentioned his meltdown on FB. Awks. Someone tell him to get into a hotel and have a rest he's losing his shit.

Yep, just finished reading it. Suspect he’ll be mortified when he reads it back with a clear head.

For the non FB-ers

Well this I feel will be my last post on here after I feel badly let down and hung out to dry and left to fend for myself. There is a basic requirement for a racers safety and I feel that I have not had any warnings at all from race control, dot watchers, fellow racers and forum members. As you are pretty much aware I've been the majority of times cycling through the night and bedding down in shelters around 6am sometimes later sometimes earlier due to suffering very badly from heat stroke earlier in the race for which I have only just recovered from.

I am absolutely furious that even though this has been common knowledge for quite some time on here no warnings were issued to me by race control, fellow riders, dot watchers or other forum users. Yesterday I begun cycling around 11am from Jajce and cycled through a solid 24hrs to be able to make cp4 and the climb before a forcast storm was due to arrive at 6pm this evening.

To my absolute horror I encountered continuous dog attacks for around 45miles continuous miles all the way up to the base climb going up to the CP. At night the street dogs turn into very ferrocious pack animals that chase a cyclist down. I had this continues street after street town after town for around 5 to 6hrs. At one point in one of the larger towns I had 10dogs chasing me at once with two being alsatians. That was terrifying as if I had got caught and brought down off the bike I would have been attacked by ten dogs. Every inch of my body would have been ravage causing life changing injuries. I was on a last climb before the base when one dog managed to get me as it was on an up hill and i did not have enough speed to escape. It inflicted 4 puncture wounds and some scrapes to my left ankle but I managed to limp up to CP4.
I feel i should have had prior warning of this and that route had been taken by many riders and it should have been marked as dangerous by race control.

My girlfriend Natasha then found several threads and posts talking about these vicious ferral dogs in the area but none of this information was passed onto me. It is the duty of race control to keep a racer safe and even though the race had finished I had not seen any warnings about this when it was on. Failing this it should also be the duty of fellow racers to make sure race control follow up this issues and get the warnings out. My route should have had a night time ban on it. I will be taking this up with race control upon my return to the UK. It is apparently common knowledge about these dog attacks so why would I not know through here or race control. I have had many many problems along the way but I have had to overcome these on a day basis and now jyst to get this far but I feel my safety has been put in jeopardy.

If its not been hard enough being on the road for this long which has caused tremendous stress to my family not to mention natasha the basic right of racer safety has been neglected.

Bloody hell.

The 24 hour blast though. Impressed with that at this stage in the game. Pity frrt is not working as his stats would have been interesting.

On a positive note. He has only got 700 or so km to ride.

On a less positive note, if the are puncture wounds, has anyone mentioned rabies?

I think he's just angry.

He should call it quits and go to a hospital

And that’s why one should stay off the internet. Being tired turns the best of people into a grumpy person likely to talk out of line.

^Well put!

He can't have done very much research if he didn't know that there would be dogs.

Poor 'race control' went off duty about three weeks ago and is now packing to fly off to Canberra for her partner's inquest.

Strip all the emotion from his post, it seems like it'd be a good idea to warn entrants about the dogs given it seems a regular issue.

Hopefully he'll make a sensible decision and seek medical help if he has been bitten.

If he wasn't prepared for dogs, he wasn't prepared. I'd be surprised if his route had loads more dogs than any other route through there. If he carries on riding, he will find that, if you ride through on a bike at night, there will dogs in pretty much every town between there and Meteora. Most will be a bit playful but the odd one will be fierce.

I guess everyone is entitled to one or two rants, he's probably just worn down from everything. Hopefully he pushes on and completes this and stays safe doing so.

I agree it's unlikely that his route had that many more. Probably an exaggeration, to make a point, particularly if bitten.

I still find it odd that its not mentioned by the organisers, as you have very succinctly defined the issue, it wouldn't be hard to include such information.

To be fair it happens everywhere. A colleague got bitten last week on a ride here in Luxembourg as the farmer left his gate open and his dogs were out on the farm track and after nipping at his heels as he rode up the track, one got a couple of bites in as they passed the farm. No lasting damage luckily.

I fixed that by being tired and grumpy all the time. Commitment.

The film from, what was it? the second edition, was literally called ... "Melons, Trucks and Angry Dogs".

The race has been over for ages so I don't see how any of this has anything to do with race org. If his family is so stressed perhaps he should consider going home. But then all of this I just put down to being tired and grumpy and everyone loves a good rant now and then so I suggested to my missus to mention the hotel/rest plan.

What other blindingly obvious potential hazards should be spelled out for people who fail to do any research?

"you may encounter potholes"
"you may experience traffic"
"packets of nuts may contain nuts"

But yeah, he probably had a scare and got his rant on. Needs to take a breather and either go home or finish and stay off the farcebook

What's the best tactic when feral dogs appear (given that we - specifically me - can't all just bump out a kilowatt like hippy)? Decoy sausage? Aniseed ball distraction? Ultrasonic repellent? Big stick?

I always sprint (or get cop cars to run the dogs over for me) but Matt Falconer said he usually stops and puts his bike between him and the dog. Ishmael carried an electronic dog scare thing with him that he said worked quite well most of the time. One of the TABR riders carried a big stick.

"you may experience traffic"

Isn't this pretty much one of the warnings given?

On the topic I'd have thought bear spray would be pretty handy for such scenarios,
although the electric thing sounds perhaps better.

Oh yeah, some riders take sprays with them. Wasp spray, bear spray, etc.

No, they have specific road warnings for roads reported by local riders as being busy/possibly dangerous. It's kinda silly because it entirely depends when you're on the roads in question but presumably it covers the race orgs somewhat.

If someone needs to be told about obvious cycling hazards they shouldn't be doing the TCR.

I've never done the TCR, I most likely never could/will, but lordy, I know about the dogs. Anyone who's done even the tiniest bit of dot-watching knows about the dogs.