People pursue hobbies. Or hobbies pursue people. Randonneuring is a hobby that pursues its devotees, pushing them into new challenges and powering them past new milestones.
An entrant to this long-distance cycling hobby seldom stops after completing a 200km ride, which makes him a randonneur. He would push himself further and do a 300km. A 400km after that. And then, a 600 km. Having achieved these four rides in one year, he becomes a super randonneur. In all likelihood, he will try to repeat the feat another year.
Just as Karthick Subramaniam did. He has achieved the super randonneur feat twice. And he’s still unable to apply the brakes on his randonneuring ambitions. In the world of randonneurs, there are always new distances and experiences to cover. If there aren’t, they’ll invent them.
Early this month, Karthick joined a bunch of randonneurs from various Indian cities who went on a rather unusual ride, titled ‘Bliss In The Hills’. Randonneurs don’t like to ride easy. They’ll stack the odds against themselves. This ride was a 1,200 km one. That however was not the toughest part. Brevets (as randonneuring rides are called) of that length are not uncommon. The challenge lay in the choice of the route.
These riders had literally put themselves on a ‘hard’ terrain. The brevet, which began in Bangalore, scaled hill stations before it returned to the Garden City.
“We covered Coorg, Waynad, Ooty, Yercaud and Yelagiri,” says Karthick, a 28-year-old software engineer from Chennai.
Thirty-six randonneurs went on the ride. According to reports, only four succeeded in completing the course within the stipulated time, 90 hours. Two of them, Karthick and Sathish Kumar, are from Chennai.
Sathish, a 30-year-old civil engineer, says, “Factoring in the rides up all the hills, we have altogether covered an elevation of 48,880 feet. Even the Paris-Brest-Paris ride, which is the Olympics for randonneurs, does not have such an elevation to cover.”
Given this, it’s not surprising that Karthick sounds as excited as a man who has returned from the summit of Mt. Everest.
“I trained 11 months for this event,” he says. Training has included travelling to hilly terrain to ride the cycle.
His commitment to cycling can be measured by the jerseys and shorts he has bought over the months. Without any doubt, they must equal, if not outnumber, the regular clothes he must have bought. At one point, he was wearing a new set of jersey and shorts to the practice ride every week. He preferred buying new ones to getting the old ones washed and ready for the next week. “One reason is lack of time. After practising on a Saturday and a Sunday, I would have to plunge back into work. And before I knew it, another weekend would have arrived. Another reason, the more significant one, is the infection I could get from an old set of cycling clothes. After intense practice, there could be stubborn salt deposits that may not go away. I simply did not want to take chances.”
It may sound like an irrational fear. But it can also be called passion.
Sathish’s passion for randonneuring matches Karthick’s. He is also equally given to pushing himself mercilessly. He’s a two-time super randonneur too. In March this year, he also completed a 1,000 km brevet: a Chennai-Vijayawada-Chennai ride.
The excitement of completing this challenge successfully wore off before he knew it. After the high came a low. It took Bliss In The Hills and an 48,880 feet of uphill cycling to pull him out of the ‘valley’.
And, this new high is already dwarfed by a new goal.
Sathish says, “I am working hard to qualify for the Paris-Brest-Paris ride, which takes place in 2015.”
