Day one started in Soria at 7am and, initially at least, everything went pretty much to plan. The legs felt good, the fitness was there and I was able to settle into the event.

As the kilometres accumulated, however, I began to understand that an ultra is about far more than how many watts you can produce.

You can have the best plan possible before the start, but the reality is that almost nothing goes completely to plan. You arrive somewhere after the shops have closed. A planned refuelling stop disappears. You haven’t eaten enough. You sleep less than expected. Saddle sores become increasingly painful. Something that seemed insignificant six hours earlier suddenly becomes the only thing you can think about.

Then you adapt and keep moving.

By day three, the physical challenge had almost become secondary to the mental one. You are tired, sleep deprived and under-fuelled, and every little problem becomes magnified.

That was probably the biggest thing Lost Horizon taught me.
You cannot fully prepare someone for the mental side of an ultra. Until you have experienced being that tired and uncomfortable and still having to make the decision to get back on the bike and continue, it is very difficult to understand what it feels like.

What Rich could prepare me for was the physical side of it.

And the biggest compliment I can give him is that my fitness never let me down. At no point during the event did I feel under-trained or think that I wasn’t physically capable of completing it. My legs weren’t the limiting factor. After hundreds of kilometres of riding, that gave me enormous confidence because however difficult things became, I knew the underlying fitness was there.

That is entirely down to the preparation.

The things that tested me most were the things that are almost impossible to recreate in training: cumulative sleep deprivation, missed fuelling stops, saddle discomfort and the psychological effect of knowing you still have hours and hours left to ride.

In a strange way, those are also the reasons I came away wanting to do another one.

Ultra cycling pushes you so far outside your normal comfort zone that you learn a lot about yourself very quickly. It teaches you to solve problems when you are exhausted, to stop worrying when the original plan falls apart and to become adaptable enough to keep finding a way forward.

And it takes you to places you would otherwise probably never see. Roads and trails you wouldn’t think to drive, and places that would take days to reach on foot. For hours you can have nothing around you except your bike, the landscape and the route ahead.

There is something pretty special about that.

I went to Soria looking for a challenge that would test me physically and mentally.

I definitely found it.

I also came away knowing that physically I had been as well prepared as I could have been. For that, I owe a huge amount to Rich.

The problem for him now is that completing my first ultra hasn’t got it out of my system.

Quite the opposite.
I am already wondering what ridiculous challenge I can give him to prepare me for next.