Cycopaths complete astonishing, community-supported 1,000-kilometer ride in sweltering Brunei.
When Vivek Jangra saw the cyclist in front of him go down, he remembers, “I had nowhere to go. So I toppled.”
It was early afternoon on Saturday, April 17, in Brunei Darussalam on the tropical, Southeast Asian island of Borneo. Jangra had been cycling since 5:30 a.m. with a group of riders, the self-dubbed Cycopaths, who planned to complete 1,000 kilometers over the course of just 36 hours.
They were about 200 kilometers into the challenge when one of the support riders cycling ahead of them hit a bump and fell off his bike, toppling another rider and then Jangra.
Jangra was only a bit bruised, but his bike was too damaged to continue. It could’ve been the end of the journey for him, but another support rider, Ivo Verstralen, offered up his own bike to Jangra.
“You don’t stop,” Verstralen told Jangra. “You just go.”
Verstralen stayed behind to tend to the injured support rider and the damaged bike. They were collected by volunteer support drivers and brought home safely. Because of this support, the Cycopaths hardly missed a beat.
The next day, around 5:00 p.m. on April 18, family and friends cheered as Jangra and Michael Scheck, two of the five Cycopaths, cycled into Bina, the industrial lot that had served as home base for the previous two days. They had completed their mind-boggling megameter ride. There was no medal, no ceremony, just gleeful rounds of hugs and laughs to celebrate their success.
Also present and beaming were the rest of the Cycopaths, all of whom had completed remarkable distances. Mark Russell cycled a formidable 750 kilometers. Alastair Comley did 600 kilometers with a break to attend a necessary meeting. Marco Bonato, the one who galvanized the community to support the Cycopaths, rode 250 kilometers with a hamstring injury.
The physical and mental achievement of these ultracyclists was a shared one. Over the course of 35-odd hours, support cyclists rode ahead of them in shifts in the sweltering heat and humidity, reducing wind resistance and providing essential moral support.
Does it take a village to cycle 1,000 kilometers? It certainly helps.
Why cycle 1,000 kilometers?
The most palatable answer to the “why?!?!” question is that the Cycopaths were raising money for charity.
World Bicycle Relief is an international nonprofit organization that provides bikes to schoolchildren who would otherwise have to walk long distances to and from school, which inhibits their learning. The Cycopaths raised nearly 2,613 euros (approximately $3,152) for the cause.
The other reason is that they really like to cycle. This was not their first foray into randonneuring—cycling in long, self-supported events that aren’t registered with organizations like the World Ultracycling Association.
For example, in October 2020, they were part of a group that completed a 323-kilometer ride from Panaga—their small, mostly expat community—to Bandar Seri Begawan—the capital city—and back, and then continuing in the other direction to the border with Malaysia and back.
Scheck has completed other endurance challenges like Everesting, which dares a runner or cyclist to “Pick any hill, anywhere in the world and complete repeats of it in a single activity until you climb 8,848 meters.” He also completed an unsupported 24-hour ride in October 2020. Despite his best efforts to recruit other cyclists for these challenges, he ended up doing them solo.
But his success planted a seed in Jangra, and when Scheck approached him with the 1,000-kilometer challenge, Jangra accepted, along with three other cyclists.
Jangra remembers thinking, “I’ll never be able to find like-minded people, this set-up, and I think I’m physically there. I can think that I could finish it.”
The challenges
There are ultracycling events longer than 1,000 kilometers, like the Paris-Brest-Paris (1,200 kilometers) and the stupefying Race Across America (approximately 4,830 kilometers). But these events are held in the temperate zone.
Brunei sits just above the equator, and the weather is uniformly hot and humid, with an average temperature of 80 degrees Fahrenheit and average humidity of 85%. Jangra, who has lived and cycled in the Netherlands, put it very simply: “It’s more exhausting here. I sweat a lot.”
The Cycopaths seemed mostly unfazed by the heat, having learned to cope with it over many rides in Brunei. Vivek learned the hard way—through full-body cramps that put him on the couch for hours, unable to move—that cyclists in the tropics must replenish the electrolytes that are lost through copious sweating. Food was also a concern, as it can be difficult to take in sufficient calories while exerting such effort for such a prolonged period. Energy bars and gels are useful for races, but for very long hauls, they cause blood-sugar spikes and crashes that aren’t helpful. You need real food, but it has to be easy to digest.
Another challenge related to the contact points between rider and bike: hands, feet, butt. Jangra explained that changing clothes regularly helps a lot with saddle sores (shudder). Scheck explained that the bike set-up is a critical component to easing the pressure on hands and feet, but this is hard to fix on the go.
The biggest challenge, however, is mental. How do you keep going at those moments when all your senses and logic tell you to stop?
“I went through dark periods,” Scheck said of his solo 24-hour ride. “It’s a bit like depression. … It’s not just that you think ‘this is pointless, let’s give up on it.’ You question other things in life. … All the decisions you’ve taken seem to be wrong. It’s a very weird place to go to.”
Even when your body can keep going, your mind struggles. So what to do?
The plan
One advantage of doing this event in Brunei in April 2021 is that the country, small and somewhat isolated, had successfully managed the novel coronavirus pandemic. Since May 2020, there had been no locally contracted COVID cases. Social distancing restrictions eased steadily as travel restrictions kept the pandemic at bay, and by August 2020 daily life was more or less normal. By 2021, the coronavirus was something people read about in the news and heard about from family living abroad, nothing more.
This meant that Brunei was one of the few places in the world where organizing an event like this was not affected by pandemic-related restrictions and concerns.
Scheck’s original proposal to the Cycopaths was based on his learnings from his successful—albeit mentally and emotionally grueling—solo 24-hour ride. For that challenge, he “just had a car standing there with my supplies in the back.”
He was delighted at the prospect of having some company on his next challenge and envisioned, “maybe five guys, riding together, no support riders, no support car. I hadn’t even thought about approaching people to cook for us.”
Bonato had a different idea: support riders around the clock, a support car at night, proper warm meals so they could refuel and recharge. This turned out to be not only essential to the riders but created a festival atmosphere that the whole community took part in.
The Cycopaths created a spreadsheet that marked out each hour of the challenge, detailing what distances would be covered, where and when they would stop to refill their bottles and their bellies, and who would be riding with them.
Their home base was Bina, a lot owned by the Brunei Industrial Development Authority, close to the highway and to Panaga. Here, they could park their cars with coolers in the trunks for their water, snacks and electrolyte tablets and powders.
Their route, out and back to Lumut and then a loop towards Kuala Belait, would never take them farther than about 40 kilometers from Bina. Support riders could easily join and supplies were always nearby. Every 6 hours they would have a warm meal at one of their families’ homes.
The “support riders” column showed which groups and individuals had agreed to cycle in front of them and shield them from the wind for each hour of the challenge.
Scheck admitted that Ramadan seemed like an awkward time to schedule such an event in an Islamic sultanate where the Muslim majority fasts during daylight hours. However, observance of Ramadan ensured there were no big events or races that might draw cyclist friends away.
Importantly, the Cycopaths broke the epic journey down into manageable milestones in the form of refueling stops and fresh support riders, which helps with the mental challenges of such an endeavor.
The support
The first shout-out goes to the families of the Cycopaths. In addition to taking care of everything at home all weekend, the families prepared carefully timed and balanced meals, like risotto and soup noodles. Both the food and the contact with the families provided physical and emotional sustenance that the cyclists needed to keep going.
Equally important were all the support riders. Having someone cycle in front of you can reduce your expended energy by up to 30%, so having people “pulling” at all hours of the day and night was a huge physical and emotional boost.
So who did all this pulling?
It’s an understatement to say that the cycling community in Brunei is vibrant. Panaga alone has at least two active WhatsApp groups where expat and local cyclists organize group rides and banter about all things cycling. Similar groups, nearby and in other parts of Brunei, overlap with these groups and are equally engaged.
This community enthusiastically supported the Cycopaths, and although early morning is the usual time for long rides, cyclists met up with the Cycopaths at other, less temperate, times of day. The midday shift on both days was particularly brutal, so those riders get extra kudos for laboring under the equatorial sun at its most powerful.
Another Ramadan benefit was that many fasting cyclists showed up to support the Cycopaths during the nighttime hours, when most non-fasting cyclists were fast asleep. Full of sungkai (known in other parts of the Muslim world as iftar) and looking forward to sahur (known elsewhere as suhoor), the fasting cyclists’ energy helped the dark hours pass more quickly and pleasantly for the Cycopaths.
Only once, from around 1:00 a.m. to 2:30 a.m., were the Cycopaths left with only one support rider: Taco de Vries. A very strong rider who generally prefers to cycle alone, this probably suited him fine, but unfortunately for the Cycopaths, he could only block so much wind.
“Somebody posted that Taco is the only one left,” Jangra recalls. “And then when we reached Bina at 2:45, there were four new riders waiting for us. … They go on Sunday around 6 or 6:30, but not 3 a.m. Nobody does 3 a.m. rides.”
Word had gotten out that some ultracyclists needed support, and the local cycling community responded.
“Three of them, I had never met them,” Jangra marveled. “They were new to us. So many new faces we saw.”
The Struggle
For ultracyclists, whose bodies are well trained for feats of fitness, the struggle is always in the mind.
Jangra said his darkest hour was around his usual bedtime on Saturday night. His body clock was telling him he should be sleeping, and he missed his wife and kids after a whole day away from them. Looking ahead to the night and day ahead of him, he started to doubt that he could achieve the goal.
Scheck noticed that Jangra had gone quiet, and he well understood the problem.
“For many things,” Scheck said, “it’s not good if you’re thinking about ‘it’s still so far until the end.’ Same at work, or if you write a thesis. You chop it out into smaller bits: ‘what am I going to do this week.’ Same here, you think ‘what am I going to do in the next loop,’ ‘when am I going to have the next stop,’ ‘how far is it until the next big stop, when we’ll have proper food.’”
Scheck worked on reminding Jangra how soon they would have that next warm meal, and the thought of soup noodles kept Jangra going. Replenished by the 11:30 p.m. meal he enjoyed at home with his wife, Jangra was ready to plough ahead.
Michael’s darkest moment came after about 700 kilometers when he realized that the intense pain in his feet from pushing the pedals was going to persist for the rest of the ride. He knew this thought pattern was “death” to his mental stamina.
So he focused on shifting his thoughts to the next break, where he could rest his feet on a pile of ice or get a foot massage. (Again, it takes a village…)
The victory
The cycling community and the Cycopaths’ families kept close tabs on their progress, which was being logged in real-time on Strava. As the riders completed their final loops, a small crowd gathered in the unassuming Bina lot.
They ventured out to the median to cheer as the riders passed on their final loop to Kuala Belait. After the Cycopaths passed and it became clear that the median was home to a colony of fire ants, the supporters retreated to the Bina lot.
The atmosphere was convivial as the support riders and other Cycopaths discussed their own portions of the ride.
Mark Russell’s feet and toes were still tingling from his incredible 750-kilometer ride. His saddle sores were bad and his shoulders were locked up, but he was going to work in the morning as a PhysEd teacher.
Thomas Lassaigne covered 160 kilometers over two rides, midday on Saturday and midday on Sunday. Dean Walters did 130 kilometers over two rides, Saturday evening and Sunday morning. Wijnand Hoitinga did just over 100 kilometers on Saturday afternoon. He can usually cover much more but “it was just too hot.”
Just before 5:00 p.m. the Cycopaths arrived, riding in front of their support riders for the first time in two days. The Bina lot erupted in cheers and the support car behind the riders honked in celebration.
Scheck and Jangra arrive at Bina. (Video)
After some 20 minutes of grinning, photos and hugs, the crowd began to disperse.
The takeaway
The following evening, Jangra still couldn’t move his pinky.
Three days later, Scheck’s feet were still sore.
They both were still raving about the revitalizing powers of Ensure, the meal replacement shakes administered to people who cannot chew.
As they revisited the challenges they had faced, they were indefatigably positive without being particularly self-congratulatory, for which they could’ve been forgiven. Their careful planning had paid off. They had pushed their bodies to the limit, had managed their hydration and nutrition perfectly. They had kept to their schedule, which had helped them manage the mental and emotional challenges.
If anything, they downplayed the physical aspects of the achievement. Scheck remarked that he was never above one-third of the physical effort he’d put forth in a time trial—as though maintaining that one-third for 1,000 kilometers and 35 hours was nothing to write home about.
Their awe was reserved for the support they received.
“There were always people with us,” Scheck said, glowing. “People with good mood, and they came out, joked with us. And we went to people’s houses, they’d prepared food for us, they waited for us to come. It was like an event, almost like a party.”
When asked what was next for them, Jangra said, “Something needs to be cooked.” He was referring to a cycling challenge, not risotto. “But I’m sure somebody’s already thinking about something.”
Scheck was also ready to throw himself at another challenge, no matter how crazy. Especially if he wouldn’t be alone.
“That’s the way to go. It’s obvious.”
This piece was submitted as my final project for JOU6114 Multimedia Reporting at the University of South Florida. A different version was published under a shared byline with Wijnand Hoitinga in the May 2021 issue of Panaga Outpost Pages, a community newsletter in Brunei Darussalam.