Cycling, or success in cycling, is about routine. Your training routine is assisted by your recovery routine, married to your nutrition routine, and of course your off the bike fitness routine. Your bike itself has a maintenance routine, and there’s a good chance that events and races you take part in have their own routine. What you pack, when you leave, your warm up, your race day nutrition – cycling disciplines celebrate the routine, and reward the consistent. Success can come if you are running like clockwork. That’s not quite how things are going for me ahead of The Pioneer – but all isn’t lost.
Stage races themselves are also routine: sleep, eat, ride, eat, sleep. Repeat. It’s a glorious feeling to be able to devote each day to just riding your bike and being ready to do it the next day. A marathon mountain bike stage race lets you live like a pro, or live like how we think pros do, for a week. The same drudgery many of us have in our jobs is replaced with different tasks – and we love it!
This weekend, I’m starting another marathon mountain bike stage race. It is seven days long, it traverses a major mountain range, and there’s lots of climbing and a pretty good chance that some days won’t have the wind and sun on our backs.
The Swiss Epic had the highest highs, and the lowest lows. But that made the experience.
The Pioneer is a new stage race on the South Island of New Zealand. With about 550km of racing that takes in well over 15000m of climbing, it’s a race that has quickly gained attention from around the globe, for riders looking for a new experience after they have completed events like Transalp, the Cape Epic, the Swiss Epic or others. The Pioneer also offers what should be a similar racing experience, but closer to home for those in Australia or New Zealand. Travel costs could be halved or even quartered in comparison to other events.
At a rough count this is my 18th marathon mountain bike stage race, which I see as a race being 6 days or longer, and to some extent my preparation and packing has been a case of going through the motions, and hoping that prior experience takes over.
With a setting like that… The Pioneer is set the challenge and enthral.
But while I can count on experience for so many things, such as what spares to pack, what clothes to take, how to pack my bike, what sort of food I’ll want to race with – there are also some huge variables. How will the race pan out each day? Will Anton Cooper and Dan McConnell be racing hard against the two Kona Endurance teams? What other local fast teams will be in the mix? The pace of the front of the race can have a dramatic bearing further down the field than you might imagine. But races can also follow some routine, in how certain stages get ridden each year – but that is wide, wide open for The Pioneer. Who knows how the race will pan out.
Anton Cooper is racing with Dan McConnell at The Pioneer. They’ll be moving!
There’s also a question of the course. What can be defined as fire trial may well end up as rough farmer’s track, and so long days might end up longer. Singletrack could well be faster than expected or more technical, and it does mean that really there are over 500km of unknown ahead. And that’s fantastic.
Sometimes the beauty of racing is riding the unknown.
Photo by Damien Schumann/Cape Epic/SPORTZPICS
As much as cycling is routine, and having a great routine for your training and preparation is rewarded, the unexpected nature of riding, and racing on trails you haven’t seen before is the greatest reward. It takes you away from your trails at home, your local loops and known adventure rides. It places you on the edge of your comfort zone, where mistakes can be punished, but skills and ability honed from thousands of hours mountain biking are quickly rewarded.
Racing, and travel, take you out of your comfort zone and offer an opportunity to reveal your true character. And while the process of getting to The Pioneer has been like clockwork (in all honesty, it’s been an unreliable clock of late) the actual event is still a new frontier, and I can’t wait to be racing through the Southern Alps.