Riding the inaugural Great Southern Brevet on a rigid singlespeed

Prelude

When the Great Southern Brevet was announced I was immediately interested. I had become a bit of a brevet veteran addicted to the physical and mental challenges they posed. Since my initiation with the 2010 Kiwi Brevet I had started two Petit Brevets on Banks Peninsula. I pulled out of the 2010 edition after almost 10 hours - exhausted, cold and frustrated at myself for taking a wrong turn in the mist on the double fence line track. Looking back this DNF did annoy me. When riding into a growing storm and things are not going well the doubts start to prey on your mind. What if this southerly gets even worse? Do I have enough warm clothes? I had to hike-a-bike that last small rise and there is still over 4000 meters of climbing left, a warm pub with hot food and beer is just an easy downhill away behind me, its getting dark - are my lights sufficient? why am I dong this? what is the point? what is the meaning of life?.......

I entered the petit brevet again in 2011 this time with fellow mad singlespeeder, black sheep rider and back of the pack racing team leader Judd Rohwer from New Mexico America. This time I did finish - dead last just under the 36 hour cutoff having hike-a-biked most of the 7500 meters of vertical ascent with Judd. Ably cheered on by the crew chief Dan van Asch it was a wholely different and enjoyable experience though. I had my brevet mojo back.

The Great Southern Brevet (GSB) was to happen in late January. I only committed to it at the last minute unsure if I could afford to take the time of work. My training was therefore a little half hearted with lots of 1-2 hour rides rather than the longer rides that would have been more sensible. Oh well - hopefully the body would remember what to do.

Dave King - the organizer extraordinaire of the GSB - had joked in an email to us about checking whether our neighbour was also doing it. Well actually my neighbour - Paul Conner - was doing it! This would be his first brevet and he had decided to use a 29er GT hard tail with skinny tires. Hmmmmm ...not sure the tires were a good idea but he was set on it. We drove together to Tekapo on the Friday night and stayed in an old bach Paul had organized. We compared setups - Paul had it well sorted (except for the tires) using a freeload rack. I was going rackless very like my proven Kiwi Brevet setup. The big difference from 2010 was that I had upgraded my Cotic Simple with my pride and joy - a Black Sheep custom titanium 29er rigid single speed.

For navigation I had uploaded the GPX file Dave had provided on the website onto my GPS. I had not really closely looked at the route though and not looked at all at the elevation profiles. Hey I had done the Petit Brevet so I knew climbs (or rather hike-a-bikes) were doable one way or another. In the coming week I would discover that I didn't really know what true mega climbs were though.