Are we falling out of love with 'racing'?

[jameso]

^ Touring is back :) In hindsight the TCR etc will be seen as the spark that gets more people out road bikepacking (aka touring).

I know it's 're nature of my job but I see lots of road tourers and none of them would have the slightest idea what the TCR is - whether they are old hands or trying it for the first time.

Oh yes, touring is already bigger than that, I just mean that eg if your bike looks like a TCR riders you can be a bikepacker or 'ultra-distancer' etc rather than a CTC tourer, it's making road touring look more appealing to people who'd not considered 4-pannier trad touring before. That's a good thing. And it's not a dig against the fashions, I'm one of those who tours with minimal BP kit etc.

[whitestone]

Maybe it's a novelty thing, great to begin with but increasingly hard to justify the effort. Climbing is similar: new crag, the greatest thing sine sliced bread! It then gets loads of traffic for a year or two before slowly drifting into obscurity as people return to the old favourites.

Riding when sleep deprived on public roads is risky, not something I'm happy doing. The NZ race, can't spell the name, has mandated down time of a contiguous number of hours per day. Not quite a stage race as you stop wherever you get to.

Off-road I monitor how I'm riding, once I start making silly mistakes then I know it's time to think about some rest, even if it's only a couple of hours.

Unless you are at the pointy end then most people are really just fast tourers, maybe riding slightly faster but generally being quicker by not faffing so much at stops. The increasingly fast times in events like the HT550 get the headlines but a lot of the finishers are still in the five to six day range so it's still a reasonable target for most.

Not sure why the Cairngorm Loop has fallen out of favour, maybe because it no longer has the crown of the hardest ITT in the UK. I think it packs a lot in, even the outer loop can be hard work if the wind is wrong.

[jameso]

https://frrt.org/tcrno6/social?center=4 ... 798&zoom=6

This view of the TCR is more interesting? I do start to think "less grammin', more racin'!" but it's good to see where/what/who.

[sean_iow]

There didn't seem to be much chit chat post Highland Trail this year...

To be fair I didn't have enough feeling in my hands at the time to post on here

I did follow the TD but as I didn't know any of the riders it's not quite the same. When Greg, Nigel and Tom have ridden it I checked trackleaders all the time, even though I've not met them in real life I seems like I know them.

I'll be following the French Divide as Bob and Cath are riding and Stu Taylor who I met at the HT550. The same for the Silk Road Race as Lee, Karl and Pete are riding , all of who I also met at the HT550.

I know the BB200 / BB300 isn't a race, but it's hardly touring and the interest in the longer distance and the speed it sold out in shows there's still interest in the more challenging events? Perhaps we're all to busy training and racing to have time to chat about it on here

[Asposium]

I know the BB200 / BB300 isn't a race, but it's hardly touring and the interest in the longer distance and the speed it sold out in shows there's still interest in the more challenging events? Perhaps we're all to busy training and racing to have time to chat about it on here

I see bb300 as part challenge, part social event, and part weekend bikepacking ride.

Only “thing” I’ll be racing is the cut-off time

[Bearbonesnorm]

From a purely personal stand-point, I tent to lose interest when an event appears (to many people) to become successful and has such things as corporate sponsorship, stickered-up cars, them big flag come banner sail things and a continual, never ceasing wall to wall twitter feed. I realise, that might sound like some perverse inverse snobbery but it's not meant to. Just once an event becomes no more than just another 'big box powder' it somehow seems to lose much of its personal identity and even character ... probably just me though.

[fatbikephil]

I think having an adventure is the important bit. I know this word has become a bit of a dirty one recently but its a good way to describe what we do at all levels. So leaving work, heading into your local hills and bivvying is just as much as an adventure as riding for 16 hours, sleeping for a few then doing it again. That's the appeal to the Various ITT's I've done - its an adventure, your doing something most normal people wouldn't contemplate, you get a real buzz from the ride, eat sleep aspect of it and its great meeting up with the like minded people you are sharing the trail with. Getting in within a certain time is secondary. Plus some of my BAMs this year have also ticked these boxes despite being much easier, and much less full on. In fact because of these aspects. But the win or quit attitude of racing is a total turn off for me. There is very little if any of this in bikepacking ITT's but it has crept in, in recent years...

[ZeroDarkBivi]

I think we have a lot to thank the racers for, showing what was possible with a minimalist approach, and the associated development of ultralight bikepacking kit that probably wouldn’t have been a thing had there not been the impetus from racers to optimize their gear. Would Revelate and all the other bag manufacturers that followed exist where it not for those race focused pioneers? The whole community now reaps the benefits of light, functional gear that allows us to travel more efficiently, in a similar way that lightweight Alpine style mountaineering reduced the logistic burden,
opening up options for those prepared to take more risk and go minimalist.

[jameso]

I think we have a lot to thank the racers for

Very much so, good point. Whether we find racing our thing or not it's hard not to be inspired. Stamstad, Curiak, Lee, all the way through to Mike Hall, and then Lael Wilcox winning the Transam. And it certainly has improved a lot of our kit, something I couldn't say for all areas of cycling.

[Richpips]

A Brit, Harold Evans has won the French Divide.