Category Archives: Meta

So there it is. 1500km done so far in October, one big crash, one new bike, lots of ups, surprisingly few downs. 55 hours and 26 minutes in the saddle, 14,233m of ascent and the month isn’t quite over. But the Great Cycle Challenge is done for this year. I also made my fundraising goal, a relatively modest $750 – or 50c per kilometre. That’s pretty good value, so if you want to add a little more, head on over to my sponsorship page and donate.

The cause, obviously, is a great one. The Children’s Medical Research Institute, which runs it, may be familiar from the annual Jeans for Genes day you may have seen around. Hopefully the Great Cycle Challenge will remain as a yearly event. It’s a great event for several reasons

1. All skill levels are catered for. Because you set your own goal, you’re not constrained by your own fitness or lack thereof. An enthusiastic racer like me could knock over 1500 or more in a month, or your grandma could set herself a target of 25km on her local cycleway and still have the same potential to make a difference.

2. It’s designed to fit in around your other commitments. Because you can ride any time in October, you don’t get a clash with, say, a race weekend or a birthday or a workday or any other commitment. You can ride whenever you want and that helps maximise participation

3. All the tools you need are provided. You don’t need any special equipment other than a bike and a web browser. You don’t need a $10,000 carbon race monster (though it helps), you don’t need a GPS unit (though it helps) and you don’t need all the lycra, dietary supplements and daily massages that a pro cyclist gets. Though they’d probably help too.

So yeah, I’ll be doing it again next year. And you probably should too, even if it’s only an excuse to up your monthly training volume.

Here’s Kelly McGarry at the 2013 Red Bull Rampage, scaring me to death

And you can find third-person of the backflip over the gap here

So I feel the need to drop in an update. I’m nine days into the Great Cycling Challenge, and I’m currently a few km behind my scheduled target. I should be on at least 450km by the end of today. With today’s evening ride to go, I’m on about 390km. There’s a reason for this slight lag in the curve.

On Friday night just past, the fourth day of the challenge month, I came something of a cropper. Continue Reading →

Just a quick post to remind everyone that this month is The Great Cycle Challenge, and I’m riding 1500km in aid of children’s cancer research.

This is a bit more than my normal training volume, but it’s a very worthy cause. If you support this, sponsor me here.

I’ll be posting semi-regular updates on my challenge page, and will be trying to exceed 50km each day of the month, in order to get nicely ahead of the curve. I’m racing a 100km XCM at Kanangra on the 20th, so I’ll have to tailor a taper programme around that, so ideally I want to be well into the upper range of the 1500km before then. Today’s weather isn’t looking helpful, but them’s the breaks in cycling.