20/03/2020 – The night before the race

After getting to know each other I settled in for the my first night in Australia. My host family were amazing and offered so much help and advice when it came with feeding me (no easy task), offering routes to cycle round Perth and advice for the race to Sydney.

I settled on riding the first day of the course the next morning to get a start on prep and it went well. I made good time and reached a little town for dinner but sadly the petrol station was closed.

Fortunately there was a pub down the road so I swung by to fill up my water bottles and have a glance at the menu. It was way out of my budget so I sat at a table eating my sour patch kids looking at the the route for the evening.

A woman approached me asking what I was up to and I explained and her and her husband wanted to hear all about my trip and offered to buy me some food.

An hour later and I’d finished my burger and was getting ready to leave when the heavens opened and my heart sank. I hadn’t seen rain in months and wasn’t planning on encountering it for a while yet.

Thankfully it was still warm so it wasn’t like British rain and was almost pleasant to cycle in.

A few hours later I pulled up at the side of the road, pitched my tent and went to sleep. This was going to be my method of sleeping for the race as staying in hotels was well out of my budget.

I’d heard a lot about the wildlife in Oz and I can attest to the fact that it is noisy. Endless scurrying around and birds that didn’t want to go to sleep.

The next morning I packed up and headed back to Perth and made it in good time.

I had a couple of other exploring rides planned to go both north and south of Perth to get used to riding here and get some more prep in but I decided to get my bike serviced first.

BikeDr cake recommended by some fellow competitors so I headed there, chatted to the guy there and left it for a service. I headed back a few hours later to a stern face awaiting me.

It turns out that the braking surface on my front wheel was so thin it could blow out at any moment. Apparently cheap wheels from Myanmar don’t last as long as you’d hoped.

Incredibly he gave me a barely used carbon fibre aero wheel to have for free! This certainly saved me a lot of heartache for when I’d have DNF’d the race due to a blown out front wheel let alone any potential injuries.

A couple more rides later and I got everything ready for the race start but first, there was a rider meet-up on the Thursday night.

It was a really nice evening and good to meet the guys and girls that I’d be riding with for 5500km from Perth to Sydney. It seems that whilst it was a race there were no tensions between racers and everyone wanted everyone else to do well so some tips were shared.

A last ride on Friday to the wheel dip was hampered when I overslept. Thankfully I found someone else down there to dip the back wheel in the sea with. The theory behind this is that you dip the rear tyre in the Indian Ocean and the front wheel in the Pacific Ocean when you get to Sydney to truly go coast to coast.

I packed up the things I didn’t need, posted then to Sydney and got an early nights sleep before race day. My alarm was set for 4:15 as I had an hours cycle to the start point with the race starting at 6:22.

I had no real idea what lay ahead of me, only that it was going to be an adventure.