THE MOST INSANE RACE I HAVE EVER DONE - UTOPIA GRAVEL

we're in Spain in the desert and it's pissing it down uh yeah another race video guys I'm here with olle uh you guys might recognize him from previous videos where are we going this weekend Ollie uh we're heading to bazer for graeler series Utopia gravel in the desert where Lo Road Badland are I've never been here before very excited to ride these stunning roads again now on every street as you TOS your head as you your the so we're driving a couple of hours from where we landed in malago all the way to Baza we're in a little town called Granada halfway not that little actually I think it's a city 65 right 165k Y and there's some absolute hitters here who's who's on the start line Ollie Matia has to be the favorite all of Gro here Nathan H and there's an Olympic mountain biker oh yeah it's going to be really fun apparently won a medal at Tokyo I should do what are you hoping to get out of it I mean we're hoping to just survive and get around you know like had a pretty all right day at reava a week ago so I'm pretty happy with the legs are so see what where it is on the European stage I guess all of this is basically prep for the tracker which is obviously this week on Friday big one so we're hoping to just get stuck into this weekend see what happens good morning good morning 7:00 an hour and what 90 minutes out from race mhm the alarms just got off time to carboo baby yeah time to eat the biggest breakfast we can so good morning it is quite early didn't quite have enough sleep but hey race day oh yeah what Lawrence is failing to tell the world is the reason we didn't get much sleep because what time did you get nose BL last night oh yeah midnight serious mate it's an aerrow shock morning it's just prolonging by about 30 seconds when I get spat that's all this is doing these came out the bottom of the draw from about 4 years ago so you know Fair okay here we go Utopia gravel 2024 I had an absolute Nightmare on the start line my Wahoo had some issues and I had to restart it eight times it finally came to life and we will go this is the Carnage of the race start shout out to the organizer for sending me some incredible drone shots you can see here straight into it straight into the Carnage starting a little bit far back so on the mission to try and move up and and get up towards the front in this neutralized section making full advantage of the payment and getting up to where I wanted to be right next to ollie on the front row or pretty much we had the pleasure of a lead car coming into a few of these BS set the pace and try and chill us out a little bit and lead us for the first 5 km or so before we took this right hand after some of this crazy gravel and then we were into the first climb of the day which would be around 10 km for this race you'll have a mixture of footage from 's camera who we are looking at now and also my inst 360 camera so it became quite clear to me pretty quickly that I hadn't done enough of the warm up these guys were doing well over 400 watts and probably closer to 500 watts up this clim you can see from O's footage here just letting the wheel go a little bit and I was actually right behind them at this point so the the group first group disappeared up the road and we formed quite a strong Chase group as you can see here but by the top well over 2 minutes behind luckily our group of five or six or so got together got heads down and started to tackle some of these amazing little Trails we were with one guy Sam his name is from the UK on from The Hope team a mountain biker he was a good whe to follow on those descents it was at this point around 3 hours into the race appr in the halfway mark where we hit the most incredible scenery that pretty much I've ever ridden on happened to be some of the same roads as the Badlands an event that me and Liam did an ultra race a couple of years ago and yeah I really remembered these sections I mean how how can you possibly forget it this time going a fair bit faster than we were last time let me tell you it was exactly at this point that someone in our group had decided that that the momentum had gone a little bit and he really put the pressure down on this descent and the group went into single file mode absolutely full gas and definitely put a dent into the group ahead of us which we weren't that far behind at this point and splined our group and lost a couple and this is something that highlights the fun of gravel everyone follows the guy who's on the front so if he makes a mistake we all make a mistake as you can see we're all turning around here going back onto the route before the next part of the route started these really rutted disgusting crimes that really take it out of you yeah this route was not for the faint hearted really really gnarly at this point this is about 5 hours in we're going through this River bed really really sandy section there was a car that decided to get in front of us and into our way this is pretty much where my legs decided to wave goodbye to the group and I just I just couldn't press anymore and I ended up with this guy in front of me here Adam Jordan and we rode the last hour or so into the finish together where at 25 km to go I was riding this little descent and my I had a front blowout I had a front puncher tried to fix it pulled over gave my front wheel a few pumps but nothing was going in I must have had pretty big hole no sealant pretty weird one but luckily with my inserts I was able to ride right the way to the finish and only lose 8 minutes left this is the final couple of kilometers from O's perspective about 10 minutes on the road behind me really nice little technical rutted section to finish off the day with the stats here you go on the screen with a finishing position of 20th 165 km and 620 with a normalized power of 280 and an average speed of over 26 km an hour W what a day out hello mission to clean bikes apparently there's a bike wash in this town somewhere which is annoyingly down a hill which means we have to go back up and back to the hotel oh there it is he's got out his aoto guys and he's getting in his casual socks bro that must mean we've completed the mission we completed the mission how was it bro mission was unsuccessful hey it was awful we got a smile on our faces I'm I'm pretty happy but to be fair I don't know where I came maybe last this is going in all it the whole thing how many calories did you burn I burned 5 half thousand um I think enough I think I think you can eat all of that and not feel guilty that that is the proof right there guys just thought I'd show you guys something I found interesting at least we're in the town of bazer and apparently it's at 800 M elevation which means that it's like when it's in a plane there's like pressure so OE smashed almost a full extra large packet of milker and The Vibes are pretty high other than the fact I've just opened this and they're completely munched overall have to be fairly happy with today we don't know the result yet another decent day in the ls before tracker next weekend really really excited for that one we're going to go and find local cafe local restaurant here and try and replace some of the calories that we lost guys thank you so much for watching please like And subscribe and we'll see you on the next one [Music]

Channel: Lawrence Carpenter

Views: 17,689

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Id: hCAsZT9y13M

Length: 8min 35sec (515 seconds)

Published: Wed May 01 2024