Hello all,
I have a small treat for paid subscribers this week – something I wrote back in 2016, and saved to the wrong place, and had forgotten all about until I found it the other day, whilst looking for something else.
It’s a fragment of what I had planned to be a full write-up of the Transcontinental Race, before I realised that, to do such an experience justice, I would need far more time and space than was available on my own blog, or the websites of my sponsors.
So much happens on a two-week bike ride, you see, that it’s quite difficult to know how to write about it. If you want to give a balanced overview, then you can probably only devote a couple of hundred words to each day, which really just gives you space to summarise the logistics, and mention any incidents that gave the day its shape – a mechanical, or an unplanned detour.
Or you can choose to go into the fine details of how the ride looked and smelt and tasted and felt, which is my preference. No one wants to know how many miles I rode, and where I slept, I told myself (though actually, I think a lot of people do); they want to understand what the experience was like, and it’s my job to try and recapture it. The problem is, you can squander hundreds of words just explaining the momentary sensation of relief as you roll through a sleeping Balkan village on the cusp of dawn, and the tension of hope is dissolved by the ambrosial scent of baking bürek, from some as-yet-unidentified source. And that’s just one moment. Every day I cycled contained thousands more, all equally significant, and if I were to reproduce all of them faithfully, it would take you as long to read about the ride as it took me to ride it. (And few people could be bothered with an account that long.)
So this is why I’ve had to compromise. In the book I wrote about long-distance racing, I painstakingly curated a selection of anecdotes and descriptions that, read in juxtaposition, would begin to give some sense of the vast, rich, varied and contradictory experience I had had. I haven’t done a bad job, I don’t think, but I think my account misses some of sense of profusion, of repetition, and of endless fascination. So much happened to me, as I rode, that there will always be more to say about it; further stories to tease out of the fabric of those I’ve already recounted.
Here's the latest. Or, really, one of the first. I think I wrote this within a month of getting home.
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