Adventure Cycling
On a bike you can feel great landscape changes in a day, and yet easily stop to appreciate every leaf on a tree.
How I got started.
I never really “got into” cycling when I was young, despite living in “cycling” university towns. I was even resistant to bikes when I first moved to Copenhagen, “Why cycle when I can walk?”.
However when we moved office out of Copenhagen (20 minutes on the train) I found I really wanted to try cycling home some days. It was mainly cycling on gravel: I could cycle 30km back from work along the coast and realised that in Denmark you can cycle most places without really sharing the roads with cars.
Over time this became more of a habit and cycling became a place of calm to get away from everyday life for an hour or two.
What is adventure cycling?
Slowly over a number of years I developed my approach to cycling:
I will cycle mainly off road. I do everything I can to avoid sharing space with cars: over 80% of cycling deaths involve a motor vehicle. My mantra is no traffic, low traffic, slow traffic.
I will cycle in nature. I love forests (shinrin-yoku). Though anything goes from flat canal side tracks to high mountain plateaus and passes.
I want to cycle from point to point, not in a circle. I want a journey and for me that means not ending up where you started. I’ll often do this in Denmark on even short rides: taking the train and cycling home.
Something that connects the route to the land. I look for a purpose and not simply a destination. I’ll try to find culturally and naturally interesting routes and places. The routes could be historic shepharding tracks or pilgrimmage trails. Places are where people have made their impact: from tiny depopulated villages to hi-tech architecture in great metropolises.
I try to be with to the people … not great… but … discussions on the marble quarrying industry in Corba… to the tiny mountain pub… werewolf in London…
I take my own time. This is not a race. Every route (even those I’ve done two hundred times as fitness) is an experience. Stop and take pictures. Take in the changing seasons. Appreciate the warm sun or the biting cold wind.
For me the above is adventure cycling. The adventure for me is taking a journey into the unknown. Perhaps that is striking up a conversation with an elderly couple in a rapidly depopulating hill town, or taking the wrong turn and ending up carrying your bike down chains across cliffs.
Somethings I’ve done
My approach to gravel cycling / adventure biking has manifested itself in my off-road trip on the Via Francigena from Canterbury to Rome, one week a year between 2018 and 2022. More recently I’ve done some trips in Denmark with an increasing bikepacking focus. And I’ve now started cycling home from the end of the world (2023-)