Sunday, January 31, 2010

Preamble or a prelude....

Ok, so the New Zealand brevet is only a couple of days away. Barring any more discoveries of critically cracked bicycle components, it all looks like we're good to go. Even the weather forecast is positive!

Your protagonists in this "Brovet" (a bromance pun on the French term Brevet) are Joel - the Brevet specialist with a career steeped in 1200km DNFs - Phil, the cross-continental tourer and freakish grimpeur, and Ed, the inexperienced young racer whippet who'll go charging up the first hill then blow up before the top. Then again, if you're reading this, chances are you know/like/have a vague Facebook acquaintance with at least one of those people, or perhaps you hate (at least one of) us and will eagerly anticipate our demise and resultant suffering.

So - basic information. The ride is somewhere between 1100km ~ 1200km of New Zealand's South Island. It's comprised of 50% gravel/dirt, and 50% tarmac roads. It takes in numerous daunting hill climbs, includes some romping singletrack, and passes through some remote and beautiful regions of the world. The catch? An 8 day time limit to complete the route, starting on the 6th of February. You can see a map of the route here.

The cooler feature is that we'll all be carrying SPOT messengers, so you can follow our journey/demise on the internet, and live vicariously through our measley 10-15km/h plod through some of the most beautiful terrain around. For the moment, we can be found on this page.

Hopefully we'll be able to update this blog with tales of epic adventures, epic struggles up epic hills, epic descents through epic terrain, and generally abuse the word "epic". If nothing else, we can put up photos thereafter.

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