Race Report · Ultracycling / Bikepacking · 2022
BikingMan Portugal
The comeback to racing, eight months on — three days across the Algarve and Alentejo · May 2–4, 2022
After a start to the year that was hard to digest, and still finishing off the recovery, this was my first race in eight months. Alert, and full of respect for whatever the body had to say about it, I rode it at low intensity.
Day one was a test — seeing what the body still remembered about being squeezed like this. Day two, pushing a little harder, cut short by a rookie move with the lights, which ran their batteries flat and forced me to close the day early. Day three started earlier to make up for it and had to run into the night, finishing on the do-or-die of the Caldeirão. The course gave me the best of the Algarve and the Alentejo, with a fine mix of weather: hills, plains, descents to beaches and streams, winding roads and dirt tracks. Downpours, heat, sunrise and sunset, and ice on the final descent. Everything I had coming to me.
And, as befits a comeback, the moment I let my guard down fate collected its toll. On the very first morning, trying to adjust the dynamo while riding, I got my thumb too close to the spinning spokes — the flat aero kind, genuine blades — and opened a gash in it. I was on anticoagulants, so stopping the bleeding turned into a production; I ended up tourniqueting the thing with electrical tape, and the finger stayed swollen and comic for the rest of the race. Welcome back.
As for performance, no point dancing around it: it was an unknown, and it turned out to be a roller coaster. Eight months without racing, and coming off the jolts of the start of the year, the indoor trainer work had ramped up progressively but always inside restrictions. This was only the fourth time I’d been out on the road in 2022 — before it, rides of 30, 75 and 140 miles. Bag packed the night before, setup done on the day itself, everything down to the wire: it was what it could be. But I needed it to happen, and it happened. Shoulder aside — I rode a long stretch of it effectively one-armed, exactly as I’d expected — I felt capacity in my legs again, closing each day with two or three hours of reserve in the tank and, above all, coming into form and improving as the days went on. The body had answered. I was alive, and I could keep dreaming.
Four months earlier I’d been on an operating table. Then came the scare with the thrombosis. And there I was, on the Caldeirão by night, closing out three days of racing. It could not have gone better.
