Long Ashton cyclist wins epic race across 11 countries

The North Cape 4000 is a 4,322km race across 11 countries, spanning a distance nearly double that of the Tour de France. Cyclists set off on July 26 from Lake Garda in Italy, and finished in Nordkapp, Norway. This year’s winner was Dr Ian Walker, a Psychology lecturer at the University of Bath who lives in Long Ashton, and who won the race by a whole eight hours, arriving on August 8 after racing for 11 days, 10 hours and 44 minutes.

Having previously competed in ultra-marathons like the mountainous 100-mile Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc, Ian is no stranger to a challenge.

He made the switch to serious cycling about two years ago, seeking a new adventure: “The idea of taking on a race that lasts weeks just completely captivated me. It’s so much bigger and scarier and there’s more that can go wrong, you have to be so much more independent and constantly solving problems and that’s what makes it really interesting.”

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Riding between 14 and 18 hours a day, he burned a colossal 11,000 calories on one of his longer stints. You may think that a rigorous nutrition plan would have been used to keep him fuelled on the slog, but that is a far cry away from his actual diet of service station snacks, which often did not stretch much further than crisps and chocolate.

“The eating is hilarious,” Ian says. “You just eat whatever you can find, and that really means just petrol stations and supermarkets. You just stop at a petrol station, fill your pockets with crap and set off again.”

The race snaked through 11 different countries, testing the riders over diverse terrains and contrasting climates.

“The temperature range was a real shock,” Ian admits. “Quite early on it was 44 degrees and baking heat and I was constantly looking for shade and throwing water all over myself.”

As the race travelled further and further north, the temperature plummeted: “By the end it was freezing! I was trying to ride quite late one night, just after I’d crossed the Arctic Circle, but it got so cold that I had to abandon and hide in a ditch.

“I was wearing every piece of clothing I had, my sleeping bag was wrapped around me, as was my jacket, and I had my clothes stuffed with magazines that I found at a bus shelter. Still I was too cold to move so I just had to bed down.”

Throughout the race, Ian rode mostly alone, apart from half a day in Poland where he met another cyclist. “We ended up sharing a motel room in this really seedy truckers’ motel in Poland with gold sheets which was an interesting experience. We had only met that morning!”

Once Ian made it to the front of the race, and he began putting all his efforts into ensuring the gap between him and the riders behind him on the road only widened.

“It was this very strange experience of spending several days being chased, and I didn’t realise just how much that preys on your mind. For 1000 miles there were people chasing me,” Ian recounts. “I was constantly thinking about it, constantly doing calculations like how long can I afford to sleep and still stay ahead?

“After the race finished, for the next three nights I was still dreaming I was being chased by people. I spent so long thinking about it that I just couldn’t let it go. Apparently, I was whimpering in my sleep!”

Throughout the race and training, Ian was raising money for RoadPeace, a charity that supports those bereaved or injured by road crashes and aims to reduce danger on roads.

“It just feels so incredibly unfair and unjust that every day, people just leave home in the morning and never come back again,” Ian says. “If we were more sensible about how we organise and police our streets, these deaths wouldn’t happen.

“The reason I support RoadPeace in particular is because they’re very sensible about how they address this. Their ethos is about prevention and how we organise things. They’re about genuine solutions that would avoid any of these things happening in the first place.”

He encourages other people to cycle too: “Cycling is important because it completely fills a gap in society. The bulk of journeys that we make by car are short enough that they could be cycled instead. It fixes so many problems – it’s clean, it’s healthy, it reduces congestion, it makes streets safer. If we just shifted even 10-20 per cent of these short city-based car journeys onto bikes, which is completely feasible, it would change our cities dramatically.”