Video: Tom Bradshaw Tries Riding 100 Trails In A Day
Tom Bradshaw admits he's a sucker for punishment and enjoys that weird type 2 fun (miserable while it’s happening, but fun in retrospect) that borders on type 3 (not fun at all, not even in retrospect). He finds it rewarding to explore a new place and push himself to see how far he can really go.
Tom was able to have a crack at a massive challenge in the Cumberland Forest on Vancouver Island where, thanks in main part to the United Riders of Cumberland (UROC), there's a network of over 170 trails.
Tom's challenge? To try and ride 100 of those trails, between dawn and dusk. Mid-summer in Cumberland, that’s just over 15 hours of daylight.
Welcome to this beautiful part of the world.
Jeremey Grasby, one of the founding members of UROC, and 2012 Olympian Max Plaxton helped Tom plan a 125km course with >3000 metres of climbing. In theory, this would be four big laps of the Forest returning back to basecamp four times to stop and refuel.
This was the literal basecamp. A 16-foot mini Airstream trailer that Tom rented in Squamish and took on the ferry to Vancouver Island.
The forecast was for a punishingly hot 36 degrees Celsius (97F), which as the day wore on, seriously blew Tom's original plan way out of the water.
Lap 1 started at 5:15am. The plan was to ride the higher, harder trails in the southwest corner of the network first. A 45km-ish lap, with just over 1000m of climbing, and roughly 25 trails. Tom was hoping to be back for his second coffee by 10am....
However by 8am, it was already 30 degrees Celcius (86F) and Jeremy, Max, Stephane and Tom had begun the "Tour de Stream" since the water was the only thing saving them from the building heat..
At 11am, Jeremy, Max, Stephane and Tom completed the first lap, which was mostly single and double black trails. Only Tom and Jeremy would head out for Lap 2, which was a 40 kilometre lap with mostly intermediate trails in the middle of the network. By lunchtime, the mercury was over 38 degrees Celcius (100F). The going was slow, the boys were cooked, and the only way to keep going was to take a one-trail-for-one-stream approach.
"Tour de Stream" (and shower) Cumberland was in full swing.
At 2pm, the temperature hit its peak for the day at 42.3 degrees Celsius (108F).
By this point, Tom and Jeremy were well behind on the four lap plan and the cooling stream stops were taking up to 15 minutes at a time. However, they were still making progress and Tom was sampling some great trails that Jeremy had first built nearly 20 years ago. Tom and Jeremy rolled back into basecamp to finish their second lap at 5pm, way behind schedule. Jeremy called it a day, heading for a well earned beer and cold bath.
 | That left me, myself and I to head out for Lap 3 and 4. I was feeling dangerously good for 13 hours in. I'd managed to eat and drink enough throughout the day, and as the temperature cooled in the evening, I was looking forward to the next laps. The conversation earlier had keep us reasonably distracted from the main goal of 100 trails. As I rolled out, I realized my heat-affected brain had lost count of trails, but I suspected we were around 50 - 60. It was going to be a surprise to everyone involved now, including me. |
Beautiful evening riding in the easier, closer trails to the hub.
At 9:25pm, Tom finally made it back to basecamp to end an epic day. The next morning, he did the math and the final trail count excluding fire roads, stream stops, and not counting any trail ridden more than once, was 83. A total of 98km pedalled, 3,100m climbed and approximately 47 stream stops.
Given how hot the day was, Tom was stoked. A huge thank you to Outdoorsy for allowing Tom to have a crack at this mission. And thank you to Jeremy, Max, Stephane and the United Riders of Cumberland for making this ride possible. It was great to share the experience with locals, who have worked so hard over 20+ years to make this trail network possible.
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100 Comments
j/k - I've ridden in Cumberland a lot and your first lap would be a huge day. Congrats!
10 hours in i kinda lost it and just rode into a circle until I fell over.
After i dont know how long was able to start riding and jumped in the lake/pond on the route. Finished the lap and called it a day.
Massive kudos on this one, can't believe you took it on with those temperatures! I was amazed that, after 90km, you were still popping jumps & drops and flowing down black runs - I would've been in basic defensive mode if I could even make it that far!
However, when you are doing a ride like this and you think to yourself 'oh, has it gotten a bit chilly out here?' is when you really know you need to lay off or suffer the consequences.
This isn't one of those things where you just push through, because you can push yourself right over the edge quite easily. One time I felt fine and was faster than the entire group on one of these high temp/ humidity days and was waiting for my group to catch up. When they caught up they could all hear my heart pounding, while sitting next to me on their bikes. Bad sign.
Here in the middle of Holland, we have a trail network consisting of 10 trails and if you ride them all on one day, you get over 200kms, and about 1500m of climbing. I have done about 155kms with 1100m of it, in about 8 hours in the saddle. You have to be partly self-supporting, because there is no "base camp": you never pass the same spot again (or you really have to plan for it). So I can only imagine the grit @Tombrad has shown with this major effort. It's great fun to watch. Keep it up!
I’ll be making a trip up island after the long weekend, need to find a camp spot. Cheers
Contrast with Davis or Koster or Lenzerheide or Arosa where so many of the trails are long hiking trails built a while ago and, usually because of land manager issues) not so much infill.
At least that's my theory