When words become irrelevant

I’m a strong believer in the power that words can carry but, unfortunately, there are times where no words are valid for expressing oneself. I learned this too early in life when my father died in 2012. He was my inspiration for everything. He was always pushing me directly and indirectly to do things, to keep going, to find myself in life and enjoy the path along the way.

#2.- Croissantssssssss

I have very well established over and over again how inexperienced I was (am) in all this ultra-endurance/bike-packing/surviving-in-the-wild thing, but I had never expected to be so utterly f*cked after riding 30km or so. I mean, I had ridden 6000km before the TCR, I had done a back-to-back 400km ride, routing myself and everything, so it never came to mind that things would go south so fast (ok, actually slow, because I was trying to travel south to no avail).

TCRNo4: An Interlude

I’m not going to apologize. In the end, this is me. A procrastinator born and made. But I do realize that this debriefing of my adventures in the Transcontinental Race from 2016 is getting ridiculously long. We are already in March 2017 and I already think there are more chances of someone finishing this year TCR before I finish my write up. But, hey, I do have a few excuses.

#1.- The Muur. The Muur.

I left home with my bike (badly) packed in a cardboard box. First time flying with my bike and I was heading to no place else but Belgium, a country I never thought I’d visit in my lifetime for some reason.

#0.- Prologue: Prepare yourself

I once wrote a letter to my dad where I said that life is that instant of existence that happens between two eternities of non-existence. I probably read or heard that somewhere else (I don’t believe I was the first to ever realize this!) but that’s beside the point. The thing is that the Transcontinental Race is a little bit like life. It lasts barely an instant in our lives. Before and after there’s nothing. No TCR.

Kit Post!

Why yes! I think it’s part of the tradition already and if not, it should be. Almost like rite of passage. How could you possibly do the Transcontinental Race, blog about it, and not do a kit post? For a moment there I was going to avoid it, but then I had two realizations as to why this is so completely necessary:

1. So I can remember, learn from my mistakes and improve for next time and;
2. So that others can learn from my mistakes and make fun of my idiocy. After all, my whole TCR preparation was mainly driven by blog posts from previous years riders.

Basically, just my two cents thrown to the online noise of the interwebs.

THANK YOU

It’s done. Been there, done that and now I’m back home. In the following days and/or weeks I’ll be probably updating this blog with my impressions and stories from the race, kit descriptions and all that. But first of all, before I even begin with that I need to say thank you.

Training: How to tell your body to stop whining.

Because in the end, that’s what training is. An eternal loop of your body complaining and you telling it: «Look, I understand, you feel like sh*t right now, but tomorrow… tomorrow you’ll fell like sh*t as well. So deal with it!»

And then your body does exactly what you expect it to do: Build enough resistance in a week to endure pain and all you throw at it, right?

NO. OF COURSE IT DOESN’T.

My Road To TCR No4

It took a lot of creative «punctures» to get it right, but finally, I was able to set up a proper way of asking for help, as I mentioned I would here. Well, at least that’s my opinion about it and do keep in mind that I suck at asking for help. Probably one of the reasons I like riding solo, unsupported and why I’m going to try to do that for 4000km all at once!

The Thing

It’s a weird name, but I was adding my new bike to my Strava profile and I couldn’t think of a proper name for it, so that’s the first thing that came to mind (No pun intended). To be honest, this is my first real bike, and the first time that I paid more than $100 dollars for a bike so it does count as a huge milestone in my life.