It has been a few days now since I have been off the route of the Silk Road Mountain Race. I’ve been wrestling with myself about how to properly articulate my experience with this endeavour. To begin with, this is by far the most extreme challenge I have ever faced. It has pushed my mental and physical capabilities beyond limits I thought possible. The ride has left me completely empty, eager to be filled with […]
To say last 3 days have been a whirlwind would be an understatement. I’ve been through an immense variety of severe environmental conditons, physical hardships, and emotional states… I was forced to scratch far earlier than I imagined from the Silk Road Mountain Race. In the end, it was a combination of things that led to my early withdrawal from the race. I was suffering from minor altitude sickness early on, but I was not […]
The last couple days have been eye opening. Tai and I went on an overnight into the mountains to acclimatize (minimally at least) and shake out our legs and gear a bit. We chose a nearby location named Chomkorchak, maybe 30k or so south of Bishkek and only get up to 2500-ish meters. Let me first say that the mountains here are just massive. You see the peaks at a distance and their prominance is […]
Video: https://vimeo.com/245391715 I am within two weeks of embarking on the biggest boundary-pushing adventure so far in my lifetime. I am participating in the @silkroadmountainrace – a self-supported off-road ultra-endurance bikepacking race in high altitude mountain wilderness in the Tian Shan mountains of Kyrgyzstan. Tian Shan loosely means ‘the heavenly mountains’ or the ‘celestial range’. There is no doubt in my mind that this event is going to push every fiber of my existence to it’s […]