Tour Divide

he'd run over a child in Iran.

say what.

Rigs:
https://bikepacking.com/bikes/2023-tour-divide-rigs-part-1/
https://bikepacking.com/bikes/rigs-of-the-2023-tour-divide-part-2/

looks a fast set-up she has.

After the cluster fuck of last year, anyone going without decent kit is a bit of a melt.

Ain't no one loosing because you carried 500 extra grams. But you might not finish.

Rooting for Adrian

1 Attachment

Hell yeah. ^

Couple of more names to watch in here:

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

She's definitely got the experience, having done the rhino run, scoped out the Sydney to Adelaide "race to the rock" edition and whatnot.

She isn't the fastest but hell of a consistent rider with a super positive attitude even when things get tough.

They kicked off. A few of the speedies already getting right up to the front.

Josh covering it daily:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCd0BSvMPjU

Thanks for linking to that, I'll keep an eye on those. I didn't realise some people rode it fixed!

Ulrich and Justinas look... close 🤔

1 Attachment

Check the rules, not that anyone enforces them.

TD is a solo challenge, however, racing in the company of other challengers is tolerated.

However, tolerated is a pretty strong word.

Going quite hard as well by the sound of it, will be interesting to see how that plays out over the next few days.

So Ted King has stopped both nights to sleep in a hotel with hot food. I wonder if he’s planning on treating the whole thing like a stage race rather than bikepacking. I hope he does so we can see how that plays out.

Chris B appears to have not slept yet. I wonder how that's going to play out, I can guess!

Yeah, 7-8 hrs sleep, then his moving average speed is a couple of mph higher than the race leaders. Interesting.

Conditions like this are totally energy sapping, it looks bloody awful!!

Taken from here:

https://dotwatcher.cc/race/tour-divide-2023?reverse=undefined&post=5cEmKOzh06XM8s76l11nId#events

The photo I never took at Seven Serpents

My bike has looked like that a few times but I have only ever been a couple of hours away from home. Must take a special mind state to suffer that on a multi-day ride without having a meltdown!!

Amazing that there are two riders currently ahead of Mike's 2016 record.
Ulrich has barely stopped for 30 hours according to the race flow.
What a record Mike set.

He stopped for nearly 3.5 hours last night so probably slept 3. The linear gradient is him stopped. He likely turned his tracker off before stoppin to sleep, so this distance covered with the tracker off confuses it and causes the line to not indicate flat.

1 Attachment

Think Dotwatcher said that was a tracker issue, so maybe not a planned stop.

EDIT: Nah, that was Justinas not Uba

That makes perfect sense skinny :)
It showed a rest on his personal page, I couldn't figure it out.

1 Attachment

How are people this hard? Is there some kind of regimen I can follow that will allow me to do this kind of shit? I rode a fixed gear bike for about 2 weeks a few years ago. Just going 20 flat miles was exhausting and I will never forget the absolute panic of going down a big hill.

Childhood complex.

I wish Ulrich and Justinas would stop riding together.