TOGWOTEE PASS WAS a big one – 9,658 feet – and it was followed by the 9,210-foot Union Pass, where the Shoshone National Forest met the Fitzpatrick Wilderness and the Gros Ventre Mountains. Union was brutal, because of the pig-shitty mud and the switchbacks. You could look in the guidebooks and count how many 9,000- and 10,000-foot passes there were on the Tour Divide route, and get it in your head how hard it was going to be, but it wasn’t that simple. It wasn’t a matter of being at 9,000 feet and knowing the pass was 10,000 feet, and thinking, There’s only 1,000 feet of climbing before I’m over the top. No, no. I’d climb to 9,500 feet, then descend to 8,000, then have to climb again to 9,700, then descend to 9,000, then climb to just short of 10,000 feet again, then descend. Bloody hell! Descend and climb, climb, descend – argh! I didn’t underestimate the climbing – I knew there was 200,000 feet of climbing in total – but I didn’t know what the climbs would be like.
Over Union Pass the mud stuck to everything, I was getting bogged down in the stuff, and it was making the bike weigh even more than it already did. I was wearing cycling shoes that were not made for walking in. Because of their hard plastic soles and metal cleats, you can come a cropper in Caistor Co-op if you turn too quickly to head back down the veg aisle to pick up the taties you forgot – but none of it was bothering me too much. It didn’t matter how long the push was up whichever mountain I was on, I knew I’d be at the top before long. The trail would be better, the view would change and I might even have a good downhill run with a pizza or two and a beer at the end of it.
I hadn’t expected to feel as good as I did physically. I felt better after a week of hard riding, 19 hours a day with food stops in between, even though I was only sleeping 4 hours a night, on a concrete bog floor, or outdoors on the ground. I thought there’d be a gradual dropping off of energy and power, but it was the opposite. I got fitter through the first week then stayed at that level. I got back to England the fittest I have ever been.
Just after Union Pass I stopped for the night. I didn’t know what day it was. I had to look back through my notes in the book to see how many nights I’d slept. It was pissing it down, and I saw a log shed near a farmhouse and decided to shelter in it and get my head together until the rain stopped. I thought the farm dog might come to find me, but I didn’t hear a sound. I still wasn’t having one single negative thought, and I got my head down for an hour and set off again. According to my guidebook I’d now crossed the Continental Divide nine times since Banff.
From there I was pedalling into a headwind for another 60 miles. It was a slog until the town of Pinedale. I made one note in the guidebook: ‘Ready for a stop.’ I had a pizza, and the waitress thought I was crackers because I ordered another one for pudding, one of those pizzas that comes folded in half, and a beer.
It was the middle of the day, and I was eating away when the waitress comes towards me with a phone in her hand. She asks, ‘Are you Terry?’ I thought for a minute and remembered. ‘Yeah, I am Terry,’ I said. ‘Terry Smith.’ She said, ‘There’s a bloke on the phone just checking you’re alright.’ So, I said, ‘Yeah, I’m fine. Who is that?’ The waitress asked the caller, who said, ‘Stephen.’ I didn’t know what was going on or who was on the phone. It was only on my mind for half an hour at the most, and then I was back to the job in hand.
When I got home it all became clear. Anyone who was following me on the Trackleaders website could zoom right in on the satellite map and see where I was. My mate Dobby had done that and seen that I’d stopped and there was a café or summat, and worked out that must be where I was. He googled the café’s phone number and rang up. But he said his name was Stephen. He’s never Stephen, always just Dobby, so I had no idea it was him. Anyway, I couldn’t have talked to him, because the rules of the race are you’re not supposed to speak to anyone you know while you’re on the ride. That is the spirit of the event, and the potential for loneliness is a big part of the mental challenge, but by this stage I loved the feeling of being isolated and relying on my own wits. I had nothing to distract me. No music, no one to talk to except when I stopped for food, nothing but the sound of my tyres on the gravel and mud. And that’s how I wanted it.
After the big feed at Pinedale I bought some more food to take with me. I rode 50 miles before stopping, but over half of it was on paved roads, so it wasn’t hard going. I was about 40 miles short of Atlantic City, which is neither a city nor anywhere near the Atlantic, when I stopped and slept in the open, at the side of the trail.
The plan was to sleep here and get up early, so I could be in Atlantic City for breakfast time, not arrive there in the middle of the night and have to wait until places opened. Stocking up in Atlantic City was important because the next stretch was 180 miles to a place called Wamsutter, which I think was the longest distance without food. But I missed Atlantic City, because the bloody GPS wasn’t clear and these places with big names are sometimes only a few low houses and not much else. Once I realised I’d missed it, I just kept going. I thought I’d be alright, but I ran out of water and was filling up bottles out of ditches and using water-purification tablets to stop me from catching owt. I was hardly carrying any food by this stage of the race, thinking that I’d always be alright to get to the next town for a feed there. This day proved that it wasn’t the best idea.
It was a tough, tough day, and I had to ride according to the energy I had. There was a brutal headwind and it was baking. The Great Divide Basin is an area of 3,600 square miles where rivers and creeks don’t merge and run to either ocean, but drain into this basin to form temporary lakes before they evaporate. The guidebooks said it was one of the emptiest and driest stretches of the whole ride – just flat, parched-dry nothingness with a few nodding-donkey oil pumps dotted through it. There was nothing to stop the wind, and I was crawling forward at only 7 to 9 mph.
Eventually, I pedalled into Wamsutter, which is just a motorway town, where there was a petrol station. I ate two lots of Subway, pizza, ice cream, crisps, full-fat milk, coffee and Gatorade, and I slept in a ditch behind the Shell garage. It had been the toughest day of the whole trip, but it hadn’t broken me.
In October 2014, I’d entered a round of the World Solo 24-hour Mountain Bike Championships at Fort William on the west coast of Scotland. I’d done a few 24-hour races there, and I’d been on the podium with the world champion once before, so I knew what I was getting into. Although I didn’t think I was going to come close to winning it, I didn’t expect to break down like I did. Partway through the race my head just went. I came in, sat in the footwell of my van and couldn’t make any sense of what my mate Tim Coles, my dad or anyone else was trying to say to me. I’d cracked. I did get back on the bike and finish it, but nowhere like as strongly as I expected. Now I think I know why. I’d shared a room with my dad and he was snoring so loudly I couldn’t get any sleep. I even ended up leaving the hotel room and trying to sleep in the corridor to escape the noise. And I was light, weighing 67 kilograms. I was 75 kilos going into the Tour Divide. I just don’t think I had enough reserves for my body to be able to push on in the Fort William race. So even though I was only getting about four hours’ sleep a day after climbing, climbing, climbing all day, and for well over a week, I was ready for it.
I’ve always been able to sleep nearly anywhere (as long as it’s not in a room with my dad), but I took that to extremes on the Tour Divide. After a few hours kipping in the ditch, I headed off towards a six-mile climb to the top of Middlewood Hill.
Somehow I was treating the challenge of it all as much like a robot as I could, and not letting myself get too emotional one way or the other. There were just little bits of high, little bits of low, nothing extreme either way. You have to have the attitude that says, Just get on with it.
I crossed the border into Colorado, a new state at last, and entered the village of Slater. There was a little museum and the owner, a real nice woman, had opened a shop just for Tour Divide riders. I was the first person she’d seen. I bought a load of breakfast bars, bananas and grapes and paid a donation.
Fifteen miles later I was stuck. The route led to a river, but the bridge was down. I waded into the water to see if I could cross, but by the time it was up to my chest and flowing like hell, I knew I couldn’t. I found a house to ask someone where I could cross, and they told me that I had to go back another ten miles, then ride another past this, that and the other, and finally get across.
I reckoned the folk behind would know the course better than me and wouldn’t have made the same mistake, so I lost a bit of time to them, but, again, I wasn’t that bothered. What could I do about it now?
The next decent-sized town was Steamboat Springs, a dead posh place and, by the official mileage, 1,511 miles in. I scribbled a note in the back of the guidebook: ‘Started Tuesday 7. Friday 17, Steamboat 1,511 miles. Eleven days, have done 1,511. Only 1,234 to do.’ But I’d done more than the official mileage because I’d got lost and had to take official detours. It was about half-seven at night as I pedalled into the outskirts of Steamboat Springs, and all that was going through my mind was, Show me the food. I dived straight into another Subway, giving them a spike in their profits they hadn’t expected.
The next morning I got lost again while I was trying to cross the Yampa River. I set off at four in the morning and spent the best part of two hours trying to find the right route. I’d ride to the bottom of this dam, then back up again. The Garmin let me down, because I hadn’t downloaded the maps, and it wasn’t clear that I had to ride over the top of a dam. I was kicking myself a bit.
By half-six the same morning, Mike Hall, the race leader, caught me. He had taken three days out of me. I quickly saw that he was carrying even less than me. He was riding a Pivot LES, with 29-inch wheels and Shimano electric gears, all charged off the front hub. It was a light 16 kilograms packed with all his kit, whereas mine was 25 kilos and I’d taken next to nothing. It was his third Tour Divide. He’d done the first in 19 days, and he told me that no one could set a record on their first attempt because there’s so much you need to learn. He’s a year older than me, and he’s from Harrogate, in Yorkshire, but lives in Cardiff.
For the next few hours I rode with Mike, and there was nothing about him that made me think he was superhuman. He was just dead calm and a bit faster than me on the climbs. I knew his packed bike weighed less, but still, he was on it.
We passed through the towns of Radium and Kremmling, not together as in side by side, but in sight of each other. He’d pass me, then I’d pass him when he stopped to change his clothes. I spoke to him a bit, though. I told him that I’d worked out that if we were over halfway and it had taken him three days to catch me, he could pull another three days on me between now and the end. If he was on record pace – 14 days or thereabouts – I’d still finish in 20 days.
I wasn’t surprised he’d already taken three days out of me. I’d got lost and I wasn’t in the routine, plus I wasn’t trying to set a record time, so I’d sit a bit longer having something to eat. It’s dead simple: sleep less, ride more. Well, simple to say, not simple to do. The Tour Divide is not about riding faster, just riding further, every day.
At the end of the day I wrote another note in the book: ‘Riding with Mike made me push. I like my own company.’ I was riding hard, not hanging about, but Mike made me ride a bit harder than I felt comfortable with at that time. I look back now and part of me thinks I should’ve tried to stay with him, but it was my first time doing a ride that long so I didn’t know what pace I could keep up. It’s so important to ride at your own pace in an endurance event like this, and realise that other people might be quicker than you in different parts of the race. You could set off like hell trying to keep up with someone, not knowing that they’re going to collapse halfway through and not make the finish.
By the time I reached the Ute Pass I was on my own again. This was another climb that peaked at 10,000 feet. The whole of Colorado is a mile or more above sea level, so these climbs weren’t from zero to 10,000 feet, but the air is still thinner when you’re at the top.
After the descent there was another stretch of tarmac road, eight miles or so, into Silverthorne. This was another place that seemed dead posh, somewhere I can imagine that people who’ve made a load of money would buy a holiday home in the mountains. It’s not far from Vail, a Colorado ski resort I’d heard of. I like the idea of living in a place like this, but only for a minute. I know I wouldn’t like the reality of it. Still, after not seeing anyone for hours, it was a nice place to roll into as the sun was setting.
There was a good cycle path around Dillon Reservoir, on the other side of Silverthorne. The guidebook reckoned that the reservoir supplied the water for Denver, 50 miles east, through 20 miles of tunnel.
Breckenridge was more of the same, posh as fuck. Between these towns I was passing rare stuff all the time, like a wooden water tank that supplied the old steam locomotives, and riding through areas with names like the Arapaho National Forest. I was never bored.
Ahead of me was the Boreas Pass, at 11,482 feet, one of the highest points of the whole Tour Divide route. I thought it would do me good to sleep up there, giving my body some altitude training while I was resting. It was Saturday night. I’m not big on going out on a Saturday night, never have been, but I’ve never had a Saturday night quite like this one. It was cold, but not cold enough to keep me awake, and I was out like a light.
I was up and away by 3.30 for a mint section of downhill to Como, then on to Hartsel for an omelette so good I even made a note of it in my book. By the time I walked into the café at eight in the morning, I’d done 40 miles of mainly off-road riding. If I’d been sticking to what the guidebook recommended for a half-keen cyclist’s daily average mileages, I’d have just finished day 46, even though the book did say riders could probably manage more. The author had worked out these mileages so no one was stranded from somewhere to get supplies or to a campsite. As it was, I was just beginning day 13.
My first puncture of the trip came on that day too. I hadn’t done anything out of the ordinary, just hit a sharp rock in the right, or wrong, place. It was a one-in-a-million chance, but it was going to happen because of the miles I was doing on that terrain. After all, how many million times did those wheels go round? I had tubeless tyres, so I had to take it off the bead and stick a tube in it. In all it took about ten minutes.
In Colorado I was seeing a lot more 4x4s on the remote trails I was riding. Most of the drivers were dead polite and slowed right down. Some didn’t and kicked up a load of dust. I can’t remember exactly where it was, as a lot of the route is a blur, but I was riding through a tight spot, not much room on either side of the trail and a big drop to one side, in the middle of nowhere, when a load of Jeeps came towards me. They all slowed down and waved. I saw they had all the gear on them, winches on their front bumpers, roll cages, special tow ropes and all that, and it made me wonder, Where are those boys going?
I didn’t think any more of it, and got on with the job of pedalling and wondering where my next milkshake was coming from. A couple of hours later I got to the summit of wherever I was, and there was a bloke there, walking on his own. I said, ‘Now mate, are you alright?’ He explained that he’d had a bit of bother. He’d been out with his mates, all in 4x4s. ‘You haven’t seen them, have you?’ he asked. I told him I had and he said he was at the back, but had got proper stuck and they hadn’t noticed and had driven on without him. He was walking to try to get some signal on his phone. He wasn’t panicking, though. Then he told me that he knew the route I was taking and I’d go near the campsite they were all staying at. Could I do him a favour and drop a note off? They had a big camp set up, apparently, and I couldn’t miss it.
He described where the camp was and wrote a note with his GPS position on a bit of paper ripped out of my notebook. He told me they were the only people on the campsite, so if I pinned the note to one of the tents, his mates could find him from that grid reference. It was two miles out of my way, but no bother.
When I got to their campsite I rooted through all their food and drink, had some milk and biscuits, foraging like Mad Max after the bomb’s gone off. I thought I’d been right by him, going out of my way, so it was OK to help myself to a bit of grub. They had loads of food, and I didn’t take the piss.
On the trail from Hartsel to Salida I could look out west and see a row of 14,000-foot mountain peaks, called Princeton, Harvard, Yale and Columbia, after the exclusive old universities, and another, Mount Shavano. Bloody impressive.
After a good downhill run I reached Salida, probably the coolest town on the whole route, and home to a mega ice-cream parlour. The whole town was retro – well, not retro, just unchanged since the 1950s. Like Lincolnshire. The next climb was brutal, 12 miles up to the Marshall Pass, where three mountain ranges all met.
After the descent from there I found a café, in Sargents, that was just closing, but the woman who ran it got the grill fired up and made me a load of chicken, bacon, cheese and everything sandwiches, wrapped in tinfoil to take with me. I was just leaving when a northbound cyclist arrived. I’d meet a good few folk riding northbound, starting off in Antelope Wells and heading north. Some were doing it that way for the same reason I set off early, to miss the crowds and do their own thing, but if you’re setting off at this time of year you mean business. You’re not really just dawdling, so we were on the same wavelength.
He was an English teacher from Texas, who’d lived in England for ages. He asked what I did, and I told him I was a truck mechanic, like I tell everyone. He told me he’d had a few problems with the bike, but he was still doing well.
Then a car pulled up and the bloke driving said, ‘Alright, Terry. I know who you are.’ He had been following me on the Trackleaders website. It turned out he was a journalist, Neil Beltchenko, who wrote for bikepacker.com, and he was reporting on the race. He just happened to be passing when I was there. Then more bikes turned up.
They all knew about me not really being Terry Smith, but I didn’t know how the word had got out and I still don’t. They said it had come out of England. I hadn’t made a secret about doing the race, so I suppose if someone really wanted to find out they could have looked through the list of entrants. I explained that I was just doing the race for me, and that was why I entered under a pseudonym, but I think I might have still put my hometown as Grimsby, so it wouldn’t have taken Poirot to work out who might have been me.
Still, I had a good craic with them, and it was the first time, other than a bit with Mike Hall, that I’d spoken about the Tour Divide with people who really knew what it was. It turns out that Neil was the most hardcore of the lot, and he held the unofficial record. The riders were impressed that I had such well-sorted kit on my first attempt at it. Neil was saying it takes years for some people to get it right.
I packed my sandwiches into the handlebar bag and rode off thinking, That was a bloody great meeting, talking to proper Tour Divide lads. Thirty miles later I slept for a few hours at the side of the trail again and was up at four the next morning. Not far ahead were two 10,000-foot-plus passes, called Cochetopa and Carnero.
South of La Garita I was finding it hard to stay on the trail I was supposed to be on. The out-of-date Garmin and five-year-old guidebook were limiting me a bit, but I was alright. To retell it now it could sound monotonous: pedalling, Subway sandwiches, more pedalling, getting up at 3.30 or 4, pedalling, another 10- or 11,000-foot pass to climb … the truth is, I was loving it. My arse was hurting a bit, but I was tilting my seat one notch down, then one notch up, every couple of days to take the pressure off different parts of my backside. I was sleeping naked at night, when it wasn’t too cold, and blathering on nappy-rash cream, because it’s a bit antiseptic. My arse was red raw in places, and I didn’t want to get an infection. Every morning I had to climb back into the clammy, damp Sideburn magazine T-shirt I wore for the whole trip.
I was 20-odd miles short of New Mexico, the last state line I would cross, when I stopped for the night at Stunner Campground, north of Platoro. It was a dead nice campsite, with a cabin you could sleep in and a shed full of logs for the fire. All you had to do was get a key off the ranger, but I arrived too late and everything was deserted. I knew that if I rode on to Platoro I’d be too late for food, so I gently jimmied the lock on the campsite bogs and slept in there. They were the best bogs of the trip – there was even a candle so I had a bit of heat. It was spot on. Other than sleeping in the old-fashioned covered wagon, in Ovando, I’d slept rough every night since leaving Banff. And the wagon was the type you see in cowboy films, so it was still fairly rough.
There was a stream to fill up my bottles with in the campsite and I left at 4.30. Just near Horca, 30 miles into the day’s ride, I saw a sign on a shop saying ‘Open at 8’. It was quarter to, so I went off for a shit in the woods and, dead on eight, I knocked on the door. A woman answered, ‘Howdy.’
‘Oh, I’m dead sorry,’ I said, ‘but can I just buy some stuff?’
‘Yeah, no problem. We’re just having a cup of coffee.’ I sat and had a cup of coffee with the family and their dogs. Again, they were the nicest folk. I told them what I was doing, bought a load of cake and set off again, feeling the fittest I had ever been.
By now I only had about 700 miles to go and was confident that this ride was not going to break me. Other than my backside, I was in good shape, and mentally I felt the strongest ever, with not one crack.
Less than 20 miles after my breakfast stop, I rode into New Mexico, the last US state I had to cycle through.
A proper find, the kind of place that helped make the Tour Divide so special, was the Shack in the tiny village of Cañon Plaza. A brother and sister had opened a shack to feed riders doing the Tour Divide, but it was the mother who was keeping an eye on the tracking website today and knew that someone called Terry Smith was close by. I was 85 miles from where I’d had coffee and cake with the family and their dogs, so I was ready for food, and there wasn’t really anywhere else to eat from there to Cuba, New Mexico, 120 miles away. I had three Pot Noodles, tuna, biscuits, crisps, Gatorade – just chucking anything within reach into my gob.
I was still stuffed four miles later when I rode through Vallecitos, also known as Dog Alley, because it’s where the stray dogs go mad chasing riders. I thought they were going to rip my calf muscles off, they were going so mental.
I slept in a farmyard near El Rito and was up again at four and into another hard day of climbing. On the far side of Abiquiú I could see Cerro Pedernal, a mesa, the kind of flat-topped mountain with steep sides you see in cowboy films or adverts for Marlboro cigarettes. I picked up another two punctures, which, along with the amount of climbing, meant that it took eight hours to ride from Abiquiú (pronounced Ab-uh-queue) to Cuba, even though it was only about 80 miles. The book recommended covering the distance between the two towns in two days, with the first day being only 23 miles of riding. It said: ‘Today’s mileage may appear short, but the effort expended to make those 23.2 miles will be considerable.’ I’d been riding before the eight hours for this stretch, and I was still riding long after.
I bought some extra inner tubes in Cuba, because I was out of spares and the slits in my tubes were so big I couldn’t repair them. The new tubes weren’t the right size, so I hoped I wouldn’t have to use them, because it would be a struggle. Luckily, I didn’t get another flat.
The scenery was half-desert, half-forest, and dry with no mud – or no mud when I was going through, anyway. When it’s wet it’s supposed to be horrible. The scenery was not quite as beautiful as Montana, but still nice – mountains and low trees nearly as far as the eye could see.
In Cuba, I was weighing up what to do and where to stay. This was the biggest part of the strategy for the Tour Divide, knowing when to stop so you’re passing places that sell food and drink when they’re open. It never entered my head that I’d have to plan like that before I started the ride, but I learned pretty quickly.
The tailwind out of Cuba was mega. I’d had days with bad headwind, and it had been a real slog, but this was the other side of the coin and I was doing 30 mph for about three hours, making hay while the sun shone. If it’s good, just keep going.
The wind started to turn at about 11 at night, the time I usually packed in riding for the day, so it made sense to stop. My lights were run off a dynamo in the hub, a dead clever thing, but as soon as I stopped pedalling it was pitch black. I took my head torch off the handlebars, and clicked it on to have a look around as I decided where I was going to camp for the night. It was all sandy with plenty of cacti, so I found a fairly clear patch, kicked some rocks out of the way and thought to myself, This will have to do. As soon as I turned off my torch a light came on, shining right at me, and a man’s voice asked what I was doing. I thought, Fuck! What’s this? I told the voice I was just having forty winks. Then he said, ‘You don’t want to sleep here,’ and then I’m sure he added, ‘There’s a Bigfoot about.’
He said, ‘There’s a house over the road and we saw you looking out here. Come and kip in our garden shed.’ They were a Native American family, Indians as they used to be called – a lad, his mum and dad – and they were more lovely people that I met on the ride. They brought me a cup of coffee and an apple. They hadn’t heard of the Tour Divide, so I sat with the son, who’d have been 20 or so, and showed him the guidebook.
I asked him what town I was near, and he explained that we were on the reservation. I’m not sure if they were Apaches or Navajos or what. They didn’t have a clue who I was, so they weren’t being nice to me because I’d been on the telly. They were just nice people. I loved being anonymous on tour in the middle of a massive foreign country.
I left their shed at four in the morning and I was in Grants, where the Tour Divide trail crossed Interstate 40, which is part of the old Route 66, at eight. There was a big truck stop so I treated myself to my first shower since leaving the hotel in Banff. I was about 2,400 miles in and on my seventeenth day of riding, so I didn’t know if I needed a shower or not, but I was going to have one anyway and it was mega. It cost me $11, though. I thought it was dear, but they gave me soap and the use of a towel. You had to book your shower, so while I was waiting I went in the diner and ordered summat called Chester’s chicken. I was tucking into it when someone came to find me and told me my shower was ready. I took my chicken with me and sat naked on a bench in the shower, eating it. I caught the reflection of myself in a mirror and couldn’t believe how much weight I’d lost. I was sat there, filling my face and thinking, Who’s that? I looked like I’d escaped from a prisoner-of-war camp. If I hadn’t have been biking I’d have been a fat bugger, the amount of rubbish I was eating.
I had been thinking about the infections I was risking and was keen to wash my backside and feet. I didn’t want anything like an infected sore to stop me, because I wasn’t having any problems with fitness or motivation. I finished my fried chicken, stepped under the shower and watched as the water ran brown with dust, flies and 16 days of whatever else. I could hardly believe what was coming out of my hair, and it had been cut short with clippers just before I left Canada.
I washed my cycling shorts and socks in the sink, but I didn’t wash my T-shirt and I don’t know why. Perhaps I subconsciously wanted to experiment with how it would smell after being worn for 20 days of nearly 3,000 miles of cycling. The answer wasn’t unexpected: ripe.
Back on the bike, this time on Route 66 for a while then on a trail to Pie Town. And that was a slog. After 130-odd miles I rolled into Pie Town, arriving just before the shops closed. What a place. There was a pie shop, of course, but not selling meat pies, only fruit pies. They’re missing a trick. I ate two apple pies when I was there – family sized, not Mr Kipling’s – and took a cherry one with me. I also had a cheeseburger and a quesadilla.
Also in Pie Town is the Toaster House, a hostel for riders and hikers doing the Tour Divide or the TransAmerica Trail. You can’t miss it, with its knackered toasters fixed to the fence all around it and loads of old shoes nailed to the outside wall. Inside, there are maps pinned up and a load of stuff in the fridge. This hostel was operated on an honesty-box system, so you paid for what you took. There were beds and seats – it was brilliant. I wasn’t the only one staying there that night. There was a hiker, heading northbound, who I had met in the pie shop. He walked bits of the Continental Divide every year. He asked if I was staying there, and that sort of made my mind up that I would. It was six in the afternoon by the time I’d finished filling my face, so my plan was to get going at midnight and have a right good push through the Gila Wilderness, a section that’s described as the most brutal, because of the heat. It’s a desert. It’s not like the Sahara, because there are loads of trees, but it’s as dry as a bone. People I spoke to said, ‘Have you been through the Gila yet?’ They pronounced it ‘Hee-la’, and it made me think it would heal me, like they say in Lincolnshire when something you’re about to do is dead hard. ‘That’ll heal ya.’ It’s like bad meaning good. Even Mike Hall had said, ‘Are you ready for the Gila, mate?’ And that was, what, a week ago? Setting off when I planned to meant that I’d be doing the lion’s share of it in the cool of the night.
I wanted to get the brunt of the climbing done before four or five in the afternoon, when the heat was worst. People talk about the midday sun, but I always thought the late afternoon felt the hottest. The bloke who was staying in the Toaster House told me where I could scoop up water, but it needed purifying.
I gave my bike a check over, had a yarn with the hiker for an hour and set the alarm on my phone for 11 before getting my head down. I hadn’t had any bother sleeping since leaving the hotel in Banff, but I couldn’t settle on this night because I knew I had such a big day ahead of me. The climbs weren’t mental – 9,000 feet or thereabouts – and Pie Town is nearly one and a half miles above sea level, so, again, I wouldn’t be climbing from the sea-level base of a mountain to the top, but it was the continuous slog of hairpin after hairpin, at an altitude I wasn’t used to before I left England. I work in Grimsby. You can’t get more sea level than that unless you grow gills.
I woke up at ten, ahead of the alarm, and forced myself back to sleep for the extra hour, then I woke up again by myself, checked my watch and it was three in the morning. I’d set my alarm for eleven in the morning by mistake. It was a bit of a bastard, but you can’t let these things knock you off course. I was already thinking, Oh, it’s alright. I had some porridge at the Toaster House, got my gear on and set off.
My plan was out of the window, but you have to stay positive. It’s the negative thoughts that will stop someone from finishing a ride like this. The negative thoughts; the broken bones; being attacked by a grizzly bear; having your calf muscle chewed off by a stray dog; riding off the side of a cliff; sunstroke; dehydration; hypothermia … but mainly the negative thoughts.
Then, three hours in, my gears stopped working. I’d done a load of research about what gears to run and decided on a Rohloff Speedhub. It’s different to any of the gear systems I have on my other bikes. Most mountain bikes have front and rear derailleurs, with a mechanism moving the chain from sprocket to sprocket. The Rohloff hub I had fitted has all the gears within the rear hub, like an old-fashioned Sturmey-Archer set-up. And the Rohloff has 14 gears. I liked the idea of it being enclosed so it wouldn’t get damaged by rocks or worn by all the dust and grit and shit. In the end it wasn’t the hub that had stopped working, but the controls to change gear. I squatted at the side of the trail, with the few essential tools I had with me, trying to fix it, but it wasn’t having it, so I had to single-speed it. By that I mean I had to choose one gear that would let me climb, but wasn’t so low that it was useless on the flatter sections where I’d have to pedal like hell to get anywhere. I knew that some lads did the whole Tour Divide route single-speed, and in very quick times, so I was still staying positive. I set off again.
The landscape was rockier with nowhere near as many trees now, but I was making good time, averaging 15 mph, until the climbing started. The temperature was rising into the early 40s, which meant I had to push it up some of the climbs.
This was where I felt I needed the most mental strength of the whole ride. Although the route is designed to follow the Continental Divide, and is never more than 50 miles from it, the Continental Divide is like the equator – it’s geographical, not manmade, and the trail can’t follow it exactly for long. But for eight miles that day, I was on the line of the Continental Divide itself.
I was having more bother with the gears when a fit bird in a 4x4 pulled up next to me. ‘Are you alright?’ she said. I told her I was, and I asked where Pinos Altos was. I knew that was the peak of the climbing and the highest point of the rest of the route. I thought, or hoped, it would be about two miles, but she said, ‘Ten miles, maybe more.’ It was nine at night, the light had just gone, and I thought, Oh, fuck.
She said, ‘Just chuck your bike in the back, no bother.’ But I wasn’t even tempted. Earlier in the day, when I was pushing up the mountain on tiptoes because it was so steep, I was thinking, If some bugger comes past now I’m getting a lift. But as soon as someone handed it on a plate, I thought, Nah, you’re alright, love. There was no way I was getting to within a day of the end and caving in, however hard it got. No way.
By the time I got to Silver City at just gone 11, I was starving. I hadn’t eaten properly since Pie Town, and there are 185 miles of desert and mountains between those two towns. All I had set off with was one pie in my bag. I found a 24-hour McDonald’s and started filling my face: chocolate milkshakes, two of them, apple pies, burgers. I was back and forth to the counter, ordering more every time I finished what was in front of me, and no one gave me a second look. It’s America, it must be what they do. I finally finished filling my face at one in the morning. I didn’t get sick of eating on this trip, because it had to be done. There wasn’t much else happening apart from pedalling, so I would look forward to eating, and eating till I could eat no more was alright. I don’t think I could face another Subway now, though.
I knew there was only 150 miles to Antelope Wells and the end, and that there was not much climbing left. When I’d been planning the ride, back in England, I thought I’d push to the end from Silver City, without stopping. Now I was here, and because I’d had such a hard time getting up to Pinos Altos, riding single-speed, I decided I’d have a few hours’ sleep.
I slept in the back of McDonald’s car park without a care in the world. I’ve seen rats as big as Jack Russells around the bins in McDonald’s car parks in Britain, all of them enjoying the cold and greasy all-you-can-eat rodent buffet, but there could have been a herd of them filling their furry faces inches from my head and I wouldn’t have noticed. Seventeen nights spent sleeping in different degrees of rough had toughened me up, no doubt about it.
My temporary home for the night, and I mean Silver City, not the McDonald’s car park, got its name from nearby mines for the precious metal. The town’s claim to fame is being the childhood home of Billy the Kid, the outlaw, gunfighter and murderer. It was the first place he was jailed and the first place he escaped from jail.
I got up at four and walked back into the McDonald’s for more food. While I was waiting, a fella with his mate got talking, worked out I was British and said, ‘You heard about Brexit?’ This was the early hours of Saturday morning, so we were already out, but I explained that I didn’t know anything about it. I filled my face again: three pancakes, sausage, apple pie, Egg McMuffin, two coffees, and took more for the journey as I set off for the finish in Antelope Wells.
The first 18 miles were on tarmac, State Highway 90, and easy going. At the end of that stretch there was a cool shop where the route turned off to follow a dirt trail again. I stopped for two ice creams and more coffee, sticking to the rule of eating and drinking when I got the chance. I had started thinking I had finished. I was still 100 miles away, but I knew I’d done it, though there was still a sting in the tail.
The countryside was more or less flat, but as hot as an oven. I was into the Chihuahuan Desert, which stretches into both America and Mexico. For some reason, with about 20 miles to go, I started having my first negative thoughts of the whole ride, wondering if I could keep going. But I didn’t let them bother me for too long – I just kept spinning the pedals. There was a really bad headwind that wasn’t helping. After hundreds of miles of rough trails my fingers went numb from the vibration, and months later I was still struggling with grip.
The miles clicked down, like they had for the past 18 days, and then I saw it: Antelope Wells, and the Mexican border with its long fence. There aren’t any antelopes or wells there and, according to the internet, it’s the least-used border crossing of the 43 that dot the 1,989-mile border between the two countries. It’s remote, alright. There were some guards at the post, and that was it. They didn’t bother coming out of their border post. And there’s nothing to say you’ve survived the Tour Divide. No banner to ride under or someone with a flag. Nothing, exactly like Banff. If you’re doing a ride like this it’s enough to know yourself that you’ve finished and you did it.
Sharon was there to meet me. I hadn’t spoken to her since I left Heathrow, three weeks ago, and she’d had to organise a load of stuff to get there, flying into Phoenix, Arizona, getting a rental car and finding Antelope Wells. I already had a plan B if she wasn’t there to meet me, but she was. She’d been there, in the baking heat, for six hours with a Subway sandwich waiting for me. I was impressed. Plan B, if she hadn’t been there, was getting back on the bike to Deming, 80-odd miles away, where I would hopefully get on a bus or something to Phoenix airport.
When I finally stopped pedalling I started to cry. I’ve never done a race that’s made me cry. I don’t know if it was the relief of doing what I set out to do or what. It was the strangest feeling. No snivelling or shoulders shaking or anything, just water coming out of my face. Where the heck was that coming from?
I had a beard, for the first time ever, because I hadn’t shaved for three weeks. I was a bit sunburnt, but not too bad. Sharon took a couple of photos of me by the Antelope Wells sign. Another woman was waiting for her fella, who was a couple of hours behind me, so we had her take a photo of me and Sharon together. There wasn’t any big celebration. It just ended. One minute I was cycling across America, the next I wasn’t.
I had cycled 2,745 miles, and probably a bit more, in 18 days and 6 hours, quicker than the time that established the Tour Divide record, set by Matthew Lee in 2008, of 19 days and 12 hours. I averaged 149 miles per day, every day. I’d soon learn that Mike Hall, the Yorkshireman living in Cardiff who I met on the route, set a new record of 13 days, 22 hours and 51 minutes. Impressive.
I took the wheels off the bike and stuck it in the back of the rental car, and I climbed in the passenger seat. Sharon never complains if I haven’t had a wash for a while, but she said I stunk the car out that day.
We headed towards Phoenix and stopped in a cheap motel, where I had my second shower of the trip. Sharon brought my trainers, shorts, kecks and clean T-shirts, so I could finally get out of the clothes I’d been wearing for going on three weeks.
Even though I’d been sleeping rough and eating shit, I wasn’t bothered about finding a luxury hotel or treating myself. We just went to a trucker’s caff, like a Little Chef, which was attached to the motel. I think Sharon wouldn’t have minded a few days’ holiday in America, but I was ready to get home. I sent Spellman an email to see if he could sort us an earlier flight. He got on the case and arranged one for the next day. I was in bed for nine and slept till eight the next morning. Nothing radical.
I wasn’t sure before if the whole Tour Divide experience was going to break me, but it hadn’t. It made me realise that if I put my mind to it I can do anything. Instead of wondering how, or even if, it had changed me, I had the same feeling as I did driving home after the wall of death. Both these things had taken so much time and effort to build up to. With the wall of death it was building the bike, learning how to ride the wall, then going as fast as humanly possible on it live on TV. For the Tour Divide it was riding further and for longer than I ever had, relying on myself and sleeping rough. At the end of both of them I wasn’t looking forward to relaxing and taking it easy – I was itching for the next big challenge. I just wasn’t sure what it should be.