It's the Final Countdown (dun-nu-ner-ner- dunu-nu-nu-nur...)

One week to go.

In precisely one week I'll be sat in a meeting, probably looking very restless and slightly nervous. And not just because it's a marketing meeting and I'll be bored beyond tears. It's because the following morning, at some unholy time of the day, we set off for Iceland.

About time too really. I've been building this up for so long now that there is no chance in hell it could ever live up to the hype!

Of course it wouldn't be right if we didn't have a little more drama before we start. Why not?

So, with the kind of monotonous surety that only Fate and all of her demonic little helpers can deliver, our route is once again in some doubt. After being nixed by fire (Holuhraun going pop for 7 months), this time it's ice. Apparently Iceland has been through one of the winteryest winters in decades (think of the chilly bits in Game of Thrones and you're spot on - they film it in Iceland), and as a result, the interior of the country is still thawing out. Normally the central highland tracks are open by late June, but as you can see from the map below, at the moment it's all closed.

Oh...

Still, it's not all doom and gloom. The map above is a little old, and the route between Hofsjökull and Langjökull is already open (mostly). Speaking to the helpful people at www.vegagerdin.is they seem to think that the Sprengisandur should open next week too, but they're not 100% on that. So we might still be in with a chance one way or another. I guess all we can do is head out there and take a look.

Other good news lies in the unlikely forms of sponsorship and sausages. No, really.

We've raised over £1250 for the MNDA, and Source Food in Bristol have set aside half a kilo of salami to liven up our otherwise painfully dull diet! They're also making noises about hosting an evening 'event' when we get back... I feel a particularly dull slideshow coming on.

Since this might be the last blog post before we go, here is a link to the DeLorme tracking website. At present it shows South Bristol in all of it's urban glory. But in 8 days it's going to get a whole lot more interesting.

https://share.delorme.com/TomVincent

Password: Fatbike

Cheers! 

Tom

Fame, Fortune and Glory

3 weeks to go until we leave. I'm trying (and failing) to resist getting excited.

I think I'm ready (which means I'm not at all ready). My kit list has more ticks than blank spaces, my spare room looks like someone ram-raided an outdoor shop, there are collection tins dotted around south Bristol and my wife is so bored of this subject she stopped talking to me weeks ago.

I've also started to commute into work with a nearly fully laden bike. As if riding a fatbike through the streets of Bristol wasn't enough to draw attention, now the thing is hung with bags and bottles and cages etc... It looks great; but subtle it aint! Surprisingly it's not much more difficult to ride. Yes, I've lost a few kph on my usual route, adding 8 minutes to a normally 45min journey. But what we're planning isn't a race, so it's about how we feel at the end of each ride, not how long it took.

That said, it was gratifying to get back onto my road bike this weekend for the first time in an age. Being able to compare pre-fatbike rides with post-fatbike is an eye-opener. Hills which previously took it out of me are comparatively simple affairs now. If Bradley Wiggins or Dave Brailsford is reading this (and I've little doubt they are... I'm told they're glued to this blog and hang on my every word); I'd suggest you train for everything on a fatbike. Riding anything else afterwards is like levitating.

On the fundraising front; the MNDA campaign is going pretty well. There's nearly £900 of sponsorship online (https://www.justgiving.com/Icelandic-Fatbike), and the tins are slowly filling up. The notable exception to this being The Hare pub on North St, where the tin is already full (amazing work!).

The Family Vincent also attended a MNDA fundraising event in Horfield at the weekend. The medieval recreation was particularly awesome, though also slightly reminiscent of the League of Gentleman. Still, anyone selfless enough to dress up in hessian and give up their weekends to charitable causes sits on a moral plain some way above my appreciation for historic battle tactics.

Further fundraising glory may also be found in the form of a Limited Edition print donated by the good (and profoundly potty-mouthed) men of Modern Toss. Unfortunately my enthusiasm for gratuitous swearing seems to be less widely shared than I assumed. As a result, the online auction of the print is proving to be a little disappointing. Hmm... I may need to dream up another plan for that particular venture. Perhaps a live auction in the pub after we get back from the trip. Alcohol is often at the heart of ill-thought-out decisions, so it could be a good place to get a stupid bidding war going on.

Speaking of becoming famous and retiring young (that's what the previous paragraphs were about right?); this blog was name-checked on the world famous Fat-Bike.com Radio Show. Yeah, I know?! I think I'm about 40-50mins in. You have to listen very very carefully. Very carefully. I'd suggest good headphones and quite a lot of patience is required. Still, that means this blog is now officially famous, and I don't need any of you hangers-on and groupies getting in the way of my ascent to stardom anymore. So do one yeah?

Nutrition, Packing and a Trial Run

So, as I sit here watching the cricket and suffering with Sinusitis, I've got plenty of time to start tying up loose ends before we head off to Iceland in a month. Like 'how are we transporting the bikes?' and 'what are we going to eat?' and 'how the hell are we going to fit everything onto our bikes?'... You know, unimportant niggling little things like that.

I've said it before, but planning this trip has not been easy. I guess it's because we're bikepacking newbies. So we have absolutely none of the gear we need for this kind of trip. It turns out my tent is wrong (well, it's preposterously large, heavy and weak), my bags are wrong (an 80ltr rucksack is not advised), my stove is wrong, most of my clothes are wrong. At the start of this I didn't have a bike, bags, spares, maps and a host of other things it seems are essential if I want to survive.

And it's not like I don't mind using what I've already got, but my mountaineering boots are wrong, using my road bike would be suicidal, and apparently having a route in mind is deemed wise (I'm still not convinced on that last one).

So when I say that planning is not easy, I think what I'm trying to say is that this trip is proving to be a bit of a gear-fest. And that's because we're starting from first principles. The next trip (I hope my wife doesn't read this bit) should be a doddle.

But despite the fact that the cupboard was very much bare when we started planning, we're pretty much ready. So ready in fact, that we managed a trial run up on the Quantocks last week. It was useful to try the bikes (nearly) fully loaded, to see how we're going to pitch the tent while pretending the weather wasn't glorious (this is where we learned that the current tent sucks) and to sit out and just enjoy being in the middle of nowhere. It was good fun, with the notable exception of the food. The food was sodding awful.

"So what are you planning on eating?" I hear none of you asking. Well, I've been researching food to a ridiculous extent too. And it turns out that Bachelors Super Noodles contain pretty much the same calorific content as those posh dried food ration packs they sell for £5 a go in the local Outdoor shop. Yes, I'll confess that Super-noodles are neither super nor, probably, noodles. But they fill you up, are light, are full of energy and they're very very cheap. Nonetheless, with something like 9 to 10 days of food needing to be carried, there's simply no way to haul everything we need. So we're going to be running at a fairly high calorie deficit throughout. I can only hope that where we cross main roads (such as Myvatn) we can find a nearby shop or garage! Otherwise we're going to be hungry.

Another box ticked is the bikepacking bags. If you're not already familiar with this stuff (and judging by the traffic sources to this blog, most of you know WAY more about this than I do), then there's a new(ish) move away from traditional panniers and racks, and towards bags which attach directly onto the bike. I'm led to believe that the main reason for this is so that you don't have to rely on a rack which, were it to break, would leave you utterly buggered in the middle of nowhere (after all, who packs a MIG welding kit in their spares?).

So the bags I'll be using are mounted to the bars (Wildcat - Fat Leopard), the seat-post and saddle (Alpkit - Kaola), the forks (5ltr dry bags on Salsa - Anything Cages) and inside the main triangle of the frame (Alpamayo Designs - Frame Bag). No doubt experienced readers will be wondering about the last one. This is a very new (so new they haven't launched officially yet) bike bag company set up by a friend of a friend. We're very fortunate in having a couple of their custom made (pre-production) bags. And with absolutely no loyalty at all, I can say that they really do look the business. Time will tell what they're like in the 'real world', but first impressions are very positive indeed. I've uploaded a few images.

So what have we got left to sort out? Not a lot really. Though we still have to work out how we're actually getting our bikes to Iceland. They're booked onto the plane, but do they go in (hugely expensive) padded/hard cases? Or do they go in clear plastic bags. The latter apparently protect your bike because the baggage handlers are less likely to stomp on something when they can see what it is? Hmm... While there is some logic to that, all it would take is one careless/hungover handler, and the trip is over.

Well, there's still time to sort that out. 4 weeks seems like a long long time away and I'm not a patient man.

A Sobering Reflection

I've mentioned charity in an earlier post. But I thought I'd summarise what we're doing, and why we're raising for the MNDA again. It can't hurt.

In summer 2014 my father-in-law passed away from Motor Neurone Disease. He was a decent and kind man. He fought valiantly, but ultimately in vain. MND has no cure and very little in the way of delaying tactics. MND slowly but inexorably wasted this good man away, robbing him of movement, memory, speech and, in the end, his life.

The MNDA is the sole MND charity in the UK, offering practical and emotional support to sufferers and their families and friends. Their advice and care is invaluable because this is a comparatively rare and fatal disease without significant NHS funding, and without them I think a great many people would be utterly lost in how to cope. Additionally the MNDA are at the pointy end of vital research which might one day prevent anyone from suffering from this horrible disease ever again.

To raise money for this worthy cause, in July this year along with Jim Gardiner, I will be cycling coast to coast across Iceland. We'll be doing this unsupported and off road.

Thanks to the vagaries of this intensely volcanic and unpredictable island, we're currently keeping the route quite flexible. However it's likely to go from either Rifstangi (furthest north point of the island) or Akureyri (on the north coast) to Kotlutangi (furthest south point). Either way, the route will cross Iceland's interior highlands and be around 500km at least. There are no roads, or at least what you and I might call roads. There are some tracks, but most of these are a serious proposition for even the most hardcore 4x4. In addition, there are freezing river crossings, miles of loose sand, lava fields, volcanoes and boiling mud pools. And as if that weren't enough, the weather is almost certainly going to spend a good deal of its time being horrible to us.  

For over 200km, the only other people we'll encounter will be very occasional lunatic off-road drivers. There are no shops, no roads, no hotels or hostels. Besides lichen, nothing grows. There will be no-one to help us. It is a desert.

All of this will be done on a fatbike. For the uninitiated, a fatbike is basically a cross between a mountain bike and a monster truck. It has 4" wide tyres and is designed to be able to keep on trucking where other bikes just give up. They also look really really cool. But that's obviously got nothing to do with anything...

Now, let's be absolutely honest about this; I'm doing this trip because I want to. Because I crave the silence and the challenge. However, the MNDA is a charity which is well worth supporting and is close to my heart. So if my stupidity can also raise money and awareness for this great cause, then so much the better.

So, don't be impressed with my selfish little holiday, but instead just donate something to the MNDA (via the link next to this post or in the hyperlink below) and help people who genuinely need your help.

If you feel so inclined, you can follow events via the links below:

https://www.justgiving.com/Icelandic-Fatbike

http://icelandicfatfun.blogspot.co.uk/

https://twitter.com/tomlvincent

https://www.facebook.com/Icelandicfatfun

Cheers,

Tom   

It's time to review the situation...

Across Iceland on a Fatbike

In july 2015, along with my good friend Jim, I'll be attempting to cross the interior of Iceland on a fatbike. Our aim is to go from the north coast to the south coast, and where possible to keep it as off-road as possible. This is, of course, going to be a pretty awesome challenge, though as you'll find if you read on, not the original plan. The original plan has shifted, evolved and generally exploded in our faces so often, that I sometimes struggle to recall what it even was. I think it was something grandiose and extremely naive. 

Originally Jim was John. We were going to do something no-one had ever done before, and ride furthest north to south across Iceland completely off-road on fatbikes. We'd do it unsupported and take 3 weeks doing it. When we'd finished women would swoon, men would be rendered impotent by simply looking at images of us, and children would chase after us shouting "why aren't you my daddy?!". We were, not to put too fine a point on it, hopelessly naive. 

Pretty soon after we'd announced to the world (well, Twitter, Facebook and my wife) our plans, they started to unravel. It turns out it's almost certainly been done before (if not on fatbikes), and that riding our proposed route off-road was at best completely impossible for men of our means, and at worse suicidal. There were some seriously impassible rivers, gorges and cliffs. There was 50km of bog just at the start, a start it would take nearly 2 days to reach in the first place. It seemed very much like just route planning from Google Earth is a 'bad idea'. 

Then there was Holurhaun; a volcano which started erupting in August 2014 and only stopped a couple of weeks ago. During which time it belched a lava flow the size of Manhattan and emitted enough SO4 to kill us many times over should we have been foolish enough to stray too close. Close being a relative term depending entirely upon wind speed and direction. 

Given the above it felt like someone was trying to tell us an important message. So we downscaled the plan to allow the use of bridges (originally deemed "cheating") and to use some of the F-roads which bisect the deserted interior highlands (also "cheating"). We also reduced the trip to 2 weeks due to finances, then 10 days due to flight availability.  

Then John became Jim. John had a back operation which didn't really work. Well, not as quickly as we'd all hoped anyway. So Jim stepped up. 

Then I got hit by a car while commuting home from work. For a minute I thought that was it, but it turns out I'm resilient, in a pathetic not-very-good-at-pain kind of way.

Despite all of that, here we are. We have the flights booked, we have the bikes, we're gathering the kit and we're trying to remember to go on training rides from time to time. But there's still three months to go before we set off; so plenty of time for a bit more drama before then.

As well as keeping this blog ticking over (feel free to question why, I do), you can follow me on twitter @tomlvincent. Feel free to send a message and say hi, or just hurl any old random abuse. 

When we get back, we'll serialise the trip here.There are also a few interested parties who are keen to publish our exploits, so I'll keep you posted who they are closer to the ime. It'll be worth checking that out just for the photos. 

Cheers,

Tom

Surly Pug Ops - Fatbike Review

So it's been a while since I posted properly, and a few things have developed since then. Firstly, I am now the proud owner of a Surly Pug Ops fatbike (more on this in a moment), secondly we have booked the flights, and thirdly we now have 3 possible route options which (we hope) will allow for poor conditions, more volcanoes going 'pop' and generally varying levels of fitness.

So, to the bike...

There are a few fatbikes on the market at the moment, and the options are continually increasing as more and more manufacturers see fatbikes as either a profitable bandwagon to jump on, or a legitimate new type of bike for the future. The jury is still out on whether they're a passing fad, as most people aren't really going to be crossing deserted islands or riding in snow and sand. But for those who are, fatbikes are a sensible option. Okay, they may look like the lovechild of a monster truck and a mountain bike, but all of that tyre width provides masses of area to distribute the weight of the bike, and so provide grip and prevent sinking into the soft stuff.

Of the many brands making fatbikes, the likes of Surly and Salsa stand out. Not least because they've been at the forefront of fatbike development since it's inception, but also because they tend to lean towards the rugged trekking/bikepacking end of the spectrum. Whereas more mainstream manufacturers (Specialized, Trek etc) are currently making trail bikes with massive tyres. With over 500km of riding to do, and carrying all of our own kit for 10 days in the wilderness, I care more about rugged reliability than how the thing goes around bermed corners at my local trail centre.

So after an extended period of research, and asking advice from people in the know, I opted for the Surly Pug Ops. It's steel, has mechanical disc brakes, doesn't have the very fattest tyres (3.8" not 4.8") and isn't at all lightweight. What it is, from the minute you look at it, is tough. Really really tough. This is the Grant Mitchell, the Vinnie Jones, the Giant Haystacks of the biking world. It aint going to win any beauty awards, but it sure as hell isn't going to cry if you use bad language at it either.

Obviously I feel madly in love with the Pug the moment I clapped eyes on it, how could you not? But I did have a major reservation; was it going to be really heavy to ride? Was getting those monstrous tyres up to speed going to be too much hard work? After years of painstakingly skimming weight from my other bikes, I looked at the Pug and was expecting pain. Thankfully, it turns out I was completely wrong. Okay, so it's not as nimble as my road bike, or sprightly my XC bike, but it's by no means a slouch, and once up to speed the beastie rolls along beautifully. What's more, the ride is accompanied by a very satisfying rumbling from those gargantuan tyres.

Offroad the Pug is exceptional. What seems like an impossibly small granny ring (22t) paired with 36t rear is the kind of thing which turns the wheel so slowly it initially looks pointless. But the grip on the Pug is so astonishing you find that you can pop it into the lowest gear, and bimble up just about any incline, no matter how muddy or loose. The only barrier to the most insane angles is your sense of balance. In Iceland, loaded up with kit, this is the kind of thing which may separate me from success, and collapsing into a ditch wheezing like a chain-smoker running the Marathon de Sables.

All of that said, the Pug is still a heavy bike. So I need to get stronger to ride it. To do this, I've elected to ride only the Pug between now and the trip to Iceland in July. That means commuting 35km per day through Bristol on it. And this brings me to another point; the reaction the bike brings out in other people. Fatbikes are still sufficiently rare in Bristol that I've yet to see another one. So when you rumble past another commuter you tend to raise a reaction, and 99 times out of a hundred that reaction is positive (or at the very least bewildered). People want to know what it's like to ride, they point and smile, or shout encouragement as I slowly crawl up yet another hill on my way to work. When I stop at the lights, car drivers actually grin at me and say nice things... yeah, I know? Car drivers?! Even my wife wanted to try it, and she tends to view my bike obsession as only marginally preferable to having an affair.

In short, the Pug is an absolute blast to ride and I cannot wait to take it to Iceland for the big challenge. In the meantime, if you see me riding through Bristol (you'll hear me coming before you see me) feel free to beep your horn and/or wave. Everyone else does!

Charity!

I've banged on about this in an earlier blog entry, but I have at last set up my just giving webpage.

So, should you feel inclined, you can help someone who needs help, while chuckling with schadenfreude at my exploits!

Cheers,

Tom