Sam Morris decided that his first holiday since Covid would see him take on the 1,430km Atlas Mountain bikepacking race. It would either make him, or badly, badly, break him.
Words & photos: Sam Morris.
“Dude, why are you riding a singlespeed?”
This was undoubtedly the question I was asked most during the Atlas Mountain Race. The Atlas Mountain Race, or ‘AMR’, is a 1,430km bikepacking race through the Atlas Mountains of Morocco. There is 25,000m of climbing, which is roughly three Everests from sea level. You start at 6pm on a Friday and you have until midnight the following Saturday to make it to the finish party in Essaouira, a stunningly beautiful, walled citadel on the Atlantic coast. About 300 people enter, and usually just over half of them finish. You have a GPX route to follow, three CPs (checkpoints) to pass through and stamp your ‘brevet card’ at, and a GPS tracker on your bike.
The first edition was billed as ‘gravel’, until everyone turned up on gravel bikes and destroyed themselves. Seven years in, and it’s very much accepted as a mountain bike event. Admittedly, the 1,430km features only about 30 minutes of singletrack, but (and you can quote me on this) the double track is genuinely great to ride. I never imagined myself writing those words, trust me. Anyhow, it’s probably the highest profile bikepacking event this side of the Atlantic. All of which begs the question that I’d just been asked for the 30th time. Why, dude?
So Many Answers, So Few Speeds
I had so many answers, but none of them really worked in isolation.
- I was raising money for a dementia charity that helps my sick Dad, himself a singlespeed rider. That one was pretty hard to poke holes in.
- Because the bike is SO pretty like this, just look! Bit less bulletproof.
- Because I’m way more engaged and mindful on a bike when all I have is me and an inappropriate gear ratio? Singlespeed wanker territory for sure.
- Because sometimes I like to dig a hole so deep I have no real idea of whether or not I’ll be able to climb out, and that uncertainty drives me in a way that has brought hardship but even more joy and beauty into my life over the years. Closest to the mark, I suspect.
- Because all the standing up will help me avoid saddle sores. Trivial but true.
- Because pacing is so hard in bikepacking events, but on the SS, that issue just doesn’t exist – it’s just sit down, stand up or push. This simplicity might mean more pain but also less suffering, less anguish.
- Because questions are where doubts start, so fewer questions is good.
- Because I’m 48 and time might be running out on pushing my poor old bod quite this hard.
- And because, as my kids said, I’m just naturally contrary. All of the above.
Anyway, forget why. How about how? A simple chronology is kind of tricky. One thing you realise pretty fast on the AMR is that time just melts in the High Atlas, like Dali’s dripping clocks. It’s a paradox since finishing in a respectable time, maybe even a position, is kind of the point, right? Otherwise, why do it as a race?
Dali’s Desert Race
All of this kind of renders a day-by-day account of the whole thing impossible. Let’s just hit it one paradox or strange memory at a time. Sort of chronological, but there are no promises.
Wind
I think I’m riding in the actual jetstream. It’s dawn, and I’m at 2,400m. It’s also about minus six and I’m wearing everything I have, down jacket and all. I’m pushing hard on the pedals to keep moving down a tarmac descent, slowly. This is pretty brutal. Due to flooding, the first 250km of beautiful trails were replaced with 350km of tarmac. And some sort of ice hurricane. I am physically blown off my bike twice. Now I’m walking on the flat, wrestling my bike to keep hold of it at under 3km/h. I know this because my Garmin never misses a chance to put the boot in when I’m hurting, beeping at me to taunt me whenever progress becomes undetectable by modern technology.
It’s so ridiculous, you just have to laugh. I chose this. I’m here on my first foreign holiday since Covid. You’re a sick puppy, Morris, so eat it up. It continues right through that night and the next day, as do I. Some people caught it worse, and about 90 racers abandoned in the first 48 hours, very few of them by choice. Still, ice crystals spraying up off my tyres and refracting the early morning light in all directions were a thousand crystalline rainbows whipping through the air as I pressed on through the pristine High Atlas. This sort of beauty shouldn’t come easily.
Eating
It’s a dark, frosty, starry pre-dawn in a washed-out riverbed at 1,800m with no distinct track, and I’m sitting on a higher patch of rocks eating a tin of sardines in oil before ‘bed’. The first tin went down a treat, so I’m smashing right into the second. Just as I swallow, something registers as not-quite-right. The oil is rancid. I’ve just swallowed a mouthful of rancid fish oil, and now I’m gagging. You can’t untaste that kind of sensory nail bomb. A shooting star skims by, just over the moonlit mountain peaks. Beautiful and horrible, all at once. Again.
I’ve just swallowed a mouthful of rancid fish oil, and now I’m gagging.
Food (and resupply in general) is an issue on the AMR. Not a big issue, but something I could definitely do better another time around (I said it already!). There are discreet, almost clandestine shops, usually the size of a small single garage with a counter out front and all the produce hidden behind. Stock is geared towards a clientele without refrigeration, so it’s all dry and in packets. It’s not lacking, it’s just a bit different to my usual, so it takes time to learn how to play it. I like to always have some sweet and some savoury food with me to cope with the vagaries of a bikepacking stomach. Always desperately eating, never properly hungry. Add that to the AMR paradox collection.
With over 100km between some resupply points, it’s good to carry a fair bit in reserve. But what? Sweet food is either biscuits (a million varieties), wafers or chocolate wafers. The chocolate stays magically solid in the sun, but also fills your teeth like putty. The wafers are just noisy air in a packet, so biscuits it is, kilograms of biscuits. On the savoury side, ‘Fighter’ crisps become a cherished treat. Cheese is limited to foil-wrapped triangles. Tinned tuna or sardines in tomato sauce are great as they fill you up and moisten the bread a bit. Bread is flat and round and really good. Add these to some opportunistic café restaurant stops, and you’ve basically got a 1,400km eating plan. Restaurant options are omelettes if you’re in a rush (you are), tajines if not. Turns out there are a million ways to cook both, and they always taste great. Cumin in Morocco is not like cumin anywhere else. It’s magical. You can drink too – all the well-known soft drinks, bottled water and, best of all for calories, drinking yoghurt. They’ll be stacked in a big drinks fridge, which will be turned off. You won’t care.
Discomfort
I’ve been eating random biscuits and crisps for so long that my tongue is covered in painful little ulcers. Since my stubble is growing, it keeps spiking the ulcers. AMR rule No. 284: Something will always hurt, ache or pinch. All the time. One fellow racer named his saddle sore just so he could hate on it more effectively. Whatever gets you through. I focused on my ears – they never hurt once. Loyal, reliable ears. Other than that, nearly everything took its turn. Feet and hands are still numb as I write these words – the typing feels very odd. Knees obviously took a hit – medial ligament on the right, under the patella on the left, they kind of tag-teamed me, but never got critical. Hip was twitchy. Right shoulder nipped like anything on the rockier descents. Bottom lip burnt and cracked wide open several times over, despite all the SPF50 lip salve in the world. Bum was a smidge sore but honestly not too bad – I genuinely think the amount of time spent standing up or pushing on the singlespeed helped here.
Sleep
This is the most common post-race question. I never set an alarm during the AMR, but neither did I hang about. Since the race starts at 6pm, night one is often skipped by folk looking for a fast time. That seems silly to me as, for mere mortals, we’re in this for a good six to eight days, so skimping on night one will likely hurt you later on. With that in mind, I hunted out a spot to get my head down, but it wasn’t easy. Soaking wet at over 2,000m in sub-zero temperatures is not ideal stopping conditions. Luckily, the owner of a shuttered-up restaurant, whose porch I was preparing to bivvy on, woke up when he heard me and invited me inside. I slept for 90 minutes, and when I awoke, there were about 20 other racers, all being served mint tea by the owner. Berber culture is hard not to love.
The next night I got 90 minutes’ sleep early on at CP1 but woke up, brain fizzing with excitement. There’s no point lying still wide awake, so I left the cosy warmth and pedalled through the night and then stopped an hour or so before dawn to nap again, just to offer my body the chance to wake up with a sunrise. The next night was about two hours bivvying on a plateau, just as the wind finally died down. Each time I meant to sleep longer, but just woke up anyway. Finally, the next night (rancid sardine mouth night), I got five hours solid kip and the night after was at CP3 (a hotel), where I got five hours again. That was just before the final 420km, 8,600m+ leg to the finish. No one ever makes this in one go, but we all try. Eventually, I caved at 5.30am and got 90 minutes in my bivvy.
That makes about 18 hours sleep for 144 hours total time. Not exactly healthy, but fit for purpose in this case. And yes, I did fall asleep on my bike once. It was just like in the car, where you snap awake and realise you’re missing a few frames there. It’s not big and it’s not clever.
Imodium
It’s 5am near the summit of the pass they call the Moroccan Stelvio. I’ve been climbing this beast for nearly three hours. Also, the entire world has just fallen out of my arse. Positives? I spent a long time pre-race finding good cycling short liners that weren’t bib shorts, for exactly this scenario. When you only have a 30-second warning, every one of those seconds counts. Imodium is amazing. That is all you need to know.
Rush vs Mindfulness
This is the paradox heavyweight. I ride for mindfulness, as I understand it. I have downloaded and then ignored apps to help me with being present, savouring the moment, living in the now. Riding solo through the Atlas Mountains sounds like absolute mindfulness nirvana. Except that it’s a race, not just a bike tour. I truly didn’t give a shit about my position. I really, really wanted to finish. I also wanted to lay down a performance that I was proud of. In the context of a timed race, this absolutely does mean going as fast as you can over the duration of the course.
That means taking the experience you have dreamed about for, in my case, several years and doing absolutely everything in your power to get it over with as quickly as possible. Always in a rush, always obsessed with moving forward. Wanting to savour every special moment, quickly. How can you reconcile these two conflicting elements in the adventure? I think I found it best, and a kindred spirit to share it with, on the final climb over to CP3. As I rounded a corner in an insanely beautiful valley oasis, climbing high into the desert peaks and plateaus of the Anti-Atlas, I found Julien with his shoes off, feet soaking in the first and last water trough I saw during the entire event. We sat there and soaked ourselves in the cool water – it was over 33°C at this point – while we chatted over the ‘race vs mindfulness’ paradox and took in the scenery. We agreed that there was a balance to be found. To ride hard and push hard, but to stop and appreciate the beauty, the culture, the other riders and all the magical little moments that something like this throws up.
Camaraderie
Which segues nicely into another race paradox. If you finish, you will receive your finishing time and overall classification. There are podiums. It is a race. The other riders are, in theory and in practice, your competitors. Except that they’re not. Inside the top ten, it’s probably different, but even where we were, kind of on the front end of the first main group, things felt very different. The challenge of the AMR itself is the competitor; that’s what we’re all trying to beat.
It’s funny because an integral part of bikepacking races is the absolute ‘no assistance’ rule. Loan your pump to another racer because theirs is broken? They’re out of the classification. Pass a cereal bar to someone bonking? Same. And yet there’s no way I could have ridden like I did without the support of the riders around me. A collective momentum of pointless but fruitful suffering and joy. When someone unknown would pass my bivvy spot in the night, it would spur me on to rouse myself and keep riding, so in that sense, there was competition. But when a rider I had seen hurting the day before would catch me at a food stop, all I would feel was relief for them that they hadn’t scratched, happiness that they’d righted their ship and were pushing on. You don’t so much race against your fellow racers as with them. It’s a really great feeling.
Positive Reframing
The mental aspect, in general, is paramount for the AMR. I’m pretty hard on myself, but here’s my take on it all: you never need to think about whether to stop or continue, whether you’re having fun or not, whether you’re tired or not, whether you can go on. If you can’t ride, you’ll know. There’ll be nothing to decide. You’ll be motionless, and it’ll either be because you’re f**ked and you need professional help or because your bike is. If neither looks reversible and you’ve already tried every single thing you can, well then, sit there another few hours and then keep trying anyway until the clock runs out. You don’t stop, you get stopped. Nothing to think about, nothing to decide. Just give it full beans until you absolutely can’t anymore.
Take Tanner, who’d come in from Toronto for the event. His freehub packed in about 400km and 8,000m of climbing from the end. He’d been placed pretty well, and now everything was royally screwed. That’s a valid abandon in anyone’s books. Except his. He hitchhiked off the route into Agadir, found a bike shop where they loved his spirit and fixed his bike, then drove him back to the point where he’d bailed. His position and his finish time were annihilated, but he finished, and in doing so, he achieved more than just about anyone else out there. Just don’t f**king stop, simple.
Finishing
I didn’t stop. A lot of variables went my way. Zero mechanicals of any sort helped. I waxed my chain once, but honestly, only because other people were, so I felt bad. Not shifting has some advantages, and one is that chain wax lasts ages. Imodium worked, and the body pains never got too much. It was nice to even feel stronger in the last couple of days, to grow into the demands of the event. At dawn on the final day, I sort of realised that if I pushed really, really hard, then I might keep up just under 20km/h, which would sneak me into the finish in under six days. Totally meaningless to anyone but me, but I went for it anyway.
The stats weren’t going my way for much of the morning, but I just kept my head down and went as aero as you can on 27.5 x 2.8in tyres. It’s a good sign of how twisted the AMR world is, that a 180km stretch with 1,500m of climbing counts as a ‘final push’; a sprintable distance. Anyhow, sprint I did, powered by biscuits and the slight fear that the Imodium would wear off. As Essaouira came into view, it was pointless trying to hold back a tear or two. Tears of pride, to be honest. No humble brag, just a ‘brag’ brag. That was really, really hard, and I’ll stand by how it went with my chin up.
The finish was no anticlimax either, in its own quiet way. You ride through a huge stone archway into the walled city and stop almost immediately by the finish sign. Then you wheel your bike up an alleyway in the medina, lean it against a wall and pop inside the restaurant serving as race HQ to get the final stamp in your brevet card. Five days, twenty-three hours and thirty-five minutes. Thirty-eighth place. No one really notices, no one cheers or slaps you on the back, and, funnily enough, you don’t mind. Looking up, you see the smiling friends who have populated your café stops all through the race, sitting at tables and smashing into their tajines, maybe drinking a beer. They welcome you in, as they have done since the start. We all did this for ourselves, but what a privilege to do it in such beautiful company.
Sam rode the Atlas Mountain Race raising money for The National Brain Appeal: www.nationalbrainappeal.org
