Words: Tim Brink / Photos: Chris Giles, Bennet Wright, Kevin Chen. Article from Ride Magazine February 2016.
What started out as a marketing opportunity, supplying his bikes to a madcap adventure down Africa as a test of their durability, became a dream, and ultimately a personal reality for SwiftCarbon founder Mark Blewett.
I really just wanted to be involved as a sponsor, from the outset” says the tanned, ridiculously lean 45-year-old in his Cape Town offices. “It was supply the frames, follow the guys on Twitter, and maximise the exposure for the SwiftCarbon brand. Then I started having little daydreams: wouldn’t it be good to join them for the South African stretch? Yes. But if you are going to do that, what would be the chances of making the time, and effort to do the whole thing? How much harder could it be?”
“The hopeless romantic in me overruled every sensible bone in my body, and before I knew it I had signed up for the full experience. Seriously. How much harder could it be?”
A lot, it turns out. Especially when it is a team time-trial from Cairo to Cape Town, down the length of Africa. 10 660km, 59 000m of ascent, nine countries. In, hopefully, 34 days.
Carocap was the brainchild of Nicholas Bourne, a retired English underwear model (seriously) who had taken to cycling after many years as a runner. An extreme runner, it has to be said, as he holds the record for the 10 000km gallop from Cape Town to Cairo, in 318 days. For context on how long that actually is, he left on 21 January 1998, and stopped running on 5 December the same year. So, mad as a box of frogs. Perfect material to conceptualise, and complete a 320km-a-day bike ride.
Aside from Mark, the six-man team that was to start was whittled down, in the shadow of the pyramids, to five when one of the English riders bailed. By the time they had reached the south of Egypt, they had lost a second member, Egyptian Adham Mahmoud, who was turned back by his own people, as he was due for military service in three months’ time. So, the core of the team was Nic, Mark, Kenyan cycling legend (and Froome mentor) David Kinjah and Zimbabwean David Martin.
Reduced numbers
“At first we worried about how small the team had become, but in the Nubian Desert, it became a iife-saver to be running a lean outfit; we were each going through 20 litres of water each a day, in 45 degree temperatures, and to find another 40 litres each day would have been nearly impossible.”
Carocap was a fully-supported ride, with a back-up vehicle and a sleeping/ cooking overlander driving with the riders, a full-time mechanic and a documentary film-maker recording everything. The bikes were shop- floor-standard Ultravox Ti frames dressed with Campagnolo Super Record parts and Vittoria wheels and tyres. A couple of riders tried to ride tubular tyres – they were averaging 35 km/h some days – but that was a failure. Mark rode Pave CX clinchers, 27mm wide, and suffered only two punctures in 10 000km. Africa’s roads are not kind. “We would be barelling along in the north of the continent, at 40-50 km/h, on the most beautiful tar road, just built by the Chinese, and then it would suddenly end and we would have 30 km of the worst gravel roads ever. I am so proud the bikes made it through, that was the whole point to prove they would”
In total, there was about 900km of dirt road, some of it smooth and almost as good as tar, but some slowing the riders down to just 12 or 13km/h. Fortunately, the backup team sorted the bikes every night, while the riders hit the sleep part of their eat-ride-eat- ride-eat-sleep-repeat routine, so the dust didn’t spend long on the bikes, and they arrived in Cape Town looking only slightly used. The riders, less so.
“I got really sick in the Sudan. Really sick. Vomiting, and the rest. I think I got ill the previous night, sleeping near some really dirty rubbish and stuff. That was the hardest part of the whole race for me, I seriously thought I was going home. But, in a way, that wasn’t an option – it was easier to keep riding, evacuation was more of a challenge. So we only rode 160km that day, and I got some sleep and it got a bit better the next day, for a 340km stroll into Khartoum.” Mark’s second problem arose in Zambia, where the sheath that houses his shin muscle on his right leg burst. “Excruciating, but thankfully I could still ride, even if it was sore, and we were getting closer to home…” Some knee tendonitis was to be expected, but came into play far later than expected, and was secondary to the shin issue. Weight- loss played havoc too, for Mark. He needed to have a collection of size- small shorts flown into Kenya, as the mediums were so loose he was getting blisters where no man should. He had lost five kilograms in two weeks.
Kinjah was the first victim of the hardship of riding 300km a day. He abandoned in the north of Zambia, utterly fatigued and with saddlesore that just wouldn’t heal. “We almost saw it coming, when he reached his family outside Nairobi. For me, the thought of getting closer to Cape Town every day motivated me to keep doing this crazy, sore thing. I can’t imagine what it must be like to get home, and then have to ride away from it again. Heart- wrenching.” And so they were down to three…
David Martin’s was the final health scare for the Carocap – he developed malaria-like symptoms, plus some more, just two days out, and rode the final stage with a raging fever (Nic recorded a body temperature in the 40s when it was his turn to be ill, further up the continent), but with absolutely no chance of any medical professional persuading him to stop. Mark and Nick nursed him to the finish, including an excruciating climb up the back of Du Toitskloof.
Come prepared
Mark, as an ex pro rider and South African cycling team captain, has enough muscle memory to ride most of us into a coma. He keeps fit, partly as a stress release for the long months he spends living and working at SwiftCarbon’s facility in China, but this was going to be a different challenge from making sure he was fit enough to ride with the Cape Town boys on his irregular trips here.
“I started off in the gym, for the first time since I stopped racing in the 90s, spending months doing strength work, building up my core and finding some general fitness. I knew we would need more than just legs for this trip. Then I went to Italy in July and spent six weeks riding my bike. A lot. 70 000m total ascent in just over 100 hours of riding. It was great to feel fit and fast again, although I wasn’t sure I was ready for fit and fast and long.”
And boy, were the days fast and long. Mark posted regular tweets of his Garmin, showing 300-plus kilometer rides at 32-odd km/h.
Africa? You’re mad
“Actually, we never felt threatened on the trip. In Egypt, we had a full-time armed escort – a vehicle filled with guys armed with AK47s, and a scary dude with an Uzzi in our back-up overlander. We didn’t see or feel any threat, but their presence did make us aware of the possibility of kidnapping, or worse. ISIS was quite keenon high- profile hostages and statements at that stage. We were relieved to cross into the Sudan.”
The Swift Ultravox TI Frames were faultless
And it wasn’t just humans that were the problem – their vehicles were a constant challenge. “The buses and trucks on Ethiopia’s Highway of Death have big spikes on the wheels. To stop whatever getting into them, we never quite found out. So there was this constant fear of being sliced open by one. But in the end, we were ok. We only had a couple of small tumbles in the 10 000km, all of them minor except for when Nic overlapped my wheel in South Africa and hit the deck really hard. Thankfully he was just shaken and scraped.”
Animals were a worry, in the planning stages, but in reality there was no problem. “When we camped out, we would make a lion-proof fence with the vehicles and a couple of Swifts, and you had to take turns keeping the fire burning. Apart from that, it was just being on the lookout for the massive scorpions when you went into the night to do your business.”
“Botswana was insane for wildlife – the best. The big tar road has a clearing 50m each side of it, so animals don’t run out in front of trucks. The animals use it to keep themselves safe from predators, so they can’t sneak up on them. We saw elephant almost close enough to touch. I think Nic tried, I just rode as fast as I could, the one time. And then, as dusk fell each night, the place would come alive – all the animals keeping themselves clear of lion ambush, in the safety of this big clearing. I will never forget riding along, and looking to my right in the gloom. There was a lioness, just strolling along next to us. It was surreal. She didn’t even acknowledge our presence.”
The only animals that did give trouble were humans, and their dogs. “We had stone throwing, sporadically, throughout North Africa. I think it was boredom, it wasn’t malicious. Just naughty kids. One even hit me with a branch. I did lose my temper there. But the dogs were a real problem in Egypt. They were feral, and they saw us as food. Our back-up driver would warn us with a hoot if we needed to sprint to safety, and unfortunately had to use the car to neutralize a few. That sounds terrible, but there is no cure for the rabies that every one of these dogs carries. Getting bitten would have been fatal.”
Mileage junkies
“We had a set routine each day. We had to, to keep sane, and to keep going, we would get up with the aim of starting riding at 5am. At two minutes past, Kinjah would need to adjust something on his bike, so we would leave at about twenty past.” Mark jokes about this, but tensions ran high for much of the ride, as they would when you have 10 crew and four elite-level riders all living in each other’s laps. They were all sorted out, quickly, as happens when outspoken is the norm. There was no time, ever, to dwell on anything.
“Once we were rolling, we would aim for 100-120km for the first stop – 3-3.5 hours. Then, we would break it down into 50km sections – an hour and a half at a time – with a short lunch after 200km. The afternoons were the worst; they just dragged.”
The group’s longest day was into Victoria West, in South Africa, where they covered 428km in 24 hours, with just one-and-a-half hours of sleep. David Martin was so shattered he needed help in and out of a bath when they got to Laingsburg, the next day; a hint of what was to come for him.
Sleep was the biggest challenge, and limiter. The riders survived on four or five hours a night, the back-up crew often less. And food was a nightmare. “I never want to see, smell, or eat tuna ever again.” Tinned tuna and pasta were the safest to carry, bolstered by Cadence Nutrition’s range of energy and protein products. “We didn’t see fresh fruit from Egypt, until Kenya. The first mango seller we saw, we cleared out a week’s worth of sales. Just the four of us. It was heaven.”
We had survived. We had done what we se out to do
The memories
How do you compress 38 days – a new world record, beating Mark Beaumont’s 2014 42-day achievement – into a collection of best and worst memories? “I lie awake at night, now, and I can re-ride all of it. I can see the changes in terrain and scenery, the changes in people, from sandy and thin, to dark and powerful, to so black they are blue, to thin and lighter again… it was like an anthropological experiment. I have this movie in my head.
‘I will never forget our water bottles popping their lids in the Nubian desert, as the water almost boiled. The wildlife, the people, the kindness, the hospitality. I will never, never forget seeing my son, Tom, 50km from Cape Town, after asking, I am told, every minute for more than an hour when we would be meeting him. Finishing at the Cullinan Hotel, outside the Waterfront. The sense of relief we had done it. We had survived. We had done what we set out to do. That was great. And knowing I had ridden down Africa on a bike I had dreamed up, and made, just capped it off. I lost focus for most of the trip, but that was the real reason I got involved. To prove that my bikes are good enough, i think we did that.”
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