Josh Cunningham

True to form, it was only four hours later that I was up again, this time to pack my bike in order to make a ferry to Kefalonia to meet @emily_grace_field for a week on the beach. The body had begun to shut down while asleep this time, making a rushed breakfast with @joshibbett and a word of thanks to @nelsontrees a bit of a blur. The hands made packing my bike impossible and I was grateful for the help from volunteers! It’s taken almost two months to get around to turning my notes into a post, but it’s taking even longer to recover (I’ve not ridden my bike since!). The hands are slowly coming back to life, and when they do I’ll be looking for position/grip solutions. Drop bars possibly? That being said, I don’t think there are many rides out there like this one. Blew my socks off, lights out, mind open. These races take you to places that you can’t access mentally or physically in any other way, and it’s always a privilege to take that opportunity when it comes along. I learnt a lot about the demands of MTB ultras in the few months that I was working towards and completing this one, and really hope to take something else on one day. 100% recommend to anyone considering it too! (7-7 for anyone that made it) 📷@lloydjwright @stephenshelesky @nils_laengner

I was forced to come off the route with about 80 km to go for a meal. Making use of Wi-Fi to check the tracker, I was surprised to see I had leapt up the field over the past 40 or so hours. Big gaps had opened up and I didn’t recognise the names around mine on the map. But despite now sitting in 16th on the road, I was considering scratching. Sat at the back of an empty kebab shop, I was reminded of a piece called In-Between in It’s a Race, a book that @jprobertson and I did on the TCR. The idea was about “spaces between motion and rest, comfort and hardship, competition and resignation, the road ahead and the road home, where demons come to dwell.” After a couple of hours I gained the perspective I needed: the damage to my hands was already done. Another five hours’ riding wasn’t going to make a difference when stacked up against the previous four days. I set off from the kebab shop at 10 pm. A couple of riders came past me as I walked up the final climb, not wanting to put any force through my hands on the grips. My legs and energy levels felt good, but with my hand situation and a lighting setup that was on the brink of failing, on the whole I was crawling to the finish. The hours ticked by and I couldn’t quite believe it when the final ascent was completed. A barren hulk of bare rocky mountain levelled out into a plateau as the trail passed beneath a fleet of wind turbines sweeping powerfully and silently overhead, before descending to the finish. I rolled in just before 3 am in 19th place, with a small gaggle of riders and volunteers spilling out into the road clapping and whooping. What legends. One or two of the riders I’d been sharing the trail with all race, others I’d only met for the first time that day. After staving off the tiredness to exult in a few chats on the kerb, everyone fumbled into the hotel to book a room. (6/7) 📷@lloydjwright @stephenshelesky @nils_laengner

Bikes littered the hotel foyer while riders, photographers, and volunteers lay sleeping. I took a room for three hours before creeping back out into the dawning light. More wily riders up ahead had done their homework and realised that CP3 was effectively the last resupply point. I had not, and hastily made my way back onto the route after grabbing just a couple of bakery items and an espresso from the only open shop. At this point I also didn’t know that I had had my last sleep. The day ahead was relentlessly full of climbing, but luckily some of it was paved. The rain fell on and off, and despite the heat between spells, I wore both my long-fingered winter gloves and racing mitts in a bid to protect my hands from the constant rattling. The small and ring fingers on both hands were now totally numb. As the day wore on and sparse villages came and went without any resupply options, I realised my mistake and began to ration food and water. I passed a French rider who’d suffered an unfixable tyre failure and was pushing his bike through the rain. “Do you know how I can get back to the finish from here?” he said, his demeanour the mild hysteria of someone who had been through a lot of emotions that day. I had no idea, but we were in the middle of what felt like nowhere, so it must have been a long journey out. We were all on our last legs. I ran out of food and water halfway up the 20 km penultimate climb, which dragged on for hours. Progress was pitiful. Apart from the French guy, I had barely seen another person — let alone another rider — for most of the day, which, along with the worsening hand situation, brought about the sense that things were fraught. The final push in these races is as if you have been walking across a frozen pond and the ice starts to crack; the race for the finish equating to a desperate lunge for the bank as stability and strength crumble around you. (5/7) 📷@lloydjwright @stephenshelesky @nils_laengner

I made use of a church to bivvy, which was such an ideal spot that I was soon joined by @mattschweiker , who emerged out of the dark as I was eating my ziplock meal with a spork. Cutting sleep down to three hours, I felt sore as I rolled away into the early hours, but after an hour of gingerly progress I started to wake up and, over the course of the morning, began to actually feel quite good. Looking back, this may have been the only few hours I was truly comfortable on the bike throughout the entire race. My SIM had stopped working in my phone and I had no PIN to reload it, so I was riding blind to the race outside of my own bubble. A number of climbs were on the menu for the day, which I ticked off slowly but steadily, navigating another hike-a-bike with Renaud Haag. This one involved dragging the bike through thick undergrowth for over an hour — fairly draining in the afternoon heat. At 10 pm about four or five of us found ourselves gathered in a small restaurant on the trail, serving up plates of souvlaki to locals. It was the one time I was able to have half a chat with a local, covering everything from his emigration to the US in 1954 and his return home, to what vegetables grow best in his garden, to how he used to scale the pass we were about to undertake by mule. Climbing the pass into the night was the only time in the race I felt sleepy, and so I raised the tempo and started yelling out nonsense to myself intermittently to get myself over it. The adrenaline of the race was also doing enough to take my mind away from my steadily deteriorating hands, which were beginning to lose feeling. I made it to CP3 just in time to grab some food from a closing convenience store and bolt it down while having a good laugh with the boys manning the CP into the night. They said I looked in an OK condition compared to most before me — a sign I was riding either sensibly or not fast enough. (4/7) 📷@lloydjwright @stephenshelesky @nils_laengner

The singletrack that was due to be a highlight was spent shivering and sodden, just on a mission to get to the checkpoint and out of the rain as soon as possible. In 30 minutes at the CP I got my meal (spaghetti, soup, Coke, and coffee), dried my outer layers, and booked a hotel 100 km up the road in Metsovo. It got very cold up high going into the night, but I noticed some other riders’ bikes propped up in roadside bivvies appearing in my headlight through the darkness. Bon courage. I was very glad to have a hotel to target, but it was nearly 2 am when I arrived and added my bike to five others already in the garage. Looking back, I wish I’d taken a photo of those bikes. Propped up without their riders, all of whom would remain anonymous to me, the image of them dragged me out of the isolating bubble of the ride into the competitive thrust of the race. Despite their stationary nature, the latent sense of urgency was palpable. Having just missed the kebab shop closing, I ate some hard-boiled eggs and bread donated by the hotel night porter, showered, washed my kit, and climbed into bed. Day 3 alarm was set for four hours later, and with sanitary towels delicately placed in my bib shorts I was away, happy to have not been the last bike in the garage when I came down, and grateful to make use of an open bakery with fresh pastries and coffee before heading out into what was arguably the highlight of the parcours: a plateau of high passes, meadows, and remote meandering trails. CP2 provided an opportunity to quickly reboot, change brake pads, hose my creaking bike clean, trade stories with other riders, and get two plates of rice and vegetables on order (one to eat and one to put in a ziplock to carry). I finished for the day just after bumping into @_schism ,who’d suffered a race-ending mechanical, had done 15 km with no drive chain, and was loading his bike into the back of a car to be evacuated out. Chin up — he made his way out of there eventually and has since set an FKT on a route and finished 7th at Hope1000. Chapeau! (3/7)

On the very first climb I got a puncture that required two plugs to seal, but thankfully it held for the remaining 850 km with a bit of TLC. The rest of the day was spent tackling the climbs and trading places with the same riders I would spend the next four days riding with and around — Michael, Paul, Matt, Marcus — diving in and out of dense forest and periods of rain. Darkness fell on day one and at points the trail became extremely hard to follow. You’d be dragging your bike through dense undergrowth, the trail long disappeared, not knowing whether to turn back or push through, desperate for your headlight to pick up on something that resembled a trail. Another headlight and voice would appear out of nowhere and ask if you were on the route. You’d have a bit of banter and carry on. I’d caught wind of how little sleep the leaders might end up going with, but as finishing was the priority for me (and not being totally confident in my lighting setup), my strategy was built around getting four hours’ sleep a night. Midnight drew in after one of the many cobbled bridge sections. I bivvied in some kind of village bandstand around midnight, deaf to the small trickle of riders making use of the only open shop just across the square during the small hours, and was away by 4:30. Needing a meal, I spent the morning calling into every café in the villages en route looking for something other than pastries. The conditions had taken their toll already and I’d developed saddle sores on both sit bones. At some point in the morning the skin broke, and the salt from my bib shorts flooded in, forcing me to ride out of the saddle for 20 km until I pulled into a town and found some sanitary towels to protect them. More pastries were gulped down with race photographer @lloydjwright for company. It was 3 pm by the time I got a meal at CP1, with a lot of climbing, rain, and hike-a-bike in between. 📷 @lloydjwright @stephenshelesky @nils_laengner

Somehow its been 2 months since @hellenicmountainrace ! A bit of waffle to follow in the next few posts but at least I can also share photos from @stephenshelesky @lloydjwright @nils_laengner to put this epic race into some of the visual perspective it deserves. I had been wanting to do an off-road race ever since finishing the TCR in 2018. Life has been happily busy with other things since then but time has flown and 7 years later I was lining up in Meteora for the start. I began training in November last year the most unfit Ive ever been. To begin with I was blowing on training rides of 50k, but spent the winter on a diet of 100-200k rides at the weekend (on the road on the mtb with slicks) and 1-2 turbos in the week. The form comes a lot slower these days (hello mid-30's) but I knew with a few months of riding in the legs I'd have the engine to finish. I also know from experience that having some residual fitness in no way prepares you for these races, and hoped that whatever challenges came up would be surmountable. With limited off road experience, no mtb mechanical knowledge, no tried and tested setup to draw confidence from, and carrying a few niggles, I was going to need luck on my side to get me through. Arriving to the start line of these events is an epic in itself with the preparation involved, and I'm sure I wasn't the only one killing time milling round Meteora just wanting to start so that the comparative simplicity of the ride could begin. Great to catch up with familiar faces. Not so encouraging to see some of the setups being run: things had become a lot more pro and dialled in my years away from racing and out of the cycling industry! I still had a considerable amount of stuff attached to my bike with voile straps. It didn't take long for the grass of the pre race milling to appear a lot greener. The brutality of the parcour came as a shock. Relentless up and down, kilometres at a time of hike a bike, boulder field trails, zero route flow, not one metre of reprieve. Cruising along in the tri bars a la TCR this was not! (1/7). 📷@stephenshelesky @lloydjwright @nils_laengner

Spot Logan Pass between Pollock Mountain and Mount Oberlin (1), and the cars making their way beneath the same face, the Garden Wall (2) on Going-to-the-Sun Road. The road is considered one of the first purpose-built roads to accommodate the touring car driver, and was constructed throughout the 1920s according to the design of landscape architect Thomas Vint. Amazing autumnal colour on the Aspen throughout the park too. #roadtrip #goingtothesunroad #glaciernationalpark #usa #montana #CanonAE1

Film from USA / honeymoon road trip. 4000km in a pickup truck across Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and Colorado with wife (née partner) in crime @emily_grace_field . My first time visiting America and first time shooting film since A Level Photography on the #CanonAE1! Cannot recommend visiting these 'wild' western states enough for just a tiny insight into the history, landscape, people and politics of this truly unique country📍Glacier National Park - views from Going To The Sun Road, bear spotting at Two Medicine Lake, and hiking up Siyeh Pass. #roadtrip #goingtothesunroad #glaciernationalpark #usa

We do! 13th July 2024

Late summer vitamin G. #EscapebyBike #LondonDivide

Catching rays on the Costa del Kielder with @rja_107 and @mrpeterjames . Thanks to @the_dirty_reiver for another 200 of the best 👌 #dirtyreiver