Discussion: Tour Divide

More spectator adventure sports are coming our way! The Tour Divide kicks off today. This 4,418 km mountain bike race travels along the mountain ranges from Banff, Alberta to the Mexican border at Antelope Wells, New Mexico. Around 100 riders will be heading out on a ride that will last from 17 to 31+ days.

This is not a regular race. It takes place in a single stage and is entirely self-supported. There is no entry fee, formal registration or prizing. There is no active, on-the-ground administration by any organizers. Tour Divide simply provides a web-based framework to present rider progress - a blog for rider voice mails, optional SPOT tracker rental and a live tracking website.

When riders arrive at the Mexican border, no one will be there to meet them and they will need to find their own way home.

Although this group departure has been arranged, anyone is welcome to ride the route at another time, and as long as they follow the very strict rules, they will be included in the historic general classification results. Most of the rules (listed on the website) revolve around the meaning of "unsupported". For example, if the Tour Divide passes through your town, you can greet and cheer for riders but you cannot offer them a meal or place to stay since they can only use services that are available to all riders.

From the website:
"Self-supported grand tour racing (ie. >2 week-race) along the Continental Divide is like none other. Simply on scale, it's the hardest form of bike racing, period. To be competitive for the overall, one must ride ≥150 miles/day for 18 days. There are no rest days. And if volume alone isn't taxing enough, one must also navigate, acquire resupply, clean and wrench the bike, find shelter each night, bathe when possible, and keep one's wits about it all. No entourages follow athletes. It cannot be compared to today's 100-milers, 24hour racing, or even 3-5 day stage race events."

Racers need to be prepared to sleep at the side of the trail, although they will often have the opportunity to be in campgrounds or towns at night. There are long stretches where no food is available and parts of the map are marked "high grizzly density".

Former Attackpointer Crash, aka Sarah Caylor from Palgrave, Canada, is one of the few women tackling the route solo this year. Anyone else out there? If you'd like to follow a rider's progress, here is Crash's GPS tracking page.

To follow the overall race, see the live tracker for all riders and read more about the Tour Divide, check out the website.

Rider call-ins and more detailed race news are provided at MTBcast.

WOOT! Thanks for posting this Barb. Go CRASH!!!!! (but try to avoid er...crashing :-))

And they're off! (Actually, they were off a little while ago. Crash has already gone 25K - yay, only 4,393 km to go!) For those familiar with the area, they're riding from Banff into the Spray Lakes area south of Canmore right now. It's amazing how much people have spread out already - although they didn't necessarily start together; they just needed to track their start time.

The SPOT trackers are working really well.
http://tourdivide.org/leaderboard

VO2Max rode with Crash for 2 hours this morning and posted this short video. She's doing well after 2 hours of climbing on her heavily loaded bike.

Looks like Crash had to camp trailside in her bivvy bag without a stove. It's been snowing in the area, so it would be a nasty night.

She's moving well today though. Her SPOT stopped broadcasting around 5:30 p.m. yesterday but I don't think she stopped that early. I kept checking though since she is currently in one of the areas labelled "high grizzly density" on the map.

Curious do some of the racers ride from New Mexico to Alberta?

Yes, you can see some of their dots on the SPOT tracker. There are also some people who started at a different time.

They've had some heavy rain and blizzards. One rider talked about a 3-hour hike-a-bike through snow over a mountain pass. Another guy talked about doing powder turns on a descent. Some very strong riders stopped a little early last night so they could have a warm hotel room in the pouring rain and dry out their stuff. Crash was in her bivy bag at the side of the trail in a "high grizzly density" wilderness area with no services.

Okay was tried to figure out the wide range of spot trackers so that makes sense. In my limited time following adventure sports I'd have to say that this race might be the craziest! :) go Crash go!

This is probably one of the toughest. I'm not really sure how you could complete this without getting an injury. I think in most cases, thats what does people in. This race has really exploded the past couple years ago. Back around 2005, there wasn't much of a playbook yet on how to do it, and it was only about 10 people on the startline. I think there's enough blogs and race reports, you can piece together a bit of a plan now. There's always a couple people which do it singlespeed... which is just insane given the climbing.

There are 9 riders on single speed bikes this year - 3 with suspension and 6 without. (The race categories are very specific!) Crash struggled with her decision on this. The problem is that more gears = more things to go wrong. In the end, she went with a converted single speed with 9 gears on the back. There's no derailleur on the front but there are two chain rings. Much of the time she will need lower gears for climbing with her big load but she can move the chain to the bigger ring manually when she hits a long stretch of paved road.

Btw Crash texted tonight from Eureka, Montana mentioning too much snow, too much rain, blizzards, hail, rivers, run-off... She's doing well but says it is hard and she's a day behind schedule because of all the snow pushing.

Interesting discussion on the bike choice. Yeah, as someone who is terrible at bike mechanics, I always thought it may be safer to go with less gears. Hopefully all the snow and cooler temperatures will translate into more water and a cooler New Mexico desert in a couple weeks.

Good news: Just learned that Crash made it to the one cabin marked on the map in the 114-mile stretch of wilderness so she didn't spend the night enjoying sleet in her bivy bag with the grizzlies.

Bad news: The rivers are running very high and she got knocked down by the flow in one and went completely under. Always a fun thing to do when you're biking through snow.

Man o man. Thx for the updates. Been through that northern area of Montana in early June and I remember seeing lots of road closures because of spring runoffs. Glad to hear she made it to a cabin for the evening!

Sounds like an intriguing event. I like the self supported aspect of it. I presume that you looked at most of the maps Bash? Mostly gravel roads or are there rougher tracks? Easy navigation? It looked like one of the lead guys went the wrong way last night - or maybe he detoured to somewhere more comfortable to sleep (though it was in the middle of nowhere).

If I ever did it I like the idea of a Rohloff Hub and a drive belt system like Ollie Whaley is using.

'Bent has been saying the same thing as you about the Rohloff hub.

Yes, we reviewed the maps together and I made up a spreadsheet of points along the route for each map including the distances between them and the services they had (informal camping, food store, restaurant, organized campground, indoor lodging, bike shop). The maps are available online for about $100 and come with detailed cue sheets. The instructions are very detailed, and given how few people seem to go off-route, I'm guessing they must be quite clear. In the book I read, the author didn't talk about navigation as much of a challenge, even though he freely shared his experiences with many other types of challenges!
http://www.adventurecycling.org/store/index.cfm/ca...

There seemed to be a lot of forest roads, ATV trails and mining roads - some of them in better shape than others and some of them quite steep. There is some single track and paved road too.

There's more info on the route at the Tourdivide.org site, the entertaining book "Eat, Sleep, Ride" by Paul Howard, and miscellaneous blogs.

There is a discussion forum at Bikepacking.net which includes a number of past racers and longtime TD watchers. I'm learning a lot from it.
http://www.bikepacking.net/forum/index.php/topic,3...

Sometimes people detour off-route for a comfortable night indoors or to hit a food shop. You can go off-route but the rule is that you must return to the point where you left. There were 3 guys who made a big mistake in the Flathead Valley overnight. They crossed the river and followed a road directly south almost to the U.S. border before realizing their error. It looks like they only lost 2-3 hours. If you click on "AH"' (Aaron Hershberger) and go to his detailed page, you can see what happened. Looks like they decided to spend the night when they realized their error, then they returned to the correct route this morning.

I think the navigation is relatively straightforward. The guy who has won this 4-5 times used to do it by memory after a couple years. Most of the roads are ATV trails, and very little singletrack (keeping in mind that even 50km of singletrack is immaterial given the length). I think the most difficult tracks are some of the mountain passes, where snow can turn it unrideable this early in the year.

After some bad luck far from the nearest bike shop, Crash has regretfully withdrawn from this year's Tour Divide. She promises to return and take advantage of all she learned in this amazing 11-day adventure in which she rode about 1500 km along the Great Divide. The race continues!

The Tour Divide is intersecting the RAAM right now. How cool is that? What are the odds of one racer seeing another from the other race?