Munga musings from a novice - The Race - Part 4 of the Trilogy

[Pikey]

Post(s) of the year,what a great read. Thourghly engaging start to finish.

 

Congrats on finishing it ????????????

[DJR]

Carlo, massive congratulations, but you should know that the BikeHub is an impatient animal...........looking forward to your race report.

[Brakenjan]

Carlo, I cannot wait for your race report. Just sayin..... 

[Imploder]

Carlo, I cannot wait for your race report. Just sayin..... 

I suspect he might be turning this into a book.....

[Carlog]

feels like a trilogy in four parts...  coming soon.  I'm thinking of it like red wine... 

[AfricaMike]

Come on Carlog!  The bottle (probably Tassie's) must be nearly finished by now.....my finger is hovering over the 'submit payment' to Alex.....all entirely dependent on the 4th episode of the Carlog 'Trilogy'....

[Slowbee]

feels like a trilogy in four parts...  coming soon.  I'm thinking of it like red wine... 

Like a modern area red wine, harvested fermented and boxed in the same day.

 

Munga ver 2.0 is around the corner

[fanievb]

Like a modern area red wine, harvested fermented and boxed in the same day.

 

Munga ver 2.0 is around the corner

I got threatened with suspension regarding a race report........

[Carlog]

THE COMMENTS COLUMN

I crossed the finish line at Doolhof Wine Estate in Wellington 3 days 23 hours 8 minutes after leaving Bloemfontein at 12 pm on 28 November.   I was the 57^th rider across the line.  Another 51 riders would cross after me, while around 30 would abandon the event somewhere along the 1076km route.   Of the nearly 96 hours it took to reach Doolhof, 68 of them were spent in the saddle.  Curiously, of the 28 hours off the bike, I only slept ‘properly’ on two occasions – on Thursday for 1½ hours and on Friday for 3 hours.  From my GPS data and recollection, I also got horizontal on 8 other occasions totaling some 4 hours.  These were usually 15-minute lie downs where I may or may not have dozed off. That’s a moving average speed of 15,9kph and 11kph if you include the stops.  While I achieved my ‘goal’ of completing it in under four days, it didn’t happen anything like my Excel version of the race.   On reflection, I don’t think I could have gone any faster on the day – a satisfying admission.    

 

The end. 

 

Or is it?

 

It’s a feature of our mostly capitalist culture that results matter.  Very often it’s all that matters.   Score boards don’t have comments columns and income statements reflect how much money was made, not how it was made. 

But, the journey is important.  The how, does matter.  Participating in The Munga has reminded me that the fullness of life comes mostly from the journey, not the result.  So here is the story of my race. 

 

Having had the foresight not to trust my aging and sleep deprived memory I recorded 48 video clips during the race.  Add to that the objective GPS data from my Garmin(s) and some fact checking with other riders, what follows is the ‘comments column’ next to position 57 on the results sheet of The Munga 2018.        

 

BRING A SHOVEL

Kilometre 370, 9am-ish, Thursday.  21hours since departure.

“Just so we’re clear:  is this that call where I tell you to harden up and ride your bike?  Because if it is – just harden up and ride your bike.”  

 

It’s around 9 am in the morning and my Garmin tells me I’m about 30km from the second race village (RV) in Britstown.  That puts me about 370km from Bloemfontein.   At this point, I haven’t slept since I woke up 27 hours ago.  I’ve been stopped for a total of 2h49 since we started at midday the previous day, and I’m already about 4 hours ahead of my most optimistic pre-race Excel predictions. 

 

Except, I’m not. 

 

The familiar voice belongs to my wife.  She’s doing exactly what we agreed weeks before: “Look babe:  under no circumstance can you allow me to quit the race.  If I can hold my phone and dial, I’m good enough to carry on, no matter what I say or how I sound.  Only the medics can pull me off the course and even they will have to catch me first.”  I had joked before the race about finishing even if I had to crawl over the line carrying a wet, bleeding limb over my shoulder.  I will not make that joke again.

 

You see, I had called to tell her that I ‘moered’ a rock with my pedal during the first night.  My Achilles had been swelling since and was now completely seized.  Unable to flex my left ankle, my left knee was now so sore that I could no longer stand and pedal.  I had told her I thought about quitting.  How could I possibly do another 700km’s?  That’s double what I’d already done, with all the real climbing still to come.  With just one leg.  What if I did permanent damage?  Surely, I wouldn’t make the finish?  

 

That’s when she told me to harden up and ride my bike.  Like we agreed.  So that’s what I did.

 

Kilometre 981, 4:22 am Sunday. 88h22 since departure. 

It’s been five hours since I left the famed Tankwa Padstal at 11:41 pm the previous evening.  My odometer has advanced just 45km in that time. 

I try and do the math.  Last time I slept more than 15 minutes was over 30hours ago in Fraserburg.  

I try and do the math.  It’s been an unrelenting, gradual, torturous uphill for five hours. 

I try and do the math: “45km.  5 hours.  45 divided by 5.  Whats that?   Less than 10… 9.  9kph!  This hill ends at about kilometre 990.  Where am I now?  881km.  That’s… 990 minus 881… Think! …9.  9km left.  At 9kph.  

One. More. Hour.  F**k.”

 

It’s 6 degrees Celsius outside and my knees feel the same inside.  My bicycle is in the middle of the road.  I am stumbling around it, stiff legged.  The pitch black of night makes one last stand against the rising sun and loses the battle for another day.  The silhouettes of orderly planted orchards begin to show themselves.  So too does the top of this damned mountain.  I can see it.  

Unable to bend my frozen, swollen knees I cannot get on my bike.  I start my stiff legged walk toward the summit.   Like Captain Hook with two wooden legs and no boat to sail.  Having seen no-one all night I am startled by the sight of another cyclist.  It’s Leonard Martin – this chap has legs like a rhinoceros.  Perhaps he can loan me one?  He storms past me at about 8kph.  At least he’s on his bike.  Again, I try and mount my bike.   I get on the saddle and get a few pedal turns.  That’s good.  My knees only bend enough to pedal with my heels.  F**k.  This won’t work.  Get off.  Push.  Walk.  I scream into the void.  I swear some more.   

 

I eventually completed the 8,6km to the top in 1h07 - 7,5kph.  At the top, the rising sun mercifully warmed the icy air.  The road flattened.  The two Myprodols I took at 4am did their job as advertised.  Without pain to slow me down, I was moving again.   

 

Back at the Tankwa Padstal I met Adrian Saffy.  He couldn’t take his helmet off nor do up his buttons.  A common consequence of non-stop multi-day events is nerve damage to your hands.  It’s like changing the language to Mandarin on your iPhone: Imagine your brain is speaking English, but your fingers now only understand Mandarin.  Your brain tells your fingers to open the zipper, but they scratch your arse instead.

 

He tells me how, the previous night, he had to change the batteries on his GPS.  His fingers weren’t even responding to his swearing and he simply had to wait in the middle of the road until another rider stopped to do it for him.  He’s lucky there was another rider.  He could only change gears by jabbing at them with the palms of his hands.  As if this was not enough atonement for something in his past, he had developed bleeding saddle sores and could not sit.  He was carrying a big shovel.

 

Forget the energy gels and caffeine shots.  On The Munga you need to bring your shovel.  If, like me, you’re a novice to ultra-endurance races, you will probably have to dig deeper than you ever have before.  At the race briefing two hours before the start, Alex Harris, race director, tells us “You are about to encounter a compressed, highly emotional version of the rest of your life.  This race is like life - not everything is planned or polished.  If you expect that we’ve marked every aardvark hole and sharp turn you’re in the wrong race briefing.”  

If you plan to cross the finish line for the first time, prepare to dig deep.  For somewhere on that 1076km track there will be an unmarked, dark aardvark hole you will have to dig yourself out of. 

 

HELLO DARKNESS MY OLD FRIEND

Kilometre 162, 7:30 pm Wednesday.  7h30 since departure

It’s my first sunset in The Munga and only the second time in my life I have ridden into the darkness.  I am reminded of two elementary things:  First, the sun sets in the west.  Second, the race route is roughly south-west the whole way.  Next time, I shall bring a peak and better sunglasses. 

 

Riding through the night in The Munga is near impossible to replicate anywhere else.  It’s remote - much of what you travel through is over 70-odd private farms, away from cities and lights.  Oftentimes there is no other visible light and I can’t recall seeing more than a handful of people over all four nights.  It’s flat and dark so you cannot estimate distance well.  You could find yourself chasing down a little bobbing red light for an hour or eleven.  In one instance, desperate for some company, I chased down an imaginary cyclist for two hours only to find it was a stationary fire bakkie with its light on.   

 

By 4:45 am on the first night I was frozen through.  Although the mercury didn’t go below 8 degrees, the wind made sure those 8 degrees found its way into every joint, bone and tendon.  In a video to myself I had icicles hanging from my nose.  The only item I wasn’t wearing was my space blanket and medical kit.  A karoo sunrise is magical most days.  It’s especially magical if you’re cold and been waiting all night on your bicycle for it. 

 

Sticking to my plan I tried to sleep at around 3 pm on Thursday for the first time.  Not knowing what tired really is, I thought I would just fall asleep.   Instead, all I ended up doing was lying on a mattress listening to people coming in and out the water point.  I left after an hour.  Although frustrated I took away an important lesson – have a plan, but be flexible and adapt quickly to the reality of the circumstances on the ground. Eventually, at 9pm on Thursday night, 38 hours after I last woke up, the hallucinations were enough to convince me I finally needed to sleep. 

 

Having ‘planned’ to sleep wild, I found an open-ish spot a few metres off the jeep track.  In what I thought was a welcome flash of brilliance I made some noise to chase away imaginary nocturnal critters – I had heard of enough puff adder sightings to focus even my sleep-deprived mind.  Still amazed at my own genius I lay down.  On rocks.  ‘Comfortable’ is not how I would describe it.  Nonetheless, I wriggled around the big rocks and flattened my karoo rock bed as best I could.  Trying to fold myself into my space blanket took a few minutes, but eventually I set the timer to 90 minutes.  And slept.  To say it was the best sleep of my life would be a significant embellishment of the truth.  Sleeping out in the open, in unfamiliar territory, in a country with a murder rate higher than Escobar’s Columbia is unsettling.  It’s also normally unnecessary: when last did you try and sleep in the dirt on a training ride?   Or when last did you do a training ride where you didn’t sleep for 38 hours?  The most ‘practice’ I got was unfolding my space blanket at home and taking a week to refold it to the original size. 

 

Therein lies the masochistic attraction of The Munga:  you will have to manage a variety of first-time challenges in a foreign, but reasonably safe, environment.  There will be challenges that you are unable to replicate in training, and therefore unable to predict how you will react to.  It’s the ‘unknown unknowns’ of The Munga, and how you react to them, that make it such a deeply satisfying event to participate in.    

 

OUT TO DRY

Kilometre 687, Fraserburg. 6:07 pm Friday.  54h06 since departure

I left the race village in Loxton at 9:12 am, Friday morning.  My knee was properly sore.  The medic had done a great job of re-strapping it and the Myprodols I ‘loaned’ from Gavin Robinson once again were working as advertised.  My GPS stopped working about 5km outside Loxton on the way in which meant I had to wait for other riders to follow to the race village.  Time with the medic; a failed attempt at a nap; time trying to activate a loan GPS and time scrounging for veterinary-grade pain killers added up to two hours at the RV.  Despite the delays I still left the RV with new resolve and even called my wife to tell her things were looking up and the wind was at my back.

  

Roll forward 8 hours 41 minutes.  Fraserburg.  Just 98 kilometres down the track.  Just 374m ascent – i.e. flat.  Average speed: 11,2kph.  The problem, you see, was a bastard, devil-of-a-wind.  It was going back to Loxton and we were going to Fraserburg.  It was blowing so hard that chickens were laying the same egg three times. This part of the world is so flat that, as Mike Woolnough puts it, “you could watch your dog run away for a week.”  The wind has got half a continent to pick up speed and, on this day, at that time, on those 100km of road, it was in a great rush to get where I was not going.  The wind could have been doing 100kph.  The temperature could have been 70 degrees.  The facts didn’t matter here.  It was brutal.  It was torturous.  As if the physical effort required wasn’t enough to break me, I could see Fraserburg in the distance for nearly three hours.  I just couldn’t get there.  On the video clips I took you cannot hear what I’m saying over the howling wind.  My mouth was dryer than a camel’s arse in a sandstorm and, at one point, on a dead flat piece of road, I actually stopped to push my bike.  And I cried.     

 

I’m sitting on the pavement outside JJ’s Café.  Busted.  Wind- and sunburnt.  I have inhaled two of JJ’s most-bestest chicken burgers and three ginormous samoosas of indeterminable filling.   Bloody good, mind you.  I am faced with a decision:  push on in roughly the same direction against the same son-of-a-devil headwind or get some sleep and hope, hope, hope, that the bastard wind exhausts itself.   It wasn’t really a decision – I had some hours ago made up my mind I would find any rationale to somehow rest up in Fraserburg.  When I woke at 10pm, after three restless, painful hours of sleep, I looked at the tops of the trees.   In a rare gift from the course, they were motionless.       

 

SOUL FOOD

The water points are a unique feature of this race.  They are expected to be operational for up to 100-odd hours, servicing just 150 riders.  They are manned by farmers and are mostly at farmers houses on route.  Aside from water, there’s no guarantee what you’ll get.  Farmers are given a free hand to interpret the requirements as they see fit.  At some point you’ll peanut butter your own peanut butter sandwich.  You’ll most often make your own Starbucks Coffee.  You may get a braaied boerie, butter cookies, or ‘zambane.   In the normal course of our everything-within-reach consumerist lives these are what I think we’d call ‘basic’.   

 

Without exception, I left every water point feeling better than when I got there.  Under Munga conditions an uncooked potato tastes like a Michelin star entry and I’ve had banana bread that would be a serious contender for a Masterchef win.  Without exception, the people at each water point are living, breathing, examples of what human generosity of spirit looks and feels like.  I’ve never been called “Oom” this often in my life nor had so many offers to be fed.   

 

Have you ever had a freshly toasted boerie ciabatta with magic sauce made by Angelo, his dog Enzo, Magriet and the chap with the cap that just climbed a mountain in Russia after you put 867km through a busted knee and 30 hours of no sleep?  In The Munga you will.  

Have you ever inhaled 10 slices of freshly made banana bread and hot black tea after 351km when you’re feeling invincible because you’ve just clocked off 50km in an hour forty-five? In The Munga I did.   

 

PLAYING FROM THE ROUGH

My preparation for my first ultra-distance race included reviewing the route using google earth.  Don’t laugh.  The problem with using google earth to try and do this is that that the image is, at maximum zoom, 1,5km from the surface you will be riding on.   It’s about as useful as an ashtray on a motorbike because holes large enough to swallow a well kitted Landcruiser are not even visible.  Similarly, when viewing the profile of the 1076km route, a sheer rock face appears flat-ish.  The race description sounds like it’s mostly on district road.  Total ascent for the entire distance is just 7500m.  You’d be forgiven for thinking this was a Sunday gravel grind.  But it’s not. 

 

In a video clip recorded at 10 in the evening on day one, with just 200km under my belt I mutter: “…just to be clear:  so much for district road.  This night riding has been fraught with danger.   Bloody aardvark holes in the middle of the night in the middle of the road.   I’ve nearly bliksemmed into quite a few.   We’re passing through farm land where road maintenance is not really a priority as all they do is drive around in 4x4 thingies, during the day.  No-one really gives a damn about how mountain bikes would fare at night.   There are rocky descents.  There are holes in the middle of them.  There are even cows in the middle of the holes in the middle of the rocky descents.  Not manicured.  If you were looking for tame district road it’s definitely not this race.”   In another clip at 5am on Friday morning: “Hard going, again.  There are so many ruts, and sand, and stones.  I don’t know where he (Alex) gets them from.”

 

There’s the brutally steep climb between water point 9 and water point 10 which takes you across the provincial border of the Northern Cape into the Western Cape.   I walked most of it and everyone else I saw did some pushing.  As you exit Fraserburg, thinking you can get some rhythm, there’s another detour into jeep and goat track.  Same thing as you exit Van Der Kloof.   When you can almost touch the Loxton church steeple the GPS veers off into a 20km detour of sand and stone and ruts.  At every opportunity Alex takes you off the road you expect.  As the kilometres roll by these purposeful excursions off the district road go from interesting to torturous.  Throw in some darkness, a sprinkling of cold, and a drizzle of sleep deprivation and the risk of eating dirt increases faster than the petrol price. 

 

Sure, there are many kilometres on never-ending district road.  Like the 48km climb from Tankwa Padstal to the Top of the Mountain in Ceres.  Make no mistake though:  riding a 2% gradient for 48km can be hard if you’ve warmed up for 936km.  Even the flat portions of district road have their challenges.  Remember the bastard wind along the the 93 kilometres into Fraserburg?  There are Corrugations.  Rocks.  Sand.  Then try all that at night.  I have learned that the lower your light the longer the shadows the holes and corrugations cast, making them easier to see.  But Sand? At night it’s almost impossible to spot sand.   The result is that you never let go of the handlebars because you remember the last time you did – just for a second to grab your bottle:  your front wheel makes a dash to the left, then the right.  You choke on your tongue and pucker your arse like a Fish Eagle in a power-dive.   So, you hold on all night, nearly dehydrating because you’re too afraid to drink, and, like Adrian Saffy, end up with nerve damage.  In my case I had a slightly less severe version of nerve damage but, quite humorously for my kids, I couldn’t hold a piece of paper between my thumb and forefinger for about three weeks after the race. 

 

When a race is as long as The Munga it easy to see the terrain as simply something to overcome - on top of the cold, the distance, the heat, the wind, and your own limitations.  When you’re in it though:  a hole is a hole (ask the riders who abandoned after falling into an arrdvark hole on night one); sand is k*k, rocks can be terminal, and corrugations are simply evil.  You don’t ride The Munga from google earth and close-up you’re always playing from the rough.  

 

GET OUT

Kilometre 1028, Ceres.  8:35am, Sunday.   

Coasting into Ceres I had given up on completing my Munga in under four days.  Broken, sleep deprived and hungry I had talked myself into sleeping at the RV for a few hours before tackling Baines Kloof pass.  Just 47km and a mountain separated me from the finish.  Philip Kleynhans was the lead at the RV and he knew from previous conversations that I wanted to complete it in four days.  True to his riding pedigree and character he very simply, and not-so-politely, told me to get out of his race village.  There may have been some swearing.  Just 22 minutes, two bowls of oats, and a brace of Myprodols later my legs were turning.

 

In that time, I re-negotiated a new deal with myself:  I was going to go as hard as possible for the whole 47km, from the get-go - the consequences to my legs be damned.  Those 47km took me ‘just’ 2h08.  In my head I was on the Champs-Élysées one late July with only a TV crew in front of me.   My Garmin tells me my normalised power output was 178W and my average speed was over 20kph.   Astounding considering my pace and power just a few hours prior.    On those 47km I was reminded that the human body is more capable than we believe, but the mind must be strong.   And a Myprodol doesn’t hurt.  

 

KEEPING IT SIMPLE

Like life, The Munga is complicated.  The variables abound and are continuously changing.  Its difficulty lies in no single element but rather in the combination of these elements.  It is the alchemy of heat, cold, road surface, sheer distance and a compressed timeline that produces something harder than the sum of their individual difficulties.  This combination is only found along that 1076km route towards the end of November each year.  Counter-intuitively, the recipe for overcoming the complexity is simplicity itself.  The sheer simplicity that all you must do is relentlessly turn each bastard pedal is both underwhelming and extraordinary at the same time.  ‘Jy moet maar ry’ is about all you have to remember.

 

The experience is unique and not easily replicable - riding through sunsets and sunrises; having a field spread out over 500km and not seeing a single light in every direction; fighting hallucinations from sleep deprivation; fighting with myself not to give up at the next water point, or to leave a warm water point at 3am and head out into the blackness.  Pushing my bike on a flat road into a monster headwind and shedding a tear; falling asleep on my bike going downhill at 40kph into Ceres. You cannot train for these things.

 

But you can open yourself up to test how deep you can dig when you need to. You can open yourself up to potential failure - and then marvel how you far you will go not to fail. How much pain you will endure to complete the task and to not let yourself and those that support you down.  We live in an increasingly interconnected world where delegation of responsibility is easier than ever.  The Munga is a reminder that in the end, you are in control of the outcome.  You can write your own future.

 

It was not fun. It was physically brutal. It was mentally torturous. Yet, my body healed, and my mind will remember what it needs to. I am left with a renewed belief that we can all do so much more that we think we can. With the right mental focus and physical preparation there is almost nothing that is out of our reach.

 

It’s easy to think that this is a solo effort - it is not. Inspiration abounds when you open yourself up to it.  When you look for it.  When you need it.  It’s in the other limping rider that's also got a busted knee; it’s in the smile of the farmers kids at 2 am; it’s in every sunrise and sunset; it’s in every rocky descent and in every tailwind.  It’s in the lame joke and knowing smile.  It’s even in the hallucinations.   It’s being told by the RV lead to get out of his RV and ride, dammit, ride.   It’s in the steam off your cup and the frost on your breath.  It’s in the black of the night and the blue of the sky, the sky, the sky.

 

And it’s in the phone calls to your wife and the voices of your family.

While it may have been my feet attached to those bastard pedals the power to keep them turning came from Tam, Matteo and Gigi. In a voice note Tam sent me after she told me to harden up and ride my bike, the kids chanted "Remember what you tell us Dad, Gonzaga’s never give up".

 
How could I possibly not live up to that?

 

In case you thought this was just another race.  This was at the start line facing the riders as we departed.  The 12 pm start.  The time of year.  The loneliness.  All designed to push you out of your comfort zone.  Break you down.  Only then can you rebuild into something new, something stronger. 

 

The wind was going to Loxton and we were going to Fraserburg.  All day. 

 

Loxton to Fraserburg.  Everyone is a warrior on the Munga.  Adrian Saffy on the right - already standing from the saddle sores. Nicky Booyens on the left.  Thinking I had fallen she stopped to wake me up on a downhill into Ceres.

 

1:30am.  Alone.  Cold.  Broken. Desperate.  Walking around my bike somewhere after Tankwa Padstal. This 45km took me five hours to negotiate.  In the dark you can’t judge whether the road is going up or down.  When your speed drops you imagine you’re climbing a monster hill.  Then you consult the profile on your Garmin only to realise it’s a 1% incline.   And swear a little.     

 

The route traverses some 70 private farms. The price you pay for the unique luxury is having to open and close a few gates.  Ok… a lot of gates.  This is the brown and blue of the Karoo: Windpomp, fences, gates, rocks, sand.  Blue sky.  

 

The road out of the Sutherland race village.  It is daunting when you see the next three or four hours laid out in front of you so clearly.   

 

Top of Ouberg Pass.  Once you gird your loins and let go of the brakes you will shed 700m of altitude in just 7km.  As an act of defiance to my battered knees I let my speedo touch 57kph.

 

Waterpoint 3.  I arrived here at about 4:50am, frozen to the bone.  Bicycles strewn all over the lawn, but no people.  Outside there was a table with a coffee machine and microwave on it.  A fridge stood in attendance nearby.  My fingers could barely open the microwave to put the mince vetkoek inside.  I felt like pouring the hot Starbucks Coffee down my shirt.  Inside, the scene was apocalyptic.  People contorted into the small chairs, arms wrapped around themselves in some last gasp attempt to capture the last of their own warmth.  Riders lying on the wooden floors, curled up like new-borns.  Under tables, trying to escape the light.  Broken-ness everywhere.  I didn’t stay long. 

 

Munga miles are not for free.  The swelling in my knees and ankle took two weeks to subside. 

 

Ola! I’ll bring the salt, you bring the tequila.

 

10 months of preparation. 7500km bashing pedals, some tears, some blood, some sweat.  All reduced to the past and packed into a handmade piece of ironmongery.  The future is not written. 

 

Edited February 5, 2019 by Carlog

[WaynejG]

Wow! Well written. And admiration for doing this.

[Captain Fastbastard Mayhem]

What a post. Holy crap, Carlo. So that's what you were putting together and why it took so long

 

Again, what a helluva ride. Top shelf, old man. 

[Wayne pudding Mol]

We waited a while for the 4th part of your trilogy but it was well worth it. Inspirational and massively impressive

[SwissVan]

GOOSE BUMP STUFF!

 

Well done and thanks for the read

[Imploder]

Well that was certainly worth the wait and THEN SOME!!

Thank you so much for this post (feels wrong to call it a post, it's so much more)

It's goosebumps stuff and I'll be coming back again and again for the inspiration it provides.

[Pusher]

Such a great article. Well done.

[Carlog]

Thanks chaps - appreciate the compliments.  It took longer to write than to ride! If you're on the fence I hope it gets you on the start line in November.