The second day of the TAW started off spectacularly, despite a 5am alarm clock to get us up. We were treated to a memorable sunrise coming out of the sea. We also came across another TAW rider who had slept in one of the other concrete huts at Malin Head, evidently we weren’t the only riders who had the brainwave to utilise the shelter provided by the huts! After stiffly packing up (4 hours sleep is not ideal recover after a 300km ride…), we set off, again aiming to complete 300km before the day’s end. It was a glorious day, with clear skies, but a slight head wind that would shift into a cross and tail winds as the day wore on as we skirted the Donegal coastline. At some point that morning, I realised my seat post was not fully extended (Bromptons have a sliding seat post due to the folding nature of them) and was about 2cm shorter than I usually had it. This was quite worrying for me as such a height difference in seat post length can have quite an impact on your body’s physiology and I hoped that it wouldn’t affect my body too much. I was annoyed with myself for not double checking before the start of the race. It probably played on my mind a bit too, “Are my knees hurting because of the cycling or my seat post height?” “Is that back pain from the seat post dropping?”.
As we settled into the ride, Jack was struggling a lot with trying to wake up, almost falling asleep on the bike, despite popping some caffeine pills, and this would become a trend for the next few days. So we took it steady and just ticked away at it. After a couple of hours, I was hit with a urging need to utilise a bathroom for a number two. Now this probably isn’t spoken about for obvious reasons but is a substantial part of riding an ultra-endurance event, everyone’s got to poop, and when you’re eating so much food to keep yourself fuelled, it’s got to go somewhere. Now we had thought about this, and packed wet wipes as a precautionary measure in case a “wild poop” was on the cards. But generally, a bathroom was a preferred choice to a bog. Another hurdle to overcome was that public toilets are few and far between on the west coast of Ireland, particularly at 07:00, and one must hope that they come across one that is open when they need to go. Fortunately, we came across a petrol/deli shop at around 07:30, and I was able to relieve myself and we could restock on food and drink supplies. We generally purchased enough supplies the evening before to last us a few hours into the next day. One of the benefits of riding in Ireland was that there was always plenty of shops, delis or petrol stations available at every village almost. At no point throughout the race were we worried about running out of food or fluids (although there was a close call on Day 8), the only difficult part was either being up riding before shops opened, or riding after they were closed, so you just needed to think ahead slightly towards the end of the day.
At this stop we also checked out how the other riders were progressing via their GPS trackers online, again from a competitive perspective, we were curious, but it also helped mentally to know that you were ahead of however many riders. We were quietly pleased to see we were the second-placed pair on the road, with the first-placed pair pulling an all-nighter and gaining a significant amount of distance while we had slept. There was nothing we could do at this point, beyond maybe pulling an all-nighter at some point in the race, but we would plough on and see how we fared by the day’s end. Soon after our first stop, we hit the first of the five Mike Hall KOM (King Of the Mountain) challenge climbs, these were:
Mamore Gap - Donegal
Glengash Pass - Donegal
Conor Pass - Kerry
Gap of Dunloe - Kerry
Ballaghbeama Gap - Kerry
It was named after Mike Hall who was an influential and pioneering ultra-endurance racer, increasing awareness of the ultra-endurance trend and setting up the TransContinental Race. He had been tragically killed in 2017 during the Indian Pacific Wheel Race in Australia and this challenge was named in his honour. Every rider’s time would be taken over the climbs and combined to show who was the fastest over the climbs. Now Jack and I had thought we would give it a go once we got to these climbs but couldn’t have given less of a shit about going for it once we got there. We were already feeling the pain in our knees from having ground our way up the steep climbs from the evening before. Jack and I had both taped both our knees before the race started to provide as much support as possible, but we were already feeling it, and our fears from our preparation rides were coming to fruition. From that point on, we both agreed that we would walk up any climb that we felt was damaging our knees. We figured we wouldn’t lose that much time walking and would protect our knees somewhat. The Mamore Gap was the first climb of the race that we walked up and at the top we both had to apply a generous does of chamois cream to our nether regions due to chaffing. This would become a trend for the rest of the race…
We carried on from the Mamore Gap down around Lough Swilly, which is a bay essentially, to Letterkenny, where we stopped for some warm grub, consisting of a horrible sausage roll and dried up wedges, not ideal. Leaving most of our warm snack behind, we carried on up the other side of lough Swilly, and once we had entered Ramelton, Jack noticed that my front light was dangling down beside my front wheel. This wasn’t good news as you could imagine. Upon investigation, the front light mount had snapped, this happened as the front light was heavier than a standard Brompton front light, so this extra weight puts additional strain on the mounts and breaks them. This had happened to both Jack and I during our training rides, and we had both a spare mount, but for some reason, I didn’t want to take the 20 minutes it would take to fix it then and there, so I proceeded to tape it up to my front frame with the thought that I would fix it later. In the process of taping up the front light, I broke the connection to the rear light so that it now didn’t work. So now my front light would turn on sporadically and shine up in my face, due to the way I had unintentionally taped it to the front frame, but thankfully, the dynamo USB output still worked, so I would have a power source which was important. I did have a spare front and rear light, so I was able to get these charged throughout the day and have enough light to work with when it got dark. I never did fix the front light mount, and I’m still not sure why, we had the tools and spare parts, but I guess given the racing nature of the TAW and having the spare lights and USB output, I just never felt the need to.
While we had been dealing with the broken light mount, a former secondary school teacher and friend of my family made an appearance. He had been told by my Aunt that we would be coming through during the day and happened to be in between two funerals when he saw us dealing with the issue on the side of the road and stopped to say hello and wish us luck. It was nice to see him and reminded me that while doing this race, we would pass by many places that would be linked to friends and family.
After our brief stop, we made it to Fanad Lighthouse and at this point, the beauty of the Donegal coastline became very obvious, it was stunning, and it became a joy to be doing the TAW and getting to see so much of Ireland’s beauty. From Fanad, we headed inland and towards Glenveagh National park and after taking on a big climb around its edge (which we didn’t need to walk due to its steady incline), we took on a much spoken about segment of the race, a gravel descent! It was quite abrupt in that as we were climbing up to it, our Garmins told us to take a right turn straight into what looked like a bog, but upon investigation, there was a rough track for us to follow. It didn’t feel correct, but there was a TAW race staff car just after it, so we assumed that it was correct that we should take the beaten track. It then opened up into what can only be called a “gnarly” descent! It was quite rough going at times, and difficult to handle our little Bromptons over, but we made it down in one piece with no punctures or mechanicals, and the race staff were on hand to capture from photos of us “shredding” it. We later found out that quite a few other riders suffered punctures on this section, but we were chuffed that the Bromptons lived up to their reputation as tough little bikes.
Following the gravel descent, we followed a rough track alongside Lough Beagh to Glenveagh Castle, which was gorgeous, but I at this point I remember being hit with a sense of melancholy. I think I got daunted by the scale of the ride still ahead of us and because after seeing the castle, I would normally have visited such places with my girlfriend Amy, and I missed her immensely at that moment. I also felt bad as I had abandoned her for two weeks in London (where we were living at the time) while I was off gallivanting doing this race. She had given me a huge amount of space to not only prepare and train for this race, but to do the race as well, for which I will always be grateful. She was also in constant communication with me throughout the race which helped to keep the morale up and keep it all in perspective, this was just a bike race, and whether we finished or not didn’t matter, just that we had fun.
From Glenveagh, we headed out of the National Park and up over a big climb to Falcarragh where we decided to stop, as it was 21:00, to get some dinner (if possible) and stock up for the evening and next morning. We found a Centra, that had a hot deli counter and we were able to get some freshly made pizzas. As you could imagine they tasted incredible after two days of riding without any warm food. We were also having some great craic with the deli counter lady and staff, they joked that we were really far behind the other riders and that we’d be needing to hurry up soon enough to catch them. This helped to cheer us up, as did coming across another pair, two young lads from Dublin, Greg and Anthony, who were eternally chirpy and cheerful. We would continue to come across each other over the length of the race, and it was always a joyful moment when we did. Greg and Anthony stopped briefly at the Centra before pushing on while Jack and I ate our pizza on the shop front. We were then approached by a, rather drunk, man from the pub across the road who was intrigued by what he saw evidently. After explaining what we were doing, he asked where we were from, and once I responded Dublin, he proceeded to call me a “jackeen” and let us be!
We decided to push for another few hours, at this point we had covered 240km, and were keen to get to the 300km mark. We got back onto the coast and proceeded to have a dramatic sunset, right into the ocean, as it was such a clear day. We carried on until we got to 295km, at one point getting an encouraging “Go Jack and Mark!” from some bystanders, I can only presume they were Dot Watchers (people who followed the GPS trackers on each riders bikes online) and came out to support us. I must admit, it made me feel quite chuffed with myself. Eventually we came onto what felt and sounded like a cliff face (we couldn’t see as it was dark) and decided to find a spot. It was difficult to find a spot given that we couldn’t see beyond the road as it was dark at that point. We eventually found a suitable spot, or it could have been crap to be honest, but as we were so tired, we didn’t really care.
Distance (km): 295.71
Elevation (m): 3,911
Moving Time (hh:mm:ss): 14:56:59
Elapsed Time (hh:mm:ss): 18:49:44
Moving Time Percentage: 79.36%
Average Speed (km/h): 19.8
Calories: 6,892
Average Heart Rate (bpm): 115
Strava Link: https://www.strava.com/activities/2431861562
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