Tour Cycling – my schizophrenic friend (Thailand)

This tour cycle lark is definitely turning into my schizophrenic friend – certain days are happy go lucky whilst others are manic days where the only goal is gobbling up km after km.

My aim on this round the world cycle is to cover around 25000 km in the 12 months that Deirbhle, my wife, has given me to achieve my ‘life goal’.  I think that she is then secretly hoping that I will have ‘scratched that itch’ and have gotten this cycling lark out of my system. Who knows and only time will tell……

Although I am only one month in to this ride I can already see patterns emerging into the way that I am covering the distances each day.  I seem to have subconsciously gotten into a rhythm of breaking my cycling down into 2 week periods where to stay on schedule for my goal of 25000km I have to cover 1000km each fortnight.

The first week in every two I seem to potter about cycling pretty much aimlessly like I did for most of my cycle through Vietnam and Cambodia.  Then, once I hit the border with Thailand I hit a fast streak to Bangkok where I was covering +100 each day for the 4 days it took me to get to Bangkok.  Since leaving Bangkok I am now in a similar cycle – I spent the first week pottering down the coast visiting different beaches and national parks and stopping for a cuppa whenever I fancied it.  In this week my average distance was around 50 km per day.

Fast forward to the second week, and I am once again pushing the kilometers covered each day and covering +140km as I push towards the Malaysian border.  It really is like being with a schizophrenic friend where certain days are all piece and love whilst others are a manic pursuit of distance where the only thing that matters is achieving the distance and all else takes a back seat.

When you are cycling +140km day in day out then it really is a mental game, and for me it is all about routines.  This starts when I get up.  On days when I am just ‘pottering’ with no real plan for the day then I start with a cuppa and a pot noodle, and then when I am an hour into the day I will stop for breakfast somewhere with a nice view.

Once I have had breakfast the pace drops and I really do just spin the pedals stopping often to look at whatever catches my eye.

On days, like today, when I am going to be covering around +140km then my routine completely changes.  It all starts the evening before when I pack the bike ready for a fast getaway the following morning and even set an alarm for 6.15am.  Once up, it is a quick shower to shake off the sleep and then straight out on the bike – no cuppa or anything.

All of the mamma and pop stalls are already up and running and so finding food for breakfast is not  an issue.  The difficulty here though is the further south I am traveling towards Malaysia the more the food is changing from ‘fresh’ towards more curries and stews which tend to be bloody spicy. This is fine for lunch or dinner but at 7am it definitely gets the sweats on.

My next ‘goal’ is then to get on with the job of cycling with the focus being the 50km mark. Once this is achieved after a couple of hours on the bike then I reward myself with a coffee.  I do not stop before 50km and the other day I passed a coffee place at 48km but pushed on as it was too soon to stop by 2km but then had to cycle for another hour before I passed another coffee stop.  Cycling really is a mental game where you have to be disciplined.

My current coffee of choice is an americano with one shot of condensed milk served over ice.  It really is an amazing rush and the pedals really do turn quicker for the next 30 minutes on the bike.

By about 11 am I should have covered around 90km and that is when the heat of the day really starts to kick in and this is the signal to pull off the road for a spot of lunch.  I don’t really need to look at my watch as my body is beginning to tell me it is time to eat – those small inclines start to feel much bigger, the speed is subtly dropping by 1 or 2 kmph, the saddle is suddenly starting to become uncomfortable in certain spots, and you are starting to notice the wind more and more.  Once this happens it is definitely time for food and I stop at the next place I see.

Back on the road after a 30 minute stop the next goal is to pass the 100km mark which soon happens and then push onto around 110km.  This is a good hour since the lunch stop and it is time to get out of the heat of the day as it is now around 1 pm.  I will look for somewhere with wifi for this stop.  On the coast there is always a good selection of places to pull in at and it is just a case of picking the one with the nicest view.

In the hills or along highways the main wifi offerings seem to be petrol stations, but they are not the same as back home.  They are more like motorway service stations – there are normally restaurants, a mini mart, and an excellent coffee shop. (my favourite is Inthanin Coffee which seems to serve better coffee than Café Amazon Advntures which is the other coffee staple when on the road in Thailand).

I always found it weird living in Vietnam as the petrol stations only sold petrol – no drinks, no food, nothing but petrol which I have never understood, but this may be a reflection of growing up in a commercialized society.

I will normally spend an hour at the ‘wifi’ stop to get out of the heat of the day.  It really is a hard struggle cycling through the heat and I have decided that it simply is not worth it unless I really need to do it as if I arrive somewhere an hour later so what as it is bloody miserable cycling during the hottest part of the day.

It is now around 2pm and the day is starting to cool down which is the signal to get back on with cycling.  There is normally somewhere around 30 km left to hit the 140km target for the day which in practical terms is another 2 hours cycling as I have found that cycling in the afternoon is the hardest, not solely due to tiredness but because the winds are picking up as the rain clouds start to gather.  In monsoon season you can normally set your watch by rain which normally hits around 4pm.  The winds for the first couple of weeks of this cycle were in my face the whole time and I was fearing that they would be this way through Asia.  Now that I have turned south they are more 50/50 in terms of being with me and against me.  The best days are obviously when the winds are with you as you really can roll along at 25kmph with not much effort.  If the wind is against you for 7 hours it really does take its toll on your legs and you get off the bike very, very tired.

This is where I am on the lookout for fruit that I can munch on as I cycle.  My favourite is to pick up half a kilo of ‘hairy lychees’.  The fruits real name is Rambutan but mine is easier to remember.

I hang the plastic bag around my handlebar stem and ‘dip in’ for the next hour.  They are really sweet and the sugar keeps the legs turning.

At around 4pm I stop for a drink and will look at the map to find a town which is about 15 km up the road.  The towns are not normally marked on the map but you can recognize them as a cluster of small roads that spread away from the main road and one of these will be my target for the day.

If I am next to the coast finding somewhere to sleep is not an issue as there are lots of cheap places available.  In the mountains this gets a little more difficult and I normally pull into a restaurant or shop and go through my routine of putting my hands together next to my head to feign sleeping on a pillow.

And that in a nutshell is my daily routine for cranking out +140km on a fully loaded bike.

The only thing left to do now is to shower, hand wash the cycling clothes ready for the morning, and then go and see what entertainment the town has to offer.  Normally though, on days when I am pushing out +140km where I end up is a 1 horse town, and the horse has left, which means dinner and an early night ready to face another 140 km the following day.

The bonus of cycling like this being that in a two week stretch you only need to do this for 5 of the days and the other 9 are what this trip is about – pootling from village to village, from beach to beach stopping whenever the whim takes you or heading totally off piste into the national parks.  To quote a Frank Sinatra song, round the world tour cycling is a bit like Love and Marriage – you can’t have one without the other.

And that is all I have time for today as I need to get on the road and crank out those kilometers as today is one of my ‘manic’ days.

Cheers

Stewart

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