Richard finishes the Tour Divide
Richard completed the longest off-road cycling route in the world this morning, finishing the Tour Divide, a self-supported race along the Great Divide mountain bike route in 25 days, 17 hours and 06 minutes.
He travelled a total of 4,431km/2,753 miles arriving at Antelope Wells on the Mexican Border at 01:05 local time this morning, after riding through the Canadian provinces of Alberta and British Columbia, followed by Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico in the United States.
Considered one of the toughest mountain bike races on the planet, Richard took on the Tour Divide as a training block as part of the preparation for his next world first project, which has yet to be revealed.
On his blog from the finish line, he stated; “I feel tired! But I'm in good shape. My goal was to push myself, enjoy the experience and come home ready to begin a new training block - I'm frazzled to be fair, so many emotions to process! As always I feel grateful for the experience, it's been sincerely wonderful to experience America like this, but it's been a tough 5 days to finish with. The hardest thing is the unrelenting nature of constantly pushing, overriding every instinct to sleep.”
Read Richard's final Tour Divide Blog here.
During the 25 days, Richard climbed nearly 200,000 feet of vertical ascent (equivalent to summiting Mount Everest from sea‐level 7 times) on his Specialized Stumpjumper, navigating through mountain passes, windswept valleys of the continental divide from hinterlands of the Canadian Rockies to badlands of the Mexican Plateau.
The race was self-supported, meaning Richard had to calculate food and water resupply, find shelter each night or bivouac/camp trailside, whilst he faced riding through grizzly bear country, endless climbing and gravel, monsoon like storms, snow, rain, hail…and a lot of mud. After a long day in the saddle there was not only food and a place to sleep to find, but bike maintenance. Richard had to make his own repairs to his Specialized bike, which he named Lightning McBenjamin after his dog Ben, and Lightning McQueen from the movie Cars!
