I had planned to properly introduce myself, but having just completed a rather big ride, I’ve been asked to jump to telling you about that. Hi, I'm Kevin.
That big ride is the Atlas Mountain Race (AMR), a beast of a ride through the Moroccan Atlas Mountain Range that's some 1,300 km with 23,000 metres of elevation. It covers every surface imaginable, and both rider and bike is tested thoroughly in the little over four days that it took me to complete.
While it has a significant amount of paved roads, around 45% of the route is sealed, the non-sealed roads are mostly not ‘gravel’. In general, the route is what I’d consider OG mountain bike terrain: jeep tracks, gravel roads of varying quality, walking paths, and fast rocky descents. There is a lot that is just plain fun to ride, and letting go of the brakes causes instant speed, smiles and stoke. There are, however, hours spent riding through dry river beds which consist of anything from sand and small stones to baby-head rocks that cover kilometres on end of the route. At times you are, quite simply, shaken.
I rode the Atlas Mountain Race in 2023 but never thought I would have the chance to return. However, a friend attending and a rush of blood to the head resulted in me applying for entry again this year. Once my entry was confirmed I had two goals for the race: Absorb the experience better and ride faster. The former is a more existential quest; as a mentor says, “Find the path to infinite joy and happiness," while the latter required a lot of thought, application of knowledge gained in the time since that first attempt, and no small measure of introspection on my strengths and weaknesses as a racer in ultra-distance slogfests.
What matters?
In 2023 I rode the race aboard a prototype Curve drop-bar hardtail, and loved it. However, I felt slightly overgeared on the climbs (my bad, I rode a 36T chainring and carried too much gear) and my body took a beating on some of the rougher technical sections. In my post-race assessment back then, I had resolved that comfort over time was more important than speed on one climb, and also that reliability of parts was all important. Lastly, I knew that I needed to find a way to reduce my deep-rooted ability to waste time.
I knew too that I was likely not the fastest rider in the race, and so to compete my bike would have to be as optimised as best as possible to maximise my strengths (downhill/flats) and minimise my weaknesses (climbing and time-wasting). Working daily in the bike industry (in my own business, Benky Rides, and a local bike shop, Callans Bike Tech, in Hilton, South Africa) is good for this; to say that I think a lot about how to make bikes better for individual riders would be the understatement of the year, as it is all that I think about in a work sense. I had to take advantage of that, and so I did my best to separate myself from the bike I was building and treat myself as I would one of my customers.
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