Cycling Adventurer: Bicycle Touring - Launceston to Hobart 2002

The Cycling Adventurer
Bicycle Touring	Launceston to Hobart 2002

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The ride that introduced me to ultracycling

Route: Launceston to Hobart via Longford, Cressy, Ross, Oatlands, Campania, Richmond (210km) Date: 26 January 2002 Organiser: Tim Stredwick and Rowan Burns This article was written as an inspiration piece for the Salamanca Cycle Touring Club newsletter. It has been edited and link inserted where relevant, but I hope it remains an inspiration for those contemplating touring or long-distance cycling.

This is a story for those of you who have thought of doing some touring, but haven't quite set out yet. You like the idea of cycle-touring, but there are some obstacles.

It might be because you haven't plucked up the courage, where-with-all, or plain confidence to do it. Or you think you are too unfit. Maybe you haven't got the right sort of bike. Then you don't have the time. Probably tour parnter won't let you. Plus the rides always clash with something else you're planning. Oh, and what would your friends and family think? Likely it's just too hard to contemplate. Of course, the weather might turn bad...

Have I hit on your excuse yet?

Five years (1997) ago I didn't ride bikes, and I had plenty of excuses not to. A relationship; it fell apart, so that wasn't an excuse anymore. Establishing a business; ditto after it didn't make enough money to live on. I had a car; ditto yet again and I finally sold it for one-sixth its purchase price. Things were really falling apart around me! There was sailing, but that was seasonal. I was boozing and smoking and "enjoying" life... or so I thought.

Then on Saturday 1 February 1996, I got the biggest wake-up call you can get. Sailing a race on the Swan River in Perth, Western Australia, I started to see little irridiscent green dots disappear into the wake of the yacht, and a vice-like pain in my chest increased with every minute until it was like a wool-press. I had my heart attack. You can read about it here.

The upshot of it was that I spent two days in Royal Perth Hospital. I was informed by the surgeon after an angiogram that I was one very lucky person and that I could resume a pretty normal lifestyle. Minus the cigarettes. I felt like death warmed up for about a week afterwards, which I suppose I was literally. I had real trouble walking even a block.

In the end, I sold the car, and I invested the meagre proceeds in a bike, a steel-framed hybrid that returned me to Tasmania. I can get immersed in planning. The execution of plans is satisying. Finishing a project can be, for me, depressing. I did the trip on the cheap. My four panniers were old Targa Tasmania backpacks with the shoulder straps cut off and tonneau-cover tied downs for utes as the rack hooks. My tent was an $80 three-person job from a disposal store. I tinkered with the bike to learn about it, and learned heaps more on the road, especially as the pre-trip tinkering resulted in a cone winding inwards until it split the rear hub in two... in the middle of nowhere... on the hottest day of the ride. You can read all about the trip, starting here.

I started up a bicycle touring and hire business, then instigated the establishment of CyclingSouth in 2000 to help build and the cred factor. If I was going to be serious about my job, I needed to be serious about my riding and to a degree, my lifestyle (read smoking which I took back up again in 1999). On 1 April 2001, I kicked the smoking habit for the final time. April Fool's Day — appropriate for all those dollars I had foolishly spent making richer a multinational corporation that didn't care a jot about my well-being. The final encouragement, however, was a recurrence of chest pains on a ride to the shopping centre one Saturday morning.

April 2001 is when I seriously returned to cycle-touring. Many of the trip reports are being republished on this website. Some have been solo, some with my great friend, Daniel Murphy, and others with various groups from the SCTC.

Since then, I have slowly assembled a range of touring equipment that currently meets my needs. One of my credos is "I ride to learn" — about me, about people, about riding, about the communities around me or around the world, and about touring.

I've even gone down the take-everything-and-damn-the-weight track, but when you're way behind the lean, mean riders up ahead, or more practically, trying to lift a fully loaded bike up the steps on to the Tasman Bridge, you start calculating what you really, really need, what might be needed, and what's absolute dead weight. I'm still learning, and I'm still on the lookout for good quality replacement equipment.

I bought a Merida Extreme 900 road bike. It's definitely not a touring bike. But it was my first foray into road bikes with drop handlebars and thin 700C wheels. It's become my "sports car", if you like... fast, exciting, aggressive handler, and great to build leg strength because of the high gearing (42 to 23 as the lowest). I use it now for commuting and fast rides and some SCTC get-togethers.

The Apollo MTB, a companion on many of the past year's tours, has clocked over 10,000km. It now sits forlornly in the corner of my spare room, semi-retired, conceding the glory now to my most important and most recent acquisition — a Fuji Touring bike.

Touring is a proper noun for this bike, because that is its model name. It's the 2002 version, and a special order... you won't see another Australian with one unless he/she has bought it while overseas and brought it back with him/her (Note: shortly after this, the Fuji brand was introduced to the Australian market, and encouraged the appearance of other off-the-shelf touring bikes such as the Mongoose Randonneur and Trek 520 to become more prevalent in shops).

It's a 700C road bike built of chromium-molybdenum alloy steel. It weighs in at 27.5lbs (a tad over 13kg). I would not have believed a bike could have a comfortable ride unless it was equipped with a front suspension fork. But this one does. Even the seat (I think a Serfas, but it has Fuji written on it) has been superb (Note again: But not as superb as the Brooks saddles that replaced it much later).

The Fuji, for me, is the result of a lot of research on the internet, and many discussions with Daniel about touring frames with particular emphasis on the set-up of his Christies "Blue" custom job. I also applied the principles of fit and frame dimensions contained in the Adult Rider Courses that I, though CyclingSouth and Bicycle Tasmania, am developing.

The Merida was useful in determining the right size, and I have to say that I am darned lucky (or pleased with myself) because there is little I would change on the Fuji. Standover height, maybe one, because it is right on the limit (a half inch/one centimetre of crotch clearance), but that's also okay, because touring bikes are meant to have the biggest frame you can cope with, and I can't change it now, anyway.

This almost gets me to the point of this article. I did a 215km ride last weekend from Launceston to Hobart, then went out the next day to do a 30km wind-down ride, all on the Fuji. I would not have been able to do it on my Apollo mountain bike (fitted up for touring with Conti Town and Countries, etc, etc). My butt, arms, shoulders, back and possibly right leg would have been cactus. The ride on the aluminium-framed Merida would have been too harsh for me to survive. The Merida's front fork is Cro-Mo, which I think helps to smooth the ride a little, but I still have to replace the stem with a shorter, steeper one to solve a minor reach problem and make it as comfortable as it should be.

Simply, the Fuji's suppleness and smooth riding characteristics enabled me to ride that distance without the physical torture I had feared.

The trip evolved out of some bragging I had been doing to Tim Stredwick about a one-day 187km shakedown ride from Hobart to Longford the Fuji and I did fully loaded during the Christmas break. I was on my way to Redbill Point at the mouth of the Tamar River to spend the break with friends Daniel Murphy and Anne Hornby, Wayne Kelly and Dianne Van Harten. I had a great time, as the picture shows!

Me at Redbill Point
I was pretty smug at Redbill Point after
riding there in two stages, including
187k from Hobart to Longford. Little
did I know...

Anyway, Tim, a veteran of Audax-type outings and rides between his Mountain River home and Hobart (ie, 187km was just a ride in the park for him) was the wrong person to brag to, because he shot back an email suggesting "Launie to Hobart in a day"!

"Just a little", he suggested, "over your new record distance" (the previous best in a day for me was 161 wind-assisted kilometres on my Nullarbor crossing).

I tried hard with the excuses. Some of them are listed in the opening part of this story. In the end, though, there was nothing to do but go for it.

Planning was at the top of the list. Great. I sorted out the lightest possible options. My Topeak rack-bag was the starting point. It came down to disposable whatever to fit in it, including undies and socks for the trip up (they had worn out anyway). I still took my polarfleece jacket, and a two-litre wine cask bladder for water.

In fact, I felt that water was an issue because country towns in Tasmania early on a holiday morning aren't exactly bustling with activity, and fresh water supplies are somewhat difficult to locate. I had two bidons on the frame, and the bladder which in total could get us to Ross before requiring a refill, just in case we could not find a fresh-water spigot in between (in the end, we found one at Cressy, so there were no significant problems).

I included a tube of lanolin, a half-pack of baby wipes, a small toolset and a spare tube. I reckoned that minus the full water bladder, my load for the return trip measured out at 3.75kg, including the rack-bag itself. I put another 15-20psi in the 35C tyres, to help reduce the rolling resistance a bit. Tim fitted 23C tyres to his Avanti hybrid that has served him so well over the years.

We took the Saturday afternoon Hobart Coaches service to Launceston (around $22 per person, plus $10.80 a bike), stayed in a twin room at the Launceston Backpackers (excellent value at around $19 including bedding), ate lots of rice as a carbo-load in a ho-hum Chinese restaurant in the centre of the city, had a few beers and talked lots about bikes, cycling and the plans of our respective organisations. We resolved to leave the hostel at 6.30 next morning, just after sunrise.

The morning was glorious. There was a cool "tang" to the air with an overcast sky, almost no traffic, and a steady climb up to Prospect. We decided to take the back route from Launceston; that was, Longford, Cressy to Ross. This avoided the Midlands/Heritage Highway. We literally saw five cars in the first half of the day to the Ross junction.

The terrain is roly-poly with a few bends and junctions here and there to keep things interesting. Without the constant distraction of high-speed traffic as on the highway, you have time to look around, at the Highland peaks to the west, and things like the imposing cliffs of Stacks Bluff to the east. You can ride most of the time two-abreast. There're also about five kilometres of gravel road which had plenty of corrugations, but we still sped along at something like 25-30km/h, and actually increased our average through there. There was a light tailwind, and even though the sun remained hidden behind cloud, our speed forwards created a cooling breeze to counter the mid-20s temperature. Some of the smells (maybe that should be fragrances) from cut hay and the wildflowers were delicious, and the bird life entertaining.

This route is highly recommended if you want to avoid the Midland/Heritage Highway with its cars, trucks, semi-trailers and coaches. If you really dislike gravel, there is a sealed link to take you to Campbell Town, but that does add another few kilometres.

We stopped for lunch at a bakery in Ross, and frankly I gorged on pies and pastries. We lolled around for 30 minutes or so before departing. The highway bit between Ross and Oatlands is self-explanatory from the traffic point of view. The tailwind which helped us along was still there, but the humidity increased substantially. Tim rode at his own pace, a bit faster than mine, and for some reason my mood darkened... probably more to do with my own inability to keep up with him than anything else. I spent quite some time finding everything about which to grumble and complain to myself. I later put my change in mood down to the large amount of food I consumed at Ross, and my body's redirection of energy to digest it — a partial bonk, perhaps, as my system waited for energy from the digested food to come on stream.

We turned on to the Mudwalls Rd which despite its broken surface, is still quite rideable at a reasonable speed. It has a downhill to Colebrook (top speed for us was 77km/h), but Tim promptly suffered double flat tyres while negotiating gravel across bridgeworks just outside Colebrook's boundary. Then one of his replacement tubes was found to also have a hole. I made full use of the 20-minute fix-it time to rest on the side of the road! However, when I went to put back on my helmet, I felt a sharp sting on the back of my neck. Evidently, my helmet had picked up an insect that took revenge on me when I dislodged it. I suppressed the pain, but it still was somewhat irritating for the rest of the ride home.

We passed the 200km mark near Craigow between Richmond and Cambridge. That was at exactly 4.30pm, meaning an average of 20km/h overall, and an on-the-bike average of 24.3km/h. Just before this kilometre-stone, rain started to fall. Hard. Big drops. Sheets of water formed across the road. We pedalled on, which was fine on the one hand because vehicular traffic seemed to drop right off, but irritating on the other hand because my shoes filled with water and felt like lead... right when I needed all the energy I could muster.

Significantly, I think, we did not use any drafting throughout the whole ride. We rode two-abreast 98% of the way into Ross, and Tim opened up a decent margin (like 200 to 500 metres) on the highway. We were two abreast through Mudwalls Rd, and again opened up gaps between ourselves between Richmond and Mornington. So the averages and times were greater personal achievements than if we had "assisted" each other by riding in a paceline. Oh, and Tim had an additional handicap... his LiteSpin sidewall generator would not disengage from the front tyre, keeping his headlight permanently lit. I tell you what, though, you could see — and hear — him coming from more than 500 metres away! Tim very soon after ditched the troublesome Litespin for a SON dynohub, which in turn encourged me to dispense with a Busch and Mueller S6 dynamo in preference for a SON.

I parted company with Tim at the Mornington overpass. He continued on into Hobart to meet up with his family and a lift home to Mountain River. I continued on home at Bellerive, stopping to get a bottle of champagne to celebrate.

Now, what's the point to all this? Well, 12 months ago I would not have contemplated riding a double metric century and would have thought Tim and his Audax cohorts like Paul Gregory were crazy, too. Even three months ago I was comfortable and self-satisfied with a day's ride of 100-120km, and could do 150 at a pinch.

But by starting out gradually (50 to 80km per day), and building up the kilometres on following trips, you too can go beyond just thinking about extended touring, and actually do it. I might never do another 200km in a day. I might try to achieve 300 or more kilometres. Paris-Brest-Paris may even be my ultimate challenge. Who knows? But I do know having gone through the right preparation, I can sustain 200km in a day if needed. Anything under that is now definitely achievable.

I was fortunate that Tim's cruising speed was about the same as mine. His stamina at that speed, however, is greater, and he reduced his average to maintain contact with me in the second half of the day. That's important. If you want to tour, forget riding with a person who is intent on impressing you with how good they are and leaves you behind. That pretty well eliminates the road-racer wannabes as touring partners.

Start short as with the Salamanca Cycle Touring Club rides, extend gradually, and ride with someone or a group who is sypathetic to your cause. SCTC member Margaret Mossman did all this before her epic 10,000-plus journey to and from Western Australia to visit her son in Port Headland. Linda Cook is another woman who started short and has progressed to long, multi-day tours. There are many other in just my neck of the woods

It's one of the great assets of the SCTC... people are there to help and you won't get lost. Sure, you may have to get off and walk the bike, or take a break (we all do that at some time each day, and the steepness of hills is relatively to your strength, experience and gearing). You may get frustrated because your technique or bike needs improving. You may even bonk (cycle-touring parlance for running out of energy).

But there is always someone around to offer some advice, help, encouragement, repairs and even water. And, it is amazing at the end of the day, preferably after a long hot shower and with a glass of nice wine in hand, how the bad bits fade into oblivion, the ordinary bits seem good, and the great bits become fantastic.

Remember one other thing, though. If I have been able do it after what happened five years ago, so can you!

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