Getting out of your comfort zone ~ Jeff's Bike Blog

Thursday, March 05, 2026

Getting out of your comfort zone

El jefeMarch 05, 2026

Getting out of your comfort zone

They say a fool and his craft beer soon go their separate ways, and so it was the time I visited Bill to swap him some beer for his old Crank Bro Candy pedals. Bill's bike is about as "matchy matchy" as it is possible to get a bike, and large areas of "blue" had worn off his pedals, making them less desirable. But I digress. While I was there, we started to chat about the inaugural 2021 Tour Te Waipounamu bikepacking event. It sounded positively daunting with talk of comfort zones, redefining difficult, scaling locked deer fences and other scary features that the organiser Brian Alder had shared to weed out any potential fence sitters. The 1300 km course had not actually even been completed by one person, but all of the segments had been done individually, or were about to be....

I was definitely on the timid side of the deer fence at this point, and Bill and I started to reflect on the very first bikepacking events we had done. The first 1100 km Kiwi Brevet in 2010 was organised by Simon Kennett and kick-started the whole Bikepacking boom which hit New Zealand hard, from that day on. In a typical NZ summer, there are now multiple Bikepacking events concurrently chris-crossing the country.

Simon's inspiration for the Kiwi Brevet was the 2008 Great Divide - a 4900 km event from Canada to Mexico, where he finished 3rd. What gave him the belief that he could do such an event, and successfully bring the concept back home to New Zealand. How scary would it have been to contemplate a ride of that magnitude? Bikepacking wasn't even a thing, bike touring was. But it was never a race.

Simon Kennett - 2008 Great Divide Race. Image from Simon's Blog.

Four years later in 2012 Kiwi Ollie Whalley had set a new record on the 4418 km Tour Divide Course and in 2017 there were 2 kiwis in the top 5 and 4 in the top 11. The New Zealanders were punching above their weight, and the Tour Divide had grown into the gold standard "bikepacking race" that everyone was being measured against.

In 2016 when Simon's brother Jonathan Kennett established a bikepacking route the length of New Zealand from Cape Reinga to Bluff, the 3000-kilometre Tour Aotearoa was born. Now a rite of passage for many kiwi Bike packers, many will do it as their first event, without even cutting their teeth on any shorter events.

What gives people the desire to ride such long events without necessarily being experienced long distance riders, what is their motivation?

Back to 2010, and Simon's first 1100 km offroad Kiwi Brevet. It was a daunting prospect for many of us newbies who'd barely even slept outside before. We did some pretty crazy training back then.700 metre hill reps up Mount Climie and Wednesday Worlds group rides on our bikepacking bikes. We hunted out the longest rides with the most elevation we could find in preparation for the unknown. How long could we ride for each day? Would we find somewhere to sleep? Could we make it between food stops? Would our gear hold up?

The excitement and trepidation of that first Kiwi Brevet would never be matched, and I said so to Bill. I had done it 3 times, but the 2nd and 3rd weren't a patch on the crazy buzz of that first one.

Bill's reply, kind of obvious in hindsight was, that if that buzz was what I was missing, I really needed to do the Tour Te Waipounamu. He was right of course.

The Tour Te Waipounamu is quite different than anything else. But as the organiser Brian Alder suggested, it was going to be more about mental tenacity than it was physical fitness. Set against the ever changing back-drop of some of the most incredible scenery most people will ever see in Aotearoa New Zealand, it makes a lasting impression on a person. Being part of the first group to do it in 2021 was special, we really were stepping into the unknown. Now everyone knows that it can be done, but that does not make it any easier. Doing it once is one thing, but doing it twice is another thing altogether. Knowing what is coming up is not necessarily an advantage. In a particularly hard moment, you might find yourself asking why you are doing it again. How you deal with that is another test, maybe a harder one. There can be a lot of soul-searching on events like this. Life is very simple. Ride, eat, sleep, navigate, think.

To date, three winners of the Tour Divide have tackled the Tour Te Waipounamu, but none of them have been first across the line, except local lad, Ollie Whalley. Ironically, finishing first is almost secondary in this event. Just crossing the line is an achievement in itself. You do not conquer the Tour Te Waipounamu, you develop a relationship with it, based on respect. The New Zealand outdoors does not suffer fools.

So maybe we could all think about getting out of our comfort zones, not necessarily in the Tour Te Waipounamu, there are plenty of other challenges out there, and there's a fair chance that you might not regret it.