On Wednesday I picked up my first ever gravel bike, a sweet little Trek Checkpoint SL 5. On Thursday I rode it up and down Mt Coot-tha. It seemed fine. So on Saturday I raced it for the first time, driving it up to the cute town of Kenilworth for The Sunday Creek Classic. The best gravel race you’ve never heard of, the Sunday Creek Classic serves up 121 kilometres of gravel of varying quality over 3,000 metres of brutal vert in the pristine, glorious Sunshine Coast hinterland.
Gravel. The first 60 minutes
We camped at the Kenilworth showgrounds and after a quick breakfast, at a chilly 7am, stripped down to jerseys and bibs and toed the start line, rolling out behind the leadout vehicle. Eve Conyers and I settled in together with the second or third group of men, Eve bombing the descents while I hung back wondering what the limit of my Maxxis Ravagers’ tread was, then nudging the dial on the climbs… but we always came back together like we were joined with elastic bands, and slowly I started to relax.
At about an hour in we were sitting pretty, taking selfies under a cloudless, sunny sky surrounded by paddocks of little calves and ponies. We came to a deep causeway. The guy at the front shook his head and dismounted ‘I’m not riding into that’. Water flooded the road in every direction, so there was no option to get around it.
‘How deep is it?’ another guy asked, unclipping.
I dumped my gears and edged my bike to the water’s edge, then Eve rolled straight past everyone and into the deep. I had just enough momentum to follow her wheel, realising that no matter what, I was going to get my feet wet, and this is gravel, after all. It’s an adventure!
Eve and I didn’t see most of those guys again.
To Buggery and beyond at the Sunday Creek Classic
At the 40km mark we shared a passionate bit of grovelling up Mt Buggery, a key feature in the event marketing campaign. Who named Mt Buggery is lost to history, but why they named it remains potently obvious. The climb is quite simply an unlovable and difficult lump that doesn’t finish when it should. Most of it is rideable, but near the top comes a series of three or four steep, loose, rutted ramps, barely achievable even for the MTBs, and punctuated with rocky descents.
Eve shouted encouragement to me as I plugged my way up, cleaning the first three ramps but walking the last. Eve and I had dropped all the men by now and sent it down the other side, diving into a long ridgeline where at some point we realised we still weren’t even half-way through the race, so we sat the hell up and let the pace drop a little. It was the perfect time for a D&M, and the day felt like the best kind of training ride: hard, scenic, and with excellent conversation.
This vibe took us and a couple of lucky male passengers all the way to Jimna at the 75 kilometre point, where Eve pumped up her flagging rear tyre. With a severe shortage of gels, having sucked down four in the first hour alone, I stuffed handfuls of jelly snakes up my jersey and ate them like spaghetti for the next 40 kilometres. Eve’s tyre sorted, we were back on. Except for a slight navigational error that had us wandering around some bushland for a while. But then we were definitely back on. We had been riding in the top 10 men, and we wanted to see if we could stay there.
Heading up the long Sunday Creek Road climb with 30km to go, Eve, who had done a huge amount of travel and racing in the last weeks, started to flag, and after a while we abandoned our plan to cross the line arm-in-arm in a display of co-operative girl power (I’d spent a good half an hour wondering how we could line up the sensors strapped to our bikes to get a precise tie). I edged away, but we both knew Eve had a chance of catching me on the last 10 kilometre descent.
After climbing and climbing, passing people with flats and a variety of existential crises, I eventually found the top, dropping into the most painful, unrewarding descent of my life. Sunday Creek Road isn’t a road so much as a collection of sharp rocks held together like extreme nougat, and which I hear was a challenge even for riders on dual suspension mountain bikes (although it’s hard to feel any pity for them, am i rite?). Throughout the day I’d been getting better and better at sending the gravel bike and opting for a ‘come what may’ attitude to downhills, and I decided to send the heck out of Sunday Creek Road, pushing waaaay into the ‘out of control’ no-go zone that experienced cyclists usually avoid at all costs.
From what I can tell, (and correct me if I’m wrong) gravel racing means you set your bike up as well as you can, then completely abandon any caution, ignore the fact that you can’t actually see anything you’re hitting, and hope for the best. This is what I did, trying to laugh when I pinged and rammed my way into unavoidable chaos. Tyres still inflated? Seem to be! Grit your teeth Imo, send it, and hang on tight until finally it’s over and all you’ve got to show for it are a pair of really sore triceps. I think that’s what gravel is trying to tell me.
Things were looking astonishingly good with 10 kilometres to go, having used every single one of my Ravagers’ nine lives and a few more for good measure. I’d caught up to a nice guy who’d blown somewhat, so we chatted a bit back and forth to pass the smoother kilometres, me stupidly ignoring my Garmin, which was telling me I was on a huge climb… (but had also been sending me in weird directions all day…). We flew home along the lovely, relatively flat road to Kenilworth. Happy days.
What hike a bike?
When I crossed the line, thinking I’d won, Chris the organiser asked me what I thought of the hike a bike at the end.
Um… What hike a bike?
I had 121km on the Garmin, the course length, but somewhere my buddy and I had missed a left-hander. Oh no!
The do-over
I wandered back to the car. It seemed such a shame to have worked so hard, especially in the last 40 kilometres, then discover I hadn’t actually completed the course. What’s more, I’d missed the dramatic climax of the event, the dismount-and-grovel-up-an-insanely-steep-monstrosity, the nadir of our collective suffering! I went back to Chris and asked if I could ride the last bit. Louise, one of the timing staff, was headed to the turn-off I’d missed, so I chugged a quarter of a recovery drink, put everything back in my sticky pockets, loaded the bike and mydisgusting helmet, and we drove off.
The sun was starting to cast longer shadows by the time I was back on the bike. Having really emptied the tank over the last couple of hours and skulled a bidon of Coke besides (from which I was fast withdrawing), I’d intelligently brought along another three gels for the 45-minute section, and I needed one straight away. Then I started struggling up the hike a bike. That first gel didn’t seem to do anything, so I took my second gel five minutes later, leaning up the hill so I didn’t slide down it. I plugged on. Someone had told me there were just two dismount sections of about 5 and 3 minutes, so by the time I got to the fourth dismount of about 10 minutes, hauling my bike over impossible head-high moto ruts, I began to wonder if something was up. I hadn’t seen a turnoff. But the guys in front of me had also disappeared. Hmmmm.
I trudged on. The track getting narrower and narrower, the dismounts longer. I began to notice there were no tyre marks. No footprints. Quite a bit of lantana. I’d been going uphill for nearly 40 minutes and had one gel left, and I was… lost?
Long story short, I didn’t get to ride the end of the course. I got rescued instead. Also, I may have cried a bit. I’m not sure what lesson to take from this. I have a habit of going to, um, noticeable lengths to complete races that should have been abandoned (anyone remember the infamous wheelgate affair at Reef to Reef last year?), but somehow I couldn’t help it. I want things to be hard. I want to finish.
But I didn’t. I got a lift back to race central feeling silly and ashamed, regretting what I’d tried to do, and utterly, totally spent after 6.5 hours of riding, an extra 400m vert of hike a bike, and a TSS of 425 on zero solid food. I had the hiccups too.
So… why?
Why do we race? We spend thousands of dollars on entries, travel and gear, endure pre-race nerves that make eating and sleeping torturous. We fix our faces with smiles on freezing start lines, staring down at our goosebumpy calves in jittery misery as the countdown begins. Then we risk it all—mechanicals, injury… disappointment.
Why do we risk the disappointment?
It’s something I’ve been asking myself lately, after not being able to finish a few races the way I wanted. The answer is unclear. Fluid at best. My reasons for racing change minute by minute, especially when I’m in the race, but minute by minute they are compelling. Racing just feels necessary. It’s adventure, it’s social, it’s competition, it’s achievement. It’s life with all the boring, heartbreaking bits taken out. Utterly simplified so we can just be who we really are. It’s an opportunity to be what we’re made of, and that’s rare these days. Our professional lives are so performative, so stripped of feeling by protocol and polish. At home, we struggle through our family lives on love and exhaustion. But when we race, then we get to do things that show honour, strength, character! We’re kind to strangers. We share suffering. We build each other up. That’s what was cool about racing at Sunday Creek. It sucked not being able to finish properly and be part of that beautiful narrative (the kind with a beginning, a middle, and an end). The ladies got me up on the podium anyway for a photo. Character!
The Sunday Creek Classic is a race you should definitely think about doing if you want to do something testing, creative, and beautiful. The team behind the event are adventure racers and have put that special mark on the course, that epic hike a bike being just one cool feature of a genuine journey in stunning surrounds.
So what’s next? My next race is next. Setting a realistic expectation and doing my best. And hoping the gravel gods smile down on my bike, my gear, and my sense of direction.
