WHEN THE PUB opened, I wasn’t long back from the Tour Divide, the ride that became a big part of Worms. For those who don’t know, the Tour Divide is the world’s toughest mountain bike race. The route follows the Continental Divide, down the Rocky Mountains. The definition of the Continental Divide is the geographical line that splits North and South America. To the west of the line the water flows to the Pacific, to the east it flows to the Atlantic.
The mountain bike route starts in Banff, Canada, and ends at the Mexico border. It is never more than 50 miles from the Continental Divide and crosses it 26 times. You can ride the route as a tourist, and plenty of folk do, but if you’re competing in the race you have to do it with no outside assistance, and you’re not supposed to talk to anyone you know during the race.
Other than people in petrol stations and cafés I only really met a handful of folk on the whole ride. One was a journalist who’d been tracking my ride and came out to interview me and take photos, another was a cyclist going east to west, some others were Tour Divide riders going in the opposite direction, and one was the winner of the 2016 Tour Divide, the Brit Mike Hall.
I rode with Mike for half or three-quarters of a day. It was at a point where I’d ridden up a track and I couldn’t work out on the GPS where I was and I was going round in circles a bit. I had set off at three in the morning, and I could hear water to the left of me, but it wasn’t showing on the GPS. I’d read my notes the night before, when I’d finished riding at midnight or whatever, but they were a bit woolly. Because I hadn’t spent a bit more on paying for the more detailed GPS route (that would have shown the background) I was having a bit of bother. My Garmin screen just showed a blue line to follow. I thought I’d buy this cheaper programme and save a few quid. Having the background showing wouldn’t have saved me loads of time, but it would’ve made it easier on that morning.
I’d just got onto the right route when Mike Hall caught up with me. I’d set off before the official start of the race because I didn’t want to leave in a crowd. That meant my time was being logged by the organisers, but it wouldn’t count for a place in the final race standings. If I’d have been in the race I’d have finished third, I think, so I wasn’t hanging about. But if you looked at my time trace from meeting Mike Hall to the end, I was faster after seeing him, because he showed me how he was riding. I was riding with him up hills and he was huffing and puffing, and I was keeping with him quite comfortably, even though he was on a lighter bike. He said, ‘You’re fit, you are.’ I said I do a bit of cycling, and told him I was surprised by how hard he’d push himself up hills, putting his body in what trainers and athletes call the red zone. He said, ‘Yeah, I push hard, then do it all again.’ I’d never let myself get to that point because I thought that’s when I’d be in an anaerobic state. I’d be robbing glycogen and I’d bonk out, having nothing left in the tank. Now I was watching Mike and thinking, Bloody hell, he’s bouncing the valves every day!
From that point on I thought, Bugger it. I surprised myself. I saw that I could push myself harder and still make power for up to 20 hours a day.
It’s easy to say all I’ve got to do to beat Mike Hall’s Tour Divide time is to sleep less and ride more, very easy to say. He is a special sort of boy he is, or was …
We emailed each other after that. He complimented me on the fact that I wasn’t mucking about, I was serious about riding, and told me of some races he had coming up. He was going to do the Arizona Trail Race in April 2017; this was another race in America like the Tour Divide, but a lot shorter, only 750 miles. Then he changed his mind, saying he was going to do a new event, called the Indian Pacific Wheel Race, instead.
That year, 2017, was the first running of this big, unsupported, backpacking bicycle race. Like the Tour Divide, the competitors were expected to carry everything they needed themselves, or buy it on the road. There were no back-up trucks or teams. Mike carried next to nothing on a race like this anyway. It started in Perth, on the Indian Ocean on the west coast of Australia, then went more or less along the southern coast, detouring into the mountains before finishing on the Pacific Ocean in Sydney.
The route was 5,500 kilometres, just short of 3,500 miles, and made a point of calling in at cities along the route, which was a big difference to the Tour Divide. The American race route visited the odd small town, but mainly villages of a few houses and a diner or petrol station at the most, and only so riders could get food and drink.
Mike was in second place in the race, coming out of Australia’s capital, Canberra, less than 250 miles from the end, when he was hit by a car at half six in the morning, on 31 March 2017, and died at the scene.
Mike will stick in my mind. I think anyone who does well in these kinds of events and keeps going back for more has issues, demons in their head, something that makes us keep wanting to punish ourselves. I still want to but it’s out of step with where I’ve found myself in life, with Shazza, Dot, the nice house and no shortage of opportunities … I’ve worked hard for what I’ve got. Do I feel guilty, subconsciously? Is that why I get up at four o’clock to cycle through freezing rain to work on trucks?
I was thinking about all this the other day, and realised that if I had to pick one of the moments when I was the happiest, or most content, in my life it was on the Tour Divide.
I’d left Salida on a tough climb, up and over Marshall Pass. It wasn’t the steepest climb on the route, just an uphill drag for a good five hours at the pace I was pedalling. It just kept going until it reached the summit at nearly 11,000 feet (two and a half times the height of Ben Nevis, Britain’s tallest mountain). After that I’d come down the other side to a filling station with a café, in a little village called Sargents in Colorado. There had been snow at the top of the pass, but it was hot at the bottom. The café was just closing up as I arrived, at about eight or nine at night, but the woman was kind enough to stay open for me to buy some grub and Gatorade. While I was there a couple of pushbikes, all kitted out for solo racing, arrived. You can do the Tour Divide from north to south, like I’d chosen, or south to north. These lads were going northbound.
I’d left Banff a couple of days before the official start, and I hadn’t been hanging about, so other than the few hours I’d spent cycling with Mike Hall this was the first time I’d met anyone in the race. I told them I was Terry from England. I’d entered under a false name, because I thought some magazines might have sent folk out to try to photograph or interview me on the route and I wanted to keep myself to myself. None of the people who’d served me sandwiches in Subways or pizzas in tiny towns knew, or cared, who I was, but here was a chance for me to get into character. One of riders was from Chicago, but had spent a lot of time in England teaching at a university. He was explaining that his rear hub had exploded on his bike, so he needed to get a lift to somewhere to get a replacement. There was another lad, an old boy, but I got the impression he was fast. I don’t know why, but I’ve never felt as at home as I did when I was talking with them. Then the lassie who ran the café said she could make us some extra sarnies, and they were good, wrapped in tinfoil. There were so many calories in them you needed a forklift to pick them up. The northbound lads were camping there overnight, but I had another three hours’ riding in me before I bedded down.
I didn’t talk for long, but I’d enjoyed having a yarn with someone on the same wavelength and with the similar plan in mind. The moment when I biked down the road, away from the café in Sargents, the sun just going down, is one of the moments I look back on as the happiest I’ve ever been. What does that say?
A few days later the ride was over. The last stretch, through the bottom of New Mexico, was a 60-mile straight road with a border station at the end. I didn’t know what was going to happen, or if Sharon was going to be there. I crossed the finish line and I hadn’t spoken to anyone I knew for over three weeks. When I got to the end I started crying. What am I doing? I’m a hard man, but what I’d put my brain and body through during those 18 days and 7 hours, and in the build-up to crossing the finish line, set me off. I had to have a word with myself. Nothing has ever made me cry like that. There isn’t a motorcycle race in the world that would make me cry like that.
Even though I wrote about the Tour Divide in Worms to Catch, it’s made such a big impact on how I think about things since that I’ve mentioned it a lot in this book. On the Tour Divide you can be climbing for days. In times like that you could sit and cry or shout and swear till you lost your voice, and it doesn’t make a shit’s worth of difference, you’ve just got to get on with it. That’s what I learned. Channel your energy into reaching the finish line. That ride changed me, it changed my life.