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It’s by far my most popular post, Ollie Whalley‘s gear list.  I’ve combed over all his stuff in hopes to gain some perspective on what to do myself for the TNGA and the TourDivide.

Ollie Whalley World

Ollie at the finish line of the Tour Divide 2012

Training on a heavy bike has been hard and has really done a number on my legs.  I’ve considered dropping weight by nixing this, that or the other and then I came across this post where Ollie said:

I knew that getting a good sleep every night would be really important, so I carried a bit more gear than Craig, who had just a bivy sack. I went for a super light Z packs tent, a Western Mountaineering sleeping bag and a Therma Rest sleeping pad. The tent was easy to set up and I could get it up in a few minutes and fall asleep, whereas Craig was always trying to find the smoothest plot of ground to sleep on. Bugs freak me out so the tent was great for keeping out the scorpions in New Mexico.

This is helping me decide to keep all my camping gear on my bike (information about that coming soon) and being able to have some comfort at night when I sleep.  I’m still going fairly minimalistic, but not half as bad as I could have been.

These current thoughts I’m having may change after the TNGA, but I’m going to go with “if I can get a comfortable rest then I’m going to be able to recover well and ride steady the next day.”  I’ve pondered ditching camping gear altogether and powering it from hotel to hotel in the cities up until the finish line but I just think that’s too much of a risky move.

Currently the camping equipment I’m using is:

Big Agnes 3 Wire Bivy

Big Agnes Air Core Mattress

SOL Emergency Bivy for a blanket

Trust me when I say I’m not going to be sleeping in the Taj Mahal.  I could go lighter of course and skip the fancy bivy, but I hate things touching my face when I’m asleep and would get claustrophobic quickly if in a conventional bivy sack.

Weight, Weight don’t tell me

Last year Eddie O’Dea did the TNGA in roughly 2 days.  That’s an amazing feat and I’m nowhere near that level of fitness and I’d have to spend 4 months recovering from that type of strenuous work.

At Cahaba Cycles, I’ve got the crew looking over my bike seeing what could be lightened up but there’s not much more wiggle room.

Another method I’ve been working on to lighten the load is losing some weight on my body.  Since May, I’ve dropped a fair amount.  At the time of writing this I have lost 21.2 lbs which could well translate over to a bike’s worth of weight.  Of course now it’s a game of losing too much weight and messing up my power output.  I don’t want to to start sacrificing muscle as I’ll need every bit of that to accomplish such a feat.

World of What?

Okay, geek time.  I used to play World of Warcraft and I unapologetically loved it.

I’m calculating up how many readers I just lost talking about Warcraft

I don’t play anymore but it’s easy to get sucked into that game – I mean, really easy.  One of the things I liked about it, and got really into, was getting your character set up for battle complete with an mount to ride on.

In the higher and more competitive levels of Warcraft, your gear, ride and statistics are paramount because you don’t want to go into battle and have the wrong setup.  Picking the right armor, having the right weapon and spells made all the difference in the world.  Blizzard, the maker of World of Warcraft (WoW) was smart and capitalized on this making all sorts of gear and weapons that ranged from inexpensive to extremely valuable and hard to find.

I honestly don’t think endurance biking (or any form of competitive biking) is much different.  Swap out swords, battle axes and magical spells for carbon fiber components, camelbaks and gu packets and you can see the similarities.  Right?

I always got into tweaking my character and had a lot of fun putting together different combinations of gear to formulate the ultimate fighting machine.  The same goes for biking as well – I’m just not slaying dragons.

The only difference is that biking is cool and you don’t live in your mom’s basement and play video games.  >:)

(I’m kidding!)