The Great Rimutaka Bike eXperiment

144 kms off road and gravel.

The Great Rimutaka Bike eXperiment #GRBX was a social media experiment that paid off in spades for the guys at Inspiring Riding, if empowering people to get out and ride into a stiff southerly is any measure of success! It was great. Around 50 people were there on all sorts of rigs, beta-testing all sorts of gear, some in anticipation of their next over-nighter, but many in anticipation of the TA (TourAotearoa) being held next February.

I was looking to trial my new dynamo set-up and I was pretty happy with the results. Mind you, according to Strava I averaged 23.4 kmh. That is not a sustainable Brevet/Bike-packing speed for any human I have heard of. And to prove this, I imploded at the halfway mark with the biggest bonk I have ever experienced. My latest special toastie pie recipe which was a special blend of Cheese and Smoked mussels was suddenly repeating on me and seemed less than desirable.

I managed to keep the contents inside my stomach, but my pace was so slow, as I rode the "Incline" that I wasn't pedalling fast enough to generate power from my dynamo to power my lights through the first tunnel. I could see lights alright, lots of small twinkly ones!

A caffeinated GEL at the top restored my mojo and I was shortly back to normal.

The latest iteration of the Stealth Bike Bag with a port-hole for cables and water resistant zip.

 I had purchased a top-tube bag off Michael at Stealth Bike bags a few months back but he said if I waited a while he would do the new one with the new slinky water resistant zip. He turned up with it at the start so I eagerly velcroed it on.

I was testing my dynamo charging system so aligned all the goodies inside the bag as well as I could and put it all in another plastic bag. There was the Sinewave converter, my little battery holder, and a 3100 mah battery, and my phone. Before I started, I estimated that the 3100 mah battery was mostly charged, and the phone was also mostly charged. With an average speed of 23.4 kmh I would have been generating a reasonable amount of watts (for charging) and at the end of the day, the phone was fully charged at 100%. The idea is that at the end of the day, this battery or one of the other 2 I will be carrying, can be put into my head torch, should I need extra lighting if negotiating slow single-track at night. They can also be used as a power-bank.

 I took the battery out today and it lasted for 6.5 hours in my torch, on the medium setting, so without getting all technical, that implies I didn't bleed too much power, overall. You wont see any photos from the ride. Why?

1. We were hammering too hard.
2. My phone was in a plastic bag in my top-tube bag ; )

The order of the bikes across the line, not neccessarily the fastest order, as people tended to leave at different times.

1, Hard-tail, 2, Fully, 3, CX bike, 4, CX bike, 5, Rigid MTB.

More "peer-reviewed" info to come when all the data has been analysed by the gurus at Inspiring Riding. Thanks guys. It was great.

Read More