Great Divide Race

Update: Well, the race is over, two guys beat the course record, and several guys were laid low by dehydration. Praise be to folks who are smart enough to drop out before they damage themselves permanently. After the last couple years, finishing on a fixed gear is starting to seem… impossible. Nathan Bay, the only finishing singlespeed rider this year (and only the second after Kent Peterson?) finished 8 hours over the limit. Topofusion shows it as 8 minutes over, which boggled my mind at the unfairness of it all. :^)

Follow it here.
Read the posts from the bottom, one at a time. This would make a great movie, just the phone messages, some maps and lots of footage of the route. It would be hypnotic.

These guys are racing from Canada to Mexico down the spine of the continent. On bicycles. Unsupported. Everything they need, they carry on their backs.

Here are the stats from Topofusion, updated by Scott Morris (probably not the same one I knew at Sony). A lot of the positioning is best-guess, since they self-report from payphones to an answering machine, and some of them don’t seem to do much of that. Tom Purvis transcribes it all onto the GDR blog.

Dave Nice is doing it on a fixed-gear machine. Whoa.

It’s the only sporting event I’ve ever found remotely interesting, and I wish them all the best best best. Holy cow, man.

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philip

UI/UX Designer, bike nerd, artist.

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