Cyclists are always chasing personal best. Can you eke out a faster climb? Can you push a bit more power? Or can you beat you mate to the town sign?
For Charles Hall, who finished as the fastest amateur rider on the brutal 200km Icelandic gravel race The Rift last weekend, his PB was something else entirely. “The event was sponsored by a hot dog factory, so it was essentially just endless hot dogs [at the finish]. So, I said hello to nine hot dogs,” he explains confirming he’s never eaten that many in one sitting before. “I think that's got to be near an entire jar of hot dogs.”
“I don't really think sports nutritionists around the world would advise it for recovery fuel. But, I think my body was craving something and it saw that and it thought that's what I needed,” he says.
Hall, who has a full time job working in a market research firm, wasn’t even meant to be in Iceland that weekend, let alone trying to refuel from burning 7,000 calories in seven hours.
“The Rift were running a competition on Instagram. It was very much, comment, share, put something on your story for a chance to get in… I was like, no one ever wins them, but I thought, you know what, why not?”
But Hall, who rides for Rule 28 Factory Racing, did win. With just three weeks to go he had to book a flight to Iceland. But all the accommodation in and around the start town of Hvolsvöllur, home to just over 1,000 people, was booked, so in less than ideal race preparation he’d sleep in a tent.
Luckily for Hall he had been due to be in Essex for the ACME Grand West audax which takes them from Essex to the Welsh coast and so already had the day booked off work. “I left work on the Thursday evening, arrived there basically midnight, pitched the tent, and then just kind of went from there. It was all quite a whirlwind of a weekend,” he recalled.
Hall wasn’t totally unprepared. He tries to get at least two hours riding in each day, mostly on his way to and from work, and four hours a day at the weekend. But his hopes weren’t high.
“Obviously, I go into each race thinking you've got to give it a roll, especially when you spend so much money and time to go away. But I was feeling a bit rough. So I called my parents, and my girlfriend was like, you know what? It's such pretty scenery. I'll just [take mey] time and enjoy what's around me."
“But as soon as I got in the bunch amongst the other riders, riding shoulder-to-shoulder against some of the pros you can't. I just thought I'd see how long I can hold on to the front group.”
Contributing turns alongside a group of pros he recognised from their social media profiles Hall lasted much longer than he expected, only dropping from the front group 130km into the 200km race. “I surprised myself quite a lot. My normalized power for the first two hours, was over 350 watts. I set my highest average power for 20 minutes near 370 watts,” he says.
By the time he dropped back, the race had climbed most of its 2,600m of ascent up onto the plains of the Fjallabak Nature Reserve and was descending slowly back towards the start. “I was kind of in no man's land, like the next 70km. I was constantly looking over my shoulder, not really knowing where anybody was,” he recalls. “Occasionally, a rider would pass through, but they were an elite rider, not an age group rider. So, the last bit was quite tense.”
The terrain was also starting to take it toll. “The terrain itself was by far the hardest terrain I've ever ridden. I train in around Richmond Park, so it's fairly champagne gravel in Richmond Park, so this was very much just like a surreal experience.
“It was quite open farm roads not like the fire roads that you would get up in [gravel race] The Gralloch in Scotland, no tricky single track, just hard terrain. Also, you had to constantly look out for big hard volcanic rocks because they were very much hiding in the soil. There would just be flat gravel, and suddenly a massive rock,” he says. “At the end, my hands were just covered with blisters from the constant vibrations.”
Having wrapped up an impressive result, he was also 22nd among the pro riders, it was time for a quick beer, nine hotdogs and packing his stuff up ready for an early morning flight back to the UK ready for a hero’s welcome in the office the next day.
“In the Monday morning meeting they ask, ‘How's everybody's weekend? What do people get up to?’ I said, ‘I went to Iceland and won a bike race’," he recalls. "They said, ‘Oh, nice. That's interesting.’ And then the conversation moves on.”
