Silk Road Mountain Race

[quixoticgeek]

Starting in the next few hours is the Silk Road Mountain race, a 1700km unsupported bike race in Kyrgyzstan. In theory it's on roads, but looking at the pictures, the roads appear to be gravel roads at best with the route including some hike-a-bike too.

There's some well known names in the race, including 93a, Bjorn Lenhard, who is racing just days after coming 3rd in the TCR (Having won the TAW race earlier in the year). He appears to be racing in a pair this time, and with a fixed route hopefully poor routing choice won't be his down fall here.

Other notables are Lee Craigie and Jenny Tough, both of the Adventure syndicate. All together 90 crazy riders are due to start from Bishkek in a few hours time.

You can watch the dots here:

https://www.silkroadmountainrace.cc/tracking/

Looks like a really interesting race.

J

[Karla]

Umm yeah, roads.

When I was there last year I could do about half the daily distance I'd do in Europe: the combination of bad roads, altitude, heat, gradient and scarcity of supply points meant it was tough going.  The SRMR organiser seems to have quite strenuously avoided anything even vaguely resembling tarmac in the region, and has taken plenty of passes that I wrote off as masochistic and/or too slow of I wanted to catch my flight home.  In short, it's going to be a very tough race.

[quixoticgeek]

Umm yeah, roads.

When I was there last year I could do about half the daily distance I'd do in Europe: the combination of bad roads, altitude, heat, gradient and scarcity of supply points meant it was tough going.  The SRMR organiser seems to have quite strenuously avoided anything even vaguely resembling tarmac in the region, and has taken plenty of passes that I wrote off as masochistic and/or too slow of I wanted to catch my flight home.  In short, it's going to be a very tough race.

Aye. I think that's why the time to make the finishers party basically requires you do do 100km a day, which given the "road" surface is going to be a challenge, tho shouldn't be impossible. The gradients look more of an issue to me. The podcast about the event is very interesting, and yes, everything you have mentioned appears to be accurate. There is a 300km section with no resupply too.

Looks like the pointy end is at about 100km mark, with lantern rouge 50km behind.

J

[JonBuoy]

This looks like a tough one - about a third of the field have packed already!

[JonBuoy]

Jay Petervary has just finished.  He was 90k in front of second place.  Only 44 of the original 93 riders are still playing this particular game.

[Dave_C]

There are some amazing photographs on Facebook of the riders and views of this race!

[JonBuoy]

They ended up with 29 finishers from 93 starters.

As Dave says - some absolutely stunning photo's and stories out there on Facebook/Instagram/etc

[quixoticgeek]

The podcast is pretty damn good too.

J