All Super Brevets are hard. They are all a gradual process of physical and mental self destruction.
The legs are typically the first to go. All long distance cyclists are used to riding without legs.
Soon other parts of your body start to give up. The palm of the hands and the feet are likely next in line. Knees are a very common one. The butt comes soon enough for everyone. You typically see some necks failing towards the end of the Super Brevets.
Some riders know where their weak spots are and try to delay the inevitable body part failure with movements and posture changes while riding. Some riders, including some of those that know where their weak spots are, will be taken by surprise and see their body fail in unexpected places.
The mental self destruction starts with having to ride through the first night.
For the experienced rider it doesn’t have an immediate effect. But start adding days with short sleeps and the accumulation of sleep deprivation will make every rider's brain go to places. Some, me included, get grumpy. Some have hallucinations. If you are riding with someone you can have deep, all-encompassing conversations while climbing a mountain in the early hours of the morning. If you are unlucky your brain will go all pessimistic. Pretty much everyone starts making small mistakes. I’d claim to be the only one whose brain took it to find a relationship between joining a cycling peloton and joining a sex orgy (a topic for a future post).
Keeping riding while your body is giving up and your mind is playing with you is pretty much the name of the game in a Super Brevet.
1001 Miglia is a hard Super Brevet because the conditions exacerbate all of the above.
The road surface is rough. Very rough at places, for long kilometers. That accelerates the destruction of the body. Butts, feet, hands, necks all start failing sooner than in other Super Brevets.
The weather also contributes to making 1001 Miglia a hard Super Brevet. Hot in general. Very hot in the central hours of the day. In this edition we got rain. Summer storms. At some point I got convinced that I got more rain in this 1001 Miglia than in my three LEL combined.
The climbing also makes 1001 Miglia a hard ride. There is lots of climbing. Small climbs, long climbs, some of them steep climbs. A section in Tuscany full of one to four kilometer climbs. What Spanish cyclists would call a “leg breaker” terrain.
Also, the climbing is all concentrated in a 1,000kms. That means that for a 1,000kms you find yourself going either up or down. Wishing to have some flat sections where everything will be easier.
But when the flat section comes you realize it is not easier. You are 1,100km into the ride. Your legs, your hands, your feet, your knees or your neck are completely destroyed by then. Maybe all of them. In my case it was my butt. It was so irritated that I could pass as a mandrill if you looked at me from behind.
Hours wishing to be riding in the flat section and when it came I was wishing we were climbing.
But the 1001 Miglia is not only a hard Super Brevet. It is also an adventure.
Food is generally good. As you would expect lots of pasta. Lots of melon and watermelon too.
Sleeping facilities on the other hand is the first surprise for the uninitiated.
The organization gave a clue when with the welcome pack they gave every rider an emergency blanket. A proper sign that you are up for an adventure.
In most of the controls you had to sleep on the hard floor. I knew that and I was ok with it. I can sleep pretty much everywhere. But any rider coming with the standards of PBP or LEL in mind was up for a hard wake up (pun intended).
Getting to a control at midnight, expecting to find food, drinks, showers and sleeping facilities (as described above) only to find that, despite what the road book said, the control it was only a person checking you in and telling you there were none of those facilities and that you have to go to the next control (55kms away) certainly contributes to make you feel in the middle of an adventure.
The fact that that was after a long and foggy descent so you get to the control frozen to death. Is the test of your mental fortitude.
You smile, you shrug your shoulders and you get on with it.
Getting just another storm half way through those 55km is the necessary touch of epicness that every adventure needs to have.
One could argue that a part of an adventure is not knowing where you are going. If you follow me you know that not knowing where I am going is a constant whenever I’m riding my bike. 1001 Miglia was no exception, but not always it was my fault. The track given by the organization had a tendency to send you through the most weird “roads”. Sometimes just cutting a hairpin bend through a very steep path instead of just continuing through the main road. The route was mandatory but we learned to exercise our own judgment everytime the Garmin was asking you to make a turn that looked like a “shortcut”. A bit of a choose your own route adventure.
Now, 1001 Miglia is also a dangerous adventure.
I mentioned rough surfaces. Those are dangerous when descending, especially during the night. Still, that is a danger riders can control (to a point).
Drivers on the other hand there is very little riders can do about them. And, believe me, drivers are dangerous in Italy. Most of them show no respect or acknowledgement for cyclists, some of them have borderline criminal attitudes towards cyclists.
Yes, 1001 Miglia is a hard, sometimes dangerous, adventure. But 1001 Miglia is an amazingly beautiful ride. The most beautiful of all Super Brevets I have ridden.
It is so beautiful and I loved the experience of riding it with Julian, my long distance cycling twin soul, that I don’t care if it is a hard adventure. I’ll most likely will be at the start line again in 2029.
The ride in Strava: https://www.strava.com/activities/12224888604
Take care of yourself
Javier Arias González
