Hello from TDA!
It is day 4 of the tour and we have set up camp on the beautiful beach at a resort hotel in the town of Sadaga on the Red Sea. We have almost sixty riders in our group, all with the same enthusiasm and excitement for the following four months of cycling and each with our own personal strengths and limitations. The last four days have been full of adaptation as we get used to our new lifestyle and situation. Each day begins at 5:45 with a musical wake-up call. By 6:15 we’ve got our gear packed, tents stowed. Then breakfast and on the road by 7:00.
The biggest challenge of the first few days is our adapting bodies. It seems like almost everybody has some sort of injury – mostly saddle sores (blisters on the bum from too much biking), knee pain, neck and shoulder pain. It seems like half of the conversations around camp have been about health/body/injury issues. Who knew that bowel movements were an appropriate topic of discussion at breakfast time! For me, it’s been knee pain. This certainly isn’t a surprise, I knew before I began that this was going to be the single greatest adversary of mine for the journey to Cape Town. Everything was going well until Day 2. The day that we will all be talking about until a day that is worse comes along. It was going to be tough on it’s own merits at 168km through the gravel desert by the red sea. With 60km to go the group I was riding with was in high spirits, expecting to arrive at camp with enough time to set up our tents in daylight! But fortunes change so quickly in the desert and headwinds kicked in. It was a ferocious headwind! After four hours of hammering into the wind, we got through those 60km to arrive at camp just at sunset. We are absolutely not permitted to ride after dark, so about a third of the riders did not make it to camp that day and had to be picked up by the trucks or hitch-hike in.
In retrospect, it may not have been wise to push my body so hard on just the second day of the tour – but that feeling, to see the tents of camp off in the distance after over 10 hours of biking, knowing that if I had been fifteen minutes further back the road I would not have been permitted to finish. A feeling like that made it worth it. My knees disagreed and now two days later I made the responsible choice and hitched a ride in the truck to give them a day for the inflammation to subside a little bit. Tomorrow we ride 140km away from the red sea inland towards Luxor and the valley of the kings and queens. The day starts with 40km of uphill and my spirits are high. I have confidence that my knees will be pain free!
