When the Climb Becomes a Community
Twelve hours. 135 kilometres. 4,900 metres of climbing, just under ten of them spent turning the pedals through the night. Those details were important, but weren't the ones that mattered the most..
I went into the weekend with a simple plan: ride up as many climbs as I could in twelve hours and livestream it for charity. The legs hurt. My right calf was barking at me somewhere past 3am. The watts slipped with every route, and by the dark hours I was grinding rather than riding. None of that is what stuck with me.
What stuck was the chat.
Throughout the 12 hours, friends and strangers would come and go, and return again.
My long suffering wife Sharon, helped me for the first little bit. Unfortunatley, she wasn’t able to join me going up Ventop, although I don’t entirely believe that she was that upset about it.
Simon dropped in fresh off winning his county pickleball league — serious stuff, apparently, even if the only prize on offer was bragging rights. Tomasz told me about the hardest ride he had ever done was a 100mile event in Texas in August, then mentioned, almost in passing, the cast that was removed only a few weeks before it due to ligament damage in his ankle, the severed top of his right middle finger, and the army life he misses every single day. The mates, the daily grind, all of it.
Bouke checked in between updates regarding Netherlands dismantling Sweden, watching the match at a friend’s party where someone else handles the cleanup, whilst at the same time sampling tasty beers Belgium beers that I found myself fantasing about. Strangers, scattered across the world, all keeping me company through the night.
Then there were the people who didn’t just talk — they rode. YouTuber Eric Barnett jumped into Zwift and came up the Epic KOM with me, even after flatly declaring he wasn’t “climbing” fit. He climbed anyway. That’s the spirit of the whole thing in a single moment: show up, suffer a bit, do it for someone else.
And as the hours ticked down, the community did something I’ll never forget. With about ninety minutes to go, we still hadn’t hit our goal — so Hollie Burgin took it upon herself to spread the word, dragging person after person into the chat to get us over the line. People I’d never met (or had met briefly) started arriving in waves, each one chipping in, each one nudging the total higher.
Rich Vale — @flammerougeracing — did the heavy lifting and finished as our number one donator, doing it all while watching a Take That concert, of all things. He only narrowedly edged out Matt Ladd by the smallest of margins; Parky and Ryan Spiteri dug deep too. Each coffee purchased mattered, because the goal was never going to fall to a single grand gesture. It was always going to take a crowd.
That’s the part I keep coming back to. When you put yourself out there — when you commit to something hard and a little bit stupid, like twelve hours on an indoor trainer through the night — you assume you’re doing it alone. You’re not. You ride into the dark and people ride in with you. They come to chat, to laugh, to tell you about their pickleball wins and their old injuries, their football matches and their family celebrations. They come to donate. They come to drag their friends along so a stranger on the internet can hit a number that means something.
Between us, we raised money for very worthwhile charties — worth every metre of climbing. But the lasting thing isn’t the total on the screen. It’s the proof that community isn’t built on the grand gestures. It’s built on the small ones, stacked up by a lot of good people over twelve long hours.
Worth every metre.
A massive thanks to everyone who donated.
Donna, Brooksy, Lisa, Belinda, Sharon, Steve, Ryan, Bouke, Aleksandra, Steve, Kezza, Miguel, Tony, Jessica, Eric, AL C, Kenneth, Scott, BikeJon, FRR RC, Andrei, Hollie, Nick, Milan, Parky, JDirom, JGellings, Michael, Matt (aka Mads Matt) & Huddo