No Race. No Medal. Just 526km and 10,000m of Climbing

Sometimes the best endurance challenges are the ones you invent yourself.

As endurance athletes, we often organise our training around events.

Enter a race. Put it in the calendar. Build a training plan. Taper. Pin on a number. Race. Recover. Then find the next one.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Racing provides motivation, structure and a reason to get out of the door when training gets difficult.

But racing isn’t the only reason to be fit.

Sometimes there simply isn’t an event that gives you quite the challenge you’re looking for.

Sometimes you have to make one up yourself.

That’s exactly what Enduraprep coach Lawrence Cronk did with a solo, self-supported cycling adventure from his home in Slovenia.

• 526.2 km
• 10,096 m of climbing
• 28 hours 10 minutes elapsed time
• 25 hours 36 minutes moving time
• Slovenia, Austria and Italy

No race number. No aid stations. No medal.

Just one very long day on a bike.

It Started During Covid

The origins of the ride actually go back several years.

During the Covid period, races disappeared from the calendar and many of the athletes Lawrence coached began creating their own endurance challenges instead.

Eventually, he developed a little FOMO.

Before leaving Wales to move to Slovenia, he decided to create one of his own: a solo, self-supported gravel ride from Bangor in North Wales to Cardiff Bay.

Rather than choosing the easiest route south, the objective was to cross Wales while incorporating as much off-road terrain and climbing as possible.

The result was approximately 480 km, more than 8,000 metres of climbing and around 26 hours on the bike.

It became a farewell to Wales.

After moving to Slovenia, another idea slowly began forming:

Could he create a ride from home with more than 10,000 metres of climbing?

For several years it remained an idea.

Then, earlier this year, Lawrence broke his leg.

Rather than making the challenge less appealing, the injury provided a useful reminder: there probably wasn’t going to be a perfect year to do it.

So why keep waiting?

Creating Your Own Start Line

The ride started at 04:36 from Lawrence’s home in the alpine village of Luče.

From there the route headed north across the mountains into Austria, continued towards Villach, crossed into Italy and eventually returned to Slovenia before continuing through the night and back towards Luče.

Along the way were famous Alpine roads, remote mountain passes, cycle paths, quiet valleys and several moments that no race organiser could have planned.

A largely traffic-free ascent of Passo Cason di Lanza became the unexpected highlight of the entire ride.

There was an evening ascent of Mangart, Slovenia’s highest paved road.

There was Lago del Predil, the Soča Valley and familiar Slovenian roads experienced for the first time in complete darkness.

There were also rather less glamorous moments.

Like getting off the bike part-way up Mangart and suddenly discovering that your legs have turned to jelly because you’ve become so absorbed in the ride that you’ve forgotten to eat enough.

The emergency intervention?

An entire bag of Haribo.

Or reaching Bovec at 20:55, running short of food for the night, and discovering a bakery that closed at 21:00.

Two large slices of pizza, burek, cakes, Coke and coffee later, the night shift began.

Fitness Is About More Than Racing

There is an important distinction between training for an event and simply being fit enough to have an adventure.

Consistent endurance training creates a level of general preparedness.

You build aerobic durability.

You learn how to pace yourself.

You understand your nutrition.

You become more comfortable being uncomfortable.

And eventually that fitness starts giving you options.

A friend suggests a huge ride? You can say yes.

You find an interesting line on a map? Go and explore it.

You wonder whether you could ride through three countries and climb 10,000 vertical metres before eventually returning to your front door?

There is really only one way to find out.

That’s a very different relationship with fitness from constantly chasing FTP numbers, PBs and race results.

Pacing Beats Bravado

Perhaps the most satisfying part of completing the ride wasn’t the final distance.

It was how controlled the effort remained.

Despite more than 25 hours of actual riding time, there was never a point where stopping felt like a serious possibility.

The legs continued working.

There was no dramatic collapse during the night.

There wasn’t even significant sleepiness.

By the end, Lawrence’s neck and shoulders hurt considerably more than his legs.

One reason was pacing.

One of the biggest mistakes athletes make when taking on unfamiliar endurance distances is allowing excitement to dictate their effort.

A 500 km ride doesn’t care how strong you feel after the first 50 km.

The early hours need to feel easy.

Probably ridiculously easy.

Lawrence actually felt poor on the first climb of the morning. Despite deliberately riding slowly, his legs felt stiff and sluggish.

But there was no reason to force the pace.

The objective wasn’t to win the first climb.

The objective was to still be riding the following morning.

Twenty-eight hours later, that conservative approach looked rather sensible.

Fuelling: Boring Often Works

Nutrition followed the same philosophy.

For much of the ride, the strategy was deliberately uncomplicated:

• Regular carbohydrate intake throughout the ride
• Approximately one energy bar per hour alongside carbohydrate drink
• Roughly 750 ml of fluid per hour, adjusted according to conditions
• Refill bottles whenever opportunities appeared
• Use shops and bakeries to supplement what was being carried
• Keep eating before hunger became a problem

Ironically, one of the periods when Lawrence felt worst came immediately after eating the most conventional food of the entire ride.

The last-minute bakery raid in Bovec provided plenty of calories, but filling the stomach with pizza, burek and cakes after many hours of riding wasn’t necessarily what the digestive system wanted.

For much of the day, comparatively boring sports nutrition had actually worked extremely well.

It’s a useful reminder for any long endurance challenge: a fuelling strategy doesn’t need to be exciting. It needs to work.

Managing the Night

Riding through the night brings another set of challenges.

After descending through the Soča Valley, the route continued towards Tolmin and then climbed familiar mountain roads towards Bohinj.

Interestingly, riding uphill in darkness didn’t feel particularly intimidating.

The speed is low, the world shrinks to the section of illuminated road directly in front of you and there is little to do except continue pedalling.

Descending required considerably more care.

Lawrence had one powerful main bike light and a smaller head-mounted light. The smaller light was used for climbing to preserve the main battery, with both used for faster sections and descents.

Eventually the smaller light died.

Then the main light began showing signs of low battery.

Suddenly sunrise became a very welcome sight.

You Don’t Need an Organiser’s Permission to Challenge Yourself

There are incredible organised endurance events all over the world.

Ironman races. Ultramarathons. Gran Fondos. Gravel races. Mountain-bike marathons. Sportives and adventure races.

Entering an event can be one of the best ways of giving your training direction.

But organised events don’t have a monopoly on adventure.

Your challenge might be:

• Your first 200 km bike ride
• Running from one side of your county to the other
• Everesting your local hill
• Linking every significant climb in your area
• Riding from sunrise to sunset
• Running a trail you’ve looked at on a map for years
• Creating your own point-to-point cycling or running adventure

It doesn’t need a timing mat.

It doesn’t need a medal.

And it definitely doesn’t need to appear on anybody else’s bucket list.

It just needs to mean something to you.

The Strange Satisfaction of Finishing

After 28 hours and 10 minutes, Lawrence eventually climbed over the final mountain pass and descended back towards Luče.

Surprisingly, he didn’t feel destroyed.

While he was still riding, everything felt almost normal.

There was always another simple task:

Pedal. Eat. Drink. Navigate. Repeat.

It was only after getting off the bike that things started to feel strange.

After spending 28 hours inside the small world of an endurance challenge, suddenly you’re standing among people going about an entirely normal morning.

That’s when the scale of what you’ve just done begins to register.

526 kilometres.
10,096 metres of climbing.
Three countries.

And not a race number anywhere in sight.

What Are You Training For?

As endurance coaches, we spend a lot of time asking athletes:

“What’s your next race?”

Perhaps occasionally we should ask a different question:

“What do you want to be fit enough to do?”

Those aren’t necessarily the same thing.

A race provides motivation, structure and an objective measure of performance.

But fitness can also buy freedom.

Freedom to explore.

Freedom to say yes.

Freedom to look at a ridiculous line on a map and wonder:

“Could I do that?”

Sometimes the answer is worth finding out.

Watch the 526km Adventure

Lawrence filmed the journey through Slovenia, Austria and Italy, including some of the biggest climbs, the night section, the scenery and one fairly significant Haribo intervention.

View the complete 526km ride and elevation profile on Strava