Last week I had the privilege to start and finish the inaugural version of the Ardennes Monster bike packing race through the beautiful Ardennes region of Belgium.
The course starts and ends in Namur, Belgium which is the French speaking part of Belgium. The area is famous for its beautiful forests, hills, and grasslands as well as many historical sites from World War II.
The race was designed to be the hardest 1000 km/620 mile paved course possible and featured every major cycling climb in the Ardennes. To say the least, the course is absolutely brutal with its 18,000 meters of net elevation gain and features dozens of steep climbs.
(Image courtesy of The Ardennes Monster).
Why?
In recent years I’ve gravitated away from road racing and towards more adventurous endeavors. I’ve enjoyed bike packing and have done quite a few weekend trips back home in the US and now here in Europe where I would ride, camp, and repeat, often enjoying food and company along the way. However, I still have a competitive streak so the idea of an ultra/bikepacking race intrigues me a lot. So much so that last year I signed up for La Baroudeuse Unpaved gravel bikepacking race in Southern France without knowing I was completely over my head. Although that race was amazingly beautiful, it was brutally hard, featuring hours and hours of pushing my bike up steep climbs. Despite my original excitement, I withdrew on the 3rd day but have had many regrets ever since.
The spirit of such an event never left me though so when I came across the Ardennes Monster, it seemed perfect. Its paved, safe, easy to prepare for and easy to travel to. However, it would still require me to set many personal records just to finish within the time limit. I mulled it over for a couple months. To be honest I didn’t even know if I could complete the course in the allotted 100 hours. I’ve ridden in the area and knew that with a loaded bike I could at best average 12 mph but realistically I would be slower, especially with stops to resupply, eat, and rest. Even if I averaged 10 mph this would be 16 hours of riding each day for 4 days straight.
To put this in perspective, I’ve only ridden more than 16 hours once (Dirty Kanza/Unbound Gravel). I’ve only exceeded 150 miles in a day 3 times. I would need to do more than this 4 days in a row with a loaded bike!
As is often the case with many of my stupid ideas, I just signed up. I didn’t really tell anyone other than Andra either. After last year’s debacle I made this my personal goal and the only thoughts I wanted to factor into my decision to keep pushing or to quit were to be my own.
Prep
Im not going into any detail about my training. Let’s just say I rode lots and stuck with my program and overall I was happy with my training progression. I’m far from the speed I could maintain back in 2013 but I could not complain about my fitness, it was the best I’ve had in years.
The race is self supported which means you need to carry your own gear, including your sleep system. I had already accumulated much of the equipment I needed and tried to make my setup as minimal as possible. The forecast was for rain the first day but would be dry otherwise. I would carry a hooped bivvy which is like a tiny tent but really more like a plastic sleeping bag. I would use layers to keep warm rather than carry a sleeping bag. In hindsight this was the perfect decision.
Most of my stuff:
And packed up:
The days leading up to the race were not ideal to say the least as I had two major setbacks. The first was that I had setup my Niner cyclocross bike with tubeless 30 mm tires and planned to use it for the event. The bike is super fast, light, and has very low gearing which would make the 10 to 20 percent grades I would encounter much more manageable. However, in the process of readying my bike for the race I broke the hanger that attached the rear derailleur to the bike. Being an American bike I could not get a replacement hanger in time for my event. I instead had to frantically try and ready my road bike which was in very bad state due to a long wet ride I had done the previous month. It was long overdue for service.
I cleaned up my road bike and tuned it to the best of my ability. What was strange is that the bike would not shift to the smallest gear. This wasn’t a problem as the course was so hilly I would never need that cog. However, when you need to rely on your bike to function flawlessly for 1000 km, you don’t want to start out with an unknown problem and this was going to be in the back of my mind the whole time. This unknown problem would later come back to haunt me but at the time I had no time to install new cables, I had to make due.
The second setback came on my travel day, one day before the event. This so happened to be an extremely rare heat event in the Netherlands where temperatures soared to near 40 C/100F. I made it to my train well in advance only to have it delayed over and over and over again over the course of 6 hours. I sat outside in 100 degree heat waiting for what I hoped would be my train to Brussels from where I would catch another train to Namur. Unfortunately the trains never came back online. Trust me, this is not the recipe for showing up to a multi day bike race fresh. Now I was doubtful I could make it at all.
Thankfully a friend knew a driver in Rotterdam that agreed to take me to Breda. During the ride I convinced him to drive me all the way to Brussels. It cost me some serious $$$ but I had no choice. I owe many thanks to Romald for saving my entire adventure.
Race Day (Day 0)
There were 35 people registered for the race, 27 of which started and 19 which would eventually go on to finish. You have 100 hours to finish the race. Given that there are 96 hours in 4 days the race starts 4 hours before midnight and then you have until midnight on the 4th day to finish. Given the 8 pm start time this more or less implies that you will be riding through the night the first night. This was the first time I’ve ever ridden overnight and I was quite looking forward to the experience.
The event was well organized and after a bike inspection earlier in the day we had our riders meeting which was really well done. Olivier, the organizer, ushered us into a dark room with scary music and it was all quite fun. He went over details of the course. Afterwards I went back into town to get some food and stock up on food supplies and arrived back to the start about an hour prior to starting.
We all lined up just before 8 pm and of course it starts raining. There was some brief rain predicted but it ended up raining lightly for most of the night. Thankfully race day excitement meant that it didn’t bother me too much other than having wet feet.
As we started we rode down from the top of the citadel in Namur and then rode towards our very first climb. The lead car pulled off and we were off. I rode at a very gentle pace as I knew I would be riding for more than 24 hours so no sense in started out fast. I soon found myself at the back of the pack but I didn’t mind. There was still daylight and the route was quite pretty as we crossed the river and then rode into the countryside. The start of the ride was not particularly hilly but just a few hours later the hills came and boy did they come. Famous climbs such as the Muur de Huy and la Radoute climbs were brutal and there were some lesser known climbs that were equally challenging. Doing these climbs in the dark for the first time made this an incredible experience.
The La Radoute climb was particularly cool as the organizers had set up lanterns on each side of the road and they were there to film and cheer us on. This is really when I started to miss not having my Niner, the extra gears would have been very helpful as I pushed to get up these steep climbs. The roads were also quite rough on the descents so I was missing my tubeless 30 mm tires. I continued to ride through the night and overall had a great time. I did start to experience some discomfort in my right ankle though. I had sprain my ankle in Italy more than a month prior but it was still tender and the steep climbs seemed to aggravate it quite a bit.
Day 1
After riding through the night I was getting sleepy and needed to take a nap so I found a bus stop where I could lay down for 20 minutes. It doesn’t sound like much but its amazing how much a short nap can improve how you are feeling. I then continued on and hit checkpoint 1 at about 1 pm. This was 7 hours ahead of the cut off time so I was quite relaxed. After downing some food and drink at the checkpoint I continued and was met by one hell of a climb just minutes after leaving. This was one of many climbs I had to walk the steeper sections of.
I mentioned that my shifter was not capable of shifting into the smallest cog. This was worrisome on its own but I noticed now that my shifting was becoming a bit irregular. The shifting quality changed a lot in a very short period of time and this was quite concerning. I went ahead and readjusted my shifting and then things were fine again and I continued.
I rode until a little after 10 pm which was my goal. This brought my mileage to almost 240 miles and is now my longest distance and longest duration bike ride. As luck would have it, I happened to arrive in the town of Bomal which is where Andra and I had camped the weekend prior. Since I was familiar with the place I headed towards the campground and rented a campsite. They weren’t serving food anymore but they had hot ramen soup so I could at least eat something warm. I fell asleep sometime between 11:30 and midnight.
Day 2
Waking up the next morning my ankle was swollen and creaking. Although not terribly painful it was an uncomfortable feeling and this worried me. I was riding again by 6:30 am and took every precaution to guard my ankle as much as possible, trying not to bend it at all. This is quite hard to do when riding a bicycle. This section of the course continued to be filled with steep climbs. They had mentioned that after checkpoint 2 the course would get easier so I was looking forward to that.
Checkpoint 2 was next to a bike/coffeeshop in Panache. I had arrived about 2 pm so I had lost an hour against the clock but it wasn’t a reason for concern, at least not yet. I was again greeted with hospitality and could enjoy a hot cup of coffee and some other refreshments.
After leaving checkpoint 2 the course did open up a bit and was quite enjoyable. We travelled through the town of Bastogne which was part of the Battle of the Bulge in WWII. This was a fascinating area as you would often see memorial sites along the roads dedicated to WWII and the battles that happened there. The US had a major role in these battles and as such there are museums and monuments that are dedicated to the US troops and others that fought there. I definitely want to come back and ride this area again on a more leisurely adventure.
As I was riding along I once again had my shifting change dramatically and my chain was hopping back and forth between gears. I was starting to wonder if there was something wrong with my shifter or cable. I had to stop to re-adjust and I decided at a minimum I would inspect and lube my right shifter. Upon inspection my worst nightmare came true. Pulling back my shifter covers, you could see a mess of frayed wire and the cable was being held by just a few strands. I knew I had a new shifter cable but I needed to make a decision about whether to continue and hope for the best or to take a chance and try to replace the cable now. Replacing a cable on a bike with internal routing can be a real challenge in the field.
I decided to replace the cable. I didn’t have a tool to cut the cable but using my hex wrench and prying on each wire it didn’t take long to cut the cable at the shifter. Despite being frayed I was able to pull the cable out from the rear derailleur. I then pulled the other half of the cable out of the shifter without too much problem and then went to work threading the new cable into the frame. Things were going quite well and I even managed to make a make shift bike stand out of the farmer’s fence I was next to. I got the wire all the way through the frame except for the very last exit hole from rear of the chain stay. This proved to be hugely problematic though.
No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get the cable to thread through the small hole in the cable stay. There was a cable stop in the hole but I wasn’t sure if I could remove it but I tried. I took the old cable and threaded it back through the hole and then pinched a zip tie around it and then tried to pull it back out hoping this would pull the cable stop with it. It didn’t. I then fished the old cable back through again and taped the old and new cables together. I tried to make the tape as thin as possible but I could not pull the cable through.
Normally in a situation like this one would let the chain drop into the lowest cog and then push it up into the second smallest cog using the limit screws. This race was way too hilly for that setup. I did have 10 zip ties though. It took me a while to figure it out but eventually I was able to wrap the rear derailleur with zip ties in such a way to get the chain on the largest cog. This worked and seemed solid so I could at least continue and hopefully find a bike shop the next day. Thankfully the course was so hilly that there were very few flat sections. This meant I could benefit from the low gearing going up the climbs and then coast on the descents. It would only be the flat sections where I would spin out and and lose time but there were not many flat sections in this race!
In all I was on the side of the road for about 2 very precious hours. A few riders came by but they could not offer assistance because that’s against the rules and to be honest there wasn’t much anyone could do to help anyway. I was quite emotional at this time. I was frustrated because this race was hard enough without any setbacks but I was also very proud. I doubt there are many riders in the race that would have found a way to continue.
I committed myself to riding to 150 miles that day which meant riding until 2 am. That night I found a small access road in the woods to sleep next to. Shortly after lying down I was terrified by the sound of a very angry dog (or animal) barking or grunting. It sounded quite close and I was thinking “You have to be kidding me!!!!” . But then I could hear it getting fainter as it ran off in the distance. I wasn’t 100% sure it was a dog though…it sounded like a bark but not 100% like a dog. Wild boars are common in the area but I’m not sure that boars can grunt in a way that sounds like a bark. I guess I’ll stick with the angry dog theory.
Day 3
I slept for 3 to 4 hours and was riding again at about 6:30 am. I had found a bike shop but it would be closed for a few more hours and I didn’t want to wait for it to open. I was also not sure how long a stop would take or whether the shop would even speak English. I decided to continue on and eventually finished with having only two gears.
Day 3 remained an easier stretch compared to the first part of the race so I was making decent progress. There were some 1 to 2 percent grades though that really slowed me down. On the flats and going down a 1% grade meant that I didn’t have enough gearing to go faster than 12 mph.
The previous day was the Belgian National day and everything was closed so it was nice to have shops open again so that I could restock and eat adequately. My ankle had stabilized now and was not getting any worse so that lifted my spirits a bit. That being said I was very tired from 3 days of riding and was often overcome with emotion. At times I would have intense highs or intense lows. Its interesting the way your mind works as it oscillates between happiness, sadness, and even euphoria. Any time I felt frustrated or low I just kept reminding myself it would change and it always did.
Checkpoint 3 was at some person’s house in the countryside. There were two other riders there when I arrived and I spent about 45 minutes there recharging my phone and taking some rest and then I was off again. I now had 190 more miles to go and a day and a half to do it. I gutted my way to 80 more miles for another big day in the saddle, finishing with 145 miles and leaving 110 miles remaining for the last day. I found a very nice field to sleep in and the stars were quite beautiful. Overall though it was an uneventful day, something I badly needed!
The last day
The last day started out not too hard but soon I got into some brutal climbs including the most difficult of them all, the Montagne de le Croix. Let’s just say I walked a lot of this one. I was trying to get myself excited as I was on pace to finish around 6 pm but 6 pm seemed like it was never going to come. It was warm, I think about 30 C/ 90F, maybe a bit warmer. This is also when my body was really suffering.
I had woken up with a bad blister on my left side and it was painful to sit. This was much worse on the flats. You would think it would be nice and easy on the flats but instead I was spinning out from being under geared and without being able to put any weight on your pedals all of your weight goes onto your seat. This put lots of pressure on my butt and on my saddle sore. My left ankle was now also starting to become quite sore as well. I’m not certain why I had so much ankle pain but its something I need to address if I do something like this again.
The finish was at the top of the citadel in Namur. There was a switch back cobbled climb up to the finish and it was an epic way to finish what was a monumental ride for me. Andra was there to greet me at the end and I shed some tears as I was overcome with emotion.
Looking back I honestly didn’t know if I could finish this. To actually do so after overcoming so many setbacks gave me an even greater sense of accomplishment.
The event was first class. This was their first time organizing an event and it seemed like they had been doing this for years. Many thanks go out to Olivier and his crew, they worked their asses off and put on a hell of an event. I think Olivier slept less than I did! I would highly recommend the Ardennes Monster to others and would even do it again if I didn’t have my eye on other events. They also sponsor some other challenges such as the La Conquette des Ardennes so check those out as well!
I know that was a long read but I hope you enjoyed.
