Singletrack/MTB
Gravel/All-road
Dirt-road Touring
Fat-bike
Samuele Tonello was one of 130 riders who participated in this year’s Bohemia Divide, an 800-kilometer race through the Czech Republic, starting from the south and ending in the north. Find a reflection of Samuele’s second-place finish and a selection of photos from the organizers here…
Words by Samuele Tonello, photos from Pavel Stastny
This year has been full of incredible cycling experiences for me, with a race in the Canary Islands over Easter, the Race through Poland in May, and the big dance in August in the UK with the GBDURO. I knew the Bohemia Divide was too soon after GBDURO. Still, I had registered anyway, as I wanted a final escape in the wild before entering the depressing winter months.
The problem is that life got in the way a bit more than I had expected, and a difficult moment in my personal life drained my mental energy. I had two work conferences scheduled just before and just after the event, and two weeks before the event, I got quite a nasty COVID infection. As if this was not enough, I kept seeing terrible news about the floods affecting the Czech Republic.
In short, my body and the very little common sense I have left told me to let it go and close the year. Yet my mind was saying the complete opposite. I needed to get that dark out of my head, and I knew nothing could heal my mind more than riding an ultra. As is happens 99.9% of the time, the body has to surrender to the mind. The court in my brain decided we were doing this.
I live and work in Brussels, Belgium, and the first work conference was in Bonn, Germany, on Thursday before the event. So, I rented a car, drove Wednesday to Bonn, attended the conference on Thursday, and then drove Friday all day to get to the start in southern Bohemia. Still coughing, with brain fog and feeling weak, I was already physically and mentally exhausted before the start. “What the hell are you doing here, you idiot?!” I kept thinking. Despite that, I was at the start line on Saturday with hundreds of other riders. I followed the briefing before the race with interest, even though I could not understand a single word, as it was all in Czech. When the race director finished, I asked another rider if there was something important I had missed and got a cryptic “there are some difficult parts at some point” answer. No shit, man, thanks for telling me. Perfectly informed, I started at noon. I usually race to finish near the front, but given my conditions, I had no expectations or interest in any result this time.
The start was relatively fast and very hilly, so I immediately got to test the conditions of my body, which resulted in good and bad news. The good was that I could pedal, and I was okay-ish. The bad thing was that my body did not have it when I pushed harder. Muscle pain, shortness of breath, nausea, and general pain. Despite that, I was in the front group after the first few hours, so I decided not to give up on my usual racing mode and to give it a go. My legs felt terrible, but efficiency was the most important aspect, so I could still do my ride as usual, just a bit slower.
Persevering on this strategy was also due to my willingness to take this ride as pure healing of my mind. That is, I had decided to enter full meditation mode. No phone, no checking the tracker, no music, limited contacts with anyone, no stopping. It’s just pure and continuous riding. I needed to enter inside myself to get the bullshit out of my brain and to feel light again. Also, thanks to the fact that I somehow missed the first checkpoint, after six or seven hours, I was finally alone, ready to merge with the forest and become one with my surroundings.
From start to end, the organizers designed what, to me, is a perfect off-road ultra race. There are many excellent forest roads, some tarmac in small villages to rest your nerves, quite some bumpy stuff, a few challenging singletrack trails but always rideable, and a few hike-a-bikes that are thankfully never too long. Throughout the entire route, I could see that the person who had designed it absolutely loved this sport.
Dark hours arrived early after the first “Granfondo” section. After a petrol station pit-stop, I planned to continue through the whole night, as I usually do. At some point during the night, I found another rider in the forest and exchanged a few words, only to lose him again after shortly after. Despite not having major issues, I was not okay, and around 4 a.m., I had to stop because my muscles had become stones, and I was in too much pain. When I laid down, I was still coughing so much, and it was so cold that I stretched for 30 minutes before moving again.
The ride had become a battle between my mind and body. Paradoxically, this is what I was looking for. I don’t mean that I was searching for discomfort or pain. I am not a masochist, and I have no will to punish myself unnecessarily. What I mean is that the need to overcome this challenge forced me to enter the present moment. I was living in the now, not trying to escape the traps of the past or thinking about the future. At other times during an ultra, I was achieving a level of consciousness that even a Buddhist monk would envy.
After the nap, I restarted. Everyone who has pulled an all-nighter knows how great it feels when the sun finally wakes up to greet you in the morning. This helped me focus less on my battle against my body and more on enjoying the scenery.
The day followed with the central part of the route, which was the easiest part of the course. It had flatter areas, more tarmac, and high temperatures. The latter was a struggle for many but an absolute pleasure for me. After exactly 24 hours, I reached the halfway point (400 kilometers), which was not too bad for a mountain bike course.
I knew I was in first place, but I didn’t know exactly where the others were without checking the tracker. And to be honest, I genuinely did not care. By this point, it had become such a personal experience that everything outside was almost an annoying detail. After playing around in a bike park, the dark arrived alongside the most challenging part of the route. Climbs became steeper, more frequent, and the terrain more technical. The cold was exasperating my cough, so around 2 a.m., I decided to take another nap. Usually, riding sleep-deprived is my biggest strength, as my brain always keeps working well (for the conditions). Yet, I was so spent that the night was a pure battle between my will to keep riding and my body’s will to sleep.
By this point, I also knew that only Tomas was in front of me, as I could only see one tire track in the muddier sections, but that changed very little, as my main concern was singing Italian songs loudly to try to remain awake. At a certain point, in the middle of nowhere, I found a petrol station with flashy blue lights everywhere. I had noted that station on the Garmin, so I was confident it was true, but it was all so bright that I had to slap myself a couple of times to make sure I was not hallucinating. I then entered it, and with what I thought was a big charming smile – and in reality probably a creepy whining – I ordered four espressos. Lady looked at me with pity and repulsion, then gave me what I had asked for. In these situations, I always remember my friend Niccolò, who, in a similar situation, told me with a big smile, “It feels so good to be disgusting.” I have been taking this quote as a life philosophy for quite a while now.
After another 10-minute blackout nap on a bench and the longest section of hike-a-bike, I reached the highest point of the course, with that bloody sun finally showing its face again. I then played in the morning again in an eternal bike park, got some food at the first town, and finally, I started the last section in some beautiful forests that reminded me of the one back home in Italy.
Despite my limited energy, I rode quite well for the last 7-8 hours, but this was not enough to catch Tomas, who had a well-deserved victory, finishing almost two hours before me. Chapeau to him. At the end, I was greeted by the race director, who helped me order some lunch and explained all the race details. All this while a peacock was walking close to us, and I was pretending I was not seeing him because I was afraid I was hallucinating (it was real and part of the hotel animals). Listening to him – the director, not the peacock – it took me a few seconds to understand that this passion originated the greatness of this course, and I felt really privileged to have had the chance to experience it.
The day after, I would have had to figure out how to get to Prague, then to the start line, then drive to Gastein in Austria for that second work conference on Thursday and Friday, and then drive back again on Saturday to Brussels. And once there, how could I prevent some of that darkness I had managed to release from returning? But all that could wait. At that moment, I had to enjoy the lightness in my soul and the opportunity to enjoy the perfect laughter with life, the one I had created by “going all the way,” as Bukowski once suggested.
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