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Journal: |
The day started well and I left a sleeping Katherine at 2am with
my short-term target the Victoria River Roadhouse at 195km.
There was quite a bright half-moon and I felt stronger and more
rested than any time since leaving home. I made good time
through the undulating savannah and was treated to a lovely bush
dawn as I approached Gregory National Park and the Victoria River
Valley, an area of red craggy bluffs, with small exotic-looking
clusters of prehistoric palms nestled here and there at the base of
the bluffs. With about 30km to go, I became conscious of a
slight anomaly in my right pedal motion and initially attributed it
to a small stone jammed in my cleat, which I removed. I had a
big brekky at the Victoria River Roadhouse, which sat above an
impressive new, but not yet used, bridge over the river. There
was a lot of construction work going on the road approaches to the
bridge and at various points along the road for the next 30km.
Early on in the remaining 93km to Timber Creek, where I had a
room booked for the night, I realised that the pedal problem was
getting worse, to the point where my bad right knee, which always
hurts a bit, was getting very painful. A closer examination
revealed that the alloy nut in the crank arm, into which the pedal
screws, was working loose from its carbon fibre moulding. I
unscrewed the pedal and confirmed that the skewed motion of the
pedal in the loose nut was also beginning to strip the thread from
the inside of the nut. It got so bad that, with 30km to go, I
was left pedalling very gingerly with my right leg for fear that the
nut would break free from the carbon fibre crank arm.
Eventually, I arrived at the one pub, one garage, one general store
outback town at 4:45.
I stopped into the garage to see if there was anything they could
suggest. I asked about using some kind of epoxy resin and they
said that might work temporarily, but that there was none in town.
There’s an exceptional amount of stress on that pedal every day, and
I have my doubts about the longevity of such a fix, anyway.
There’s no bike shop ahead of me for more than 1000km and the
nearest is Darwin, a nine hour bus ride away in the other direction.
Sharon offered to fly to Darwin and then drive to Timber Creek with
my spare bike, but I don’t want to go to such extreme measures,
which don’t really fit with the “solo and unsupported” theme of the
record. I called the Kununurra Cycle Club, Kununurra being the
next town I go through (225km ahead), to see if they had any ideas,
but they said they order their bike gear in from Darwin and there is
no bike shop in town.
I started out this trip by saying that I would keep going round
Australia, even if I had no chance of breaking the record. But, now
it has come to this point, and I‘ve invested so much effort and
energy into putting myself into a good position to break the record,
I really can’t find the motivation to continue after a bicycle
repair which I think will cost me at least four days in time.
I could get a bus to Darwin tomorrow (Saturday), get the bike fixed
(hopefully) on Monday, then return here on Tuesday in time to resume
riding on Wednesday, but there is no way I could make up the lost
time. As an alternative, I’m thinking of catching the bus to
Darwin tomorrow and then flying home from there on Sunday
(embarrassed, with my tail between my legsJ). I’ll sleep on
it, but it seems to me at the moment that I’ve made three serious
attempts on the record that have cost money, time and effort, and
it’s time to move on. There are other, perhaps less demanding,
adventures on my list.
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