The Munga 2024 ride report

The Munga is more than a bike race. To me it seems a container for a spiritual journey. The route is explicitly designed to take a rider on an inner sojourn as well as an outer pilgrimage across the most beautiful, harsh and ancient places of our land.

The race is unbelievably hard. There is nowhere to hide. The prevailing wind is a head or or cross-headwind. The first 400 kilometers to Britstown were into the teeth of this headwind. The roads are often corrugated. There is usually a line that is smoother, but you have to find it. Sometimes there isn’t a line, and you must take the punishment as the bike judders and slams itself into your hands and backside. Or your quads, already tens of hours into the ride, must suck up the burn of pedaling through a hundred meters of finely ground sand. There are large sections of technical, un-curated trail with aardvark holes and disused jeep tracks that the floods and heat have had their way with.

The air is parched and snatches any moisture it can find. Your lips, your nose, your, tongue your throat are dry as pepper all the time. The wind picks up tiny particles of dust and deposits them in every crease and fold of your skin. You breathe this in. Your nose bleeds. Some people develop deep resonant bronchial coughs as their lungs try to cope.

The desert is not flat. There are long stretches of false flat – 10, 15, 20 kilometers at a slight gradient, not enough for Garmin to register – a quarter of a percent incline, a half, one or two percent. Into a headwind which means that when its a negative gradient, you are still having to push the pedals to move.

And it is long. 1135 kilometers in this 10^th edition. You must average about 10kmph including stops to make the 120 hour cutoff.

The route itself is a masterpiece. At its heart, somewhere between 500 and 900 kilometers, in the sacred deep of the desert, I think every rider finds something out about themselves or the world. Perhaps some question is answered, or the slow growth of the soul marks a milestone, or a personal crisis is brought into relief. I’m convinced that something happens to almost everyone there – whether they finish the ride or not, I don’t think a person can go into this and not encounter something profound.

That’s some of the physical, outer world stuff. My inner journey of the Munga felt mystical.

Here are some of the events that moved me.

After hundreds and hundreds of kilometers into the wind, there was a break in its nagging, insistent gnawing at my strength. The terrain was typically karoo – low bushes, little mounded koppies of rock and sand and low scrubby bushes scattered over a vast plain.

And hot

There was a dust devil – a mini tornado whipping sand up into a whirling dance, a plume of fine powder trailing off against the blue and red heat of the day, keeping pace with me about 30 meters to my right. I thought about my riding mate Gilly who would for sure have stopped to take a photo. I wondered if I should but knew it would be an underwhelming image on a cell phone. I kept riding.

It moved ahead of me and then was caught against the ruins of an old stone wall, dancing in place. Waiting for me I thought as it gyrated and spun in small circles, loops within loops. It looked mischievous and full of energy. An imp.

As I got closer it freed itself and spun away behind a small koppie, and, as I crested the shoulder of this little hill, and coasted the 100 meters of gentle slope on the other side, this whirligig of desert sand suddenly reversed direction and moved towards the road on a direct path of intersection with me. And moving faster than I had realised. Before I knew it, it was on me.

I felt a rush of adrenaline. An anxious thought “What will happen?”. I closed my eyes against the sand, (closing one’s eyes on a bicycle and not falling over is difficult), kept my fingers far away from the brakes (most crashes are caused or made worse by slamming on anchors) and ….

It was remarkably gentle. I heard the sand pitter patter against my helmet. Its breath was warm, a tugging caress, as one might ruffle a pet’s fur. It was affectionate. It was a second or two and then it was gone, disappearing off behind me to my left.

A surge of joy broke in my chest and became a loud whoop. I felt that I’d been kissed by the desert, that the soul of the world (to borrow Roger Scruton’s phrase) had sent this elemental sprite of earth and air to give me a cheerful and teasing welcome.

The wind, having blocked and impeded me for 40 hours had seen me at last, had found me worthy and perhaps amusing and had imitated me – spinning circles on itself next to me almost as tightly as my legs were spinning to move two other spinning circles forward.

Something subtle changed in how I thought about what I was doing after that. It felt that the terrain had become an ally. That my desert imp had contained the message that the awesome might of this place would not be unleashed against me, that I was present with the blessing of the place. These were thoughts but also feelings, intuitions, the kind of sensation you might have if a friend were feeling something but hadn’t told you. A suggestion of knowing from within.

I thought about an interview with Drikus Coetzee, the course record holder for the Munga at 47 hours and some change, where he said you must make friends with the wind and the corrugations. Learn to appreciate them he’d said.

This doesn’t mean that everything was peachy. I’ve had friendships that have taken much more from me than they’ve given (all long gone thankfully) and the little imaginary romance I had with my dizzy and dusty visitor did not mean that these two elements weren’t going to harden into thick corrugations clotted with sand and pitiless headwinds in the miles ahead.

Indeed, by the time I reached the 770km waterpoint before Sutherland I was exhausted and in trouble. I hadn’t slept anywhere near the minimum I needed. My left Achilles tendon was very sore and protecting that pain was setting up difficulties in other parts of my pedal stroke. Two of the worst saddle sores I’ve ever had were maturing into their prime. On the upside, I had been able to eat and hydrate properly. My heart rate was acceptably low and my breathing was clear and deep.

But the levers that turn the pedals and the ass that supports them were sending warning signals of things to come. A kind man named Frans, gave me some herbal ointment for my Achilles, I obtained some Ibuprofen to supplement the two panados I’d taken from the ER24 medic who didn’t look like he enjoyed the hug I gave him in return. (I realised afterwards that I smelled like a desert mule and being engulfed in an embrace of gratitude might not have been at all pleasant or welcome).

I carted a mattress into the far corner of Frans’ beautiful garden and lay down under a tree and closed my eyes. I rested there for a few hours. I think I slept a little, but it was not refreshing. Getting moving again was difficult. Frans’ little Jack Russell came trotting over to see who was squatting in his garden and helped me get going by playing a little game of hide and seek which made me laugh.

I rode out of the waterpoint at about midday, gingerly looking for the least painful place to place my sit bones on the saddle and wondering how I was going to get through the next sections which I knew were going to be at least as testing if not harder than what lay behind me and not feeling that I could do it. The temperature was climbing up into the high 30’s. There was about 80km to Sutherland.

Then my dust devil visited me again. This time it appeared instantly to my right and passed directly in front of me and then was gone. And just as before, it opened a well of emotion deep in my body that rushed through my cracked throat and flooded my eyes with tears.

A little while later, a Munga support vehicle pulled alongside me and a man with a go pro asked me how I was doing. I was so far inside myself that to find the me that faces the world and open my mouth and speak was an effort.

I told him about my dust devil and he gave me a look as if I’d lost my mind and as he drove away leaving a cloud of hot dust for me to ride into, I regretted telling him. I felt exposed. I imagined ridicule. I felt that I’d given away something meaningful to someone who wanted nothing more than a pithy soundbite for social media.

As I toiled on, my Achilles making every pedal stroke a conscious act, I reflected on this experience. The dust devil had felt like a deeply meaningful, mystical or even religious experience. A theologian would call it animism. And a part of religious experience is the desire to speak about it, to write it and share it.

Most religious traditions include the idea of testimony, telling others. But this desire to speak about the experience places us in a paradox because the experience cannot be described, only felt.

Part of what language does is to separate the speaker from the thing spoken about. We speak about something and speaking about the thing is not the thing itself. Also, the experience itself is not cerebral, it is visceral and somatic. It is intuited rather than accessed through the rational, linear pathways of language. In a very real sense, a religious experience involves a lived experience of the absence of the separation between self and world. Putting something into words however is the creation of a separation, it is the taking of something inner and articulating it into the outer world.

Perhaps all I can say of this experience is that it involved a feeling of deep connection to a whole, a realization that one is part of something much larger. It evoked and released an overwhelming flood of emotion. Grief, joy, gratitude and awe mix and merge into a sense of fulness and realisation.

I think this difficulty in articulating the experience is partly why religious talk is often so absurd to those who do not subscribe to it. In psychiatrist Ian McGilchrist’s frame of left and right brain, when the left brain gets hold of right brain knowledge it doesn’t know what to do with it and it can come out garbled. Stories of martyrs being greeted by virgins in an afterlife, or wind and earth sprites taking an interest in bicycle riders or virgin births are all equally ridiculous and yet,I would say are inspired by the same feeling I had with my dust devil.

For this reason, many religious faiths forbid using the name of god. And I’m not using it here either, partly because, although I was raised in an Anglican Christian school environment and am very pleased to know the bible and to have had the exposure, I am not a Christian and nor am I religious. My Munga experience is the most recent and developed of a dimension I will call spirituality. Mystical.

I got to Sutherland at about an hour and half before sunset. My randomized mega munga spotify playlist made me smile through gritted teeth when Bruce sang as I coasted towards the race village.

I was bruised and battered
I couldn't tell what I felt
I was unrecognizable to myself
Saw my reflection in a window
And didn't know my own face
Oh brother are you gonna leave me wastin' away
On the streets of Philadelphia (Sutherland)?

They didn’t leave me wasting away. The Sutherland race village saved my Munga for me. Sleeping in a communal space is a working definition of hell and up until that point I estimated I’d had 2 and a half hours sleep in 3 days. I told whoever would listen in as ungarbled a way as I could manage, and doing my best to hold my despair in check while letting enough of it through to let people know I was earnest, that I needed a drug to make me sleep or at least a quiet spot.

I cannot understand how so many of the other riders are able to arrive at a water point, lie down and 10 seconds later be snoring in a way that made me feel sorry for their loved ones. At the best of times I have to manage myself into sleep – surrounded as I was by an atonal symphony of snorks and grunts interrupted by the beeps of garmins left on warning that their sensors are disconnected and conversations and farts, I found it impossible.

I know the difference between those nervous system fortunate enough to be able to switch off and shut down so easily and mine which cannot and I could fill pages with thoughts about the impact of sensory integration on emotional and social functioning and trace the origins and impact of this through my genealogy, but those are mercifully beyond the scope of a race report.

This lack of sleep was the biggest crisis of the ride for me. I knew that I would collapse if I didn’t sleep. I also know that the level of exhaustion that lay beyond Sutherland would be very dangerous to my health and well being. This was what threatened my meeting the cutoff, not the riding but the resting.

This was another aspect of my mental approach to the race. I wanted to claim finisher status and meet the cutoff very badly. I had told so many people what I was attempting, invested so much time and effort, de-emphasised other important aspects of my life to do the training and planned a celebratory tattoo that the prospect of not finishing was painful.  On the other hand lots of people scratch from the munga and at this point I had already ridden almost 650 kilometers and that is an achievement in itself. Also – the binary implied by success and failure is not appropriate to an endeavour like this and can overshadow the other aspects I’ve described so far.

My parents always told me that everything was ok so long as I did my best. “As long as you’ve done your best, that’s all anyone can ask of you” is something I heard often as a child. It’s tricky that because it presupposes that you know what your best is and we very seldom do until something requires it of us. But I adopted this as my over arching race stategy which went something like this.

1. I would not be the one to decide my withdrawal from the ride
2. I would only withdraw if advised to by a medical expert or if advised by a bicycle mechanic that my bicycle was broken beyond repair and every other avenue to repair it had been exhausted.
3. I would only withdraw if I failed to meet the rolling 24 hour cutoff at any of the race villages. And then only after pleading for an exception.
4. When deciding what to do in any situation, that is, stop and rest or continue, or linger at the waterpoint for longer or push on the guiding principle will be “Is this the absolute best I can do in this moment”.
5. If I do not finish the event and all of the above criteria have been met, I will not recriminate myself or do anything other than mourn the loss of the achievement, claim the valuable insights and experiences as my own and continue to love riding my bicycles.

I repeated these 5 points to myself many times over the hours.

Anyway, as I was saying, the Sutherland race village, looked after me like I was family. I was brought a plate of food and guided to a private room in a guest house down the road where I showered.

I rubbed a magical ointment called Move into my painful Achilles which it really enjoyed. I lay naked in front of an open window, with the dusk breeze cooling my aching body and fell into a recuperative coma that lasted 3 hours.

At midnight and much refreshed, I left Sutherland. On the first climb out of town I told my right knee that his friend Achilles was in trouble, probably because we had been standing up out of the saddle too often to give cousin ass a break. This meant that Achilles was being stretched more than usual and wasn’t enjoying it.

A congress of body parts ensued.

“Listen knee” said a voice in my head, “Higher cortical function here from central command”.

Higher cortical functioning has a tendency towards pomposity, it matches his delusion that he is charge of things when in reality, he’s the last idiot in the queue to know what/s going on and then he usually gets it wrong. On this occasion however, he did a good job managing the assemblage of spare parts that constitutes the mamilian body.

 You gotta come to the party and help out”, he continued.

“I thought I was”, said knee sounding a little hurt and registering his protest with a twinge.

“More is needed I’m afraid. We must stablise the ankle, you know how it pronates, and all this flexion is causing trouble for Achilles. So, I’m taking over the coordination of all of you lot from the automated motor processes, and the quad squad is going to be sending more of the force through you for a while”

“Oh”, said knee, “I suppose I don’t have a choice”

“Not really. But I promise you a generous rubbing of ‘Move’ and 400mg of Ibuprofen at the next waterpoint.”

So it was that we managed the issue and Achilles took a break and it did wonders. He recovered really well, only tweaking a little every now and then. Knee took on his extra load with only minor complaint and was quite proud of his contribution to the effort and the only one who wasn’t happy about the situation was ass who got less time off the saddle than any of us would have wanted for him.

“I always get the shit end of the stick” he complained.

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Ouberg descent in the dark was intimidating but not too bad in the end. I walked two sections of it. I have been to ouberg twice now – in the pitch black. I still don’t know what the view looks like which means I have to go back.

From there the landscape changes again. Into the desert proper – the brutal Tankwa. I felt I owed something to the Tankwa after my grit experience. It is a place another rider Nabil has said is forgotten by god. I got to Da Doer at 9 after another session with my friend the headwind.

I felt OK all things considered. I reflected as I dismounted that if you had told me at dusk the previous day as I rode into Sutherland, that I would be at Da Doer, feeling as I did, that I would have said “Yes please” and “Thank you very much”. Sutherland really was the turning point for me and somehow I knew it would be. I had remarked to Justin Tuck at the Gear Change that being at 700km with 400 to go would be a crucial moment and it was.

Local knowledge at Da Doer, suggested the wind would die down in about an hour and then start picking up again from lunchtime. This proved correct and a few other riders and I got a brief window to dash through to the next waterpoint at the Tankkwa Padstal. This included an hour of paceline riding with some others – one of only a handful of hours where I got to enjoy a draft and offer a wheel.

At the padstal I confirmed with another local there that the wind would be picking up later and he said “If I were you I would have left already”.

So I did.

The 62 kilometers from the padstal to the last race village at Matroosberg is a front runner for hardest section of the route. It is a 62km long climb that starts as an imperceptible slope and builds gradually through a series of rollers at about 3% gradient (only there’s no down to the roller, only a return to the false flat) before kicking up to the KOM of the race at Matroosberg at about 12 or 13 percent. Of course there’s also a headwind that’s matching the increase in gradient by getting stronger as time passes so that by the time you reach the short section of tar that marks the exit from the Tankwa, you’ve endured a demonically hot 35 kilometer an hour block headwind up an escalating series of hills. The road is of course, not exactly immaculate whispercrete tar – it’s a bitter old crinkle cut chip crenallated hell path of corrugation, rock and sand.

It would be bad on fresh legs after a nice oats and orange juice breakfast and an ice cold  bidon in your bottle cage. With 900km and change in the legs, no sleep, 38000 calories of gels, bars, koeksisters, sandwiches, bananas, pies, lasagnes, rice, boiled eggs and other forgotten morsels passing through the engine room and leaving behind a trail of boskak and with a liter and a half of tepid electrolyte mix in your USWE, it’s an absolute nightmare.

The treasures of mystic experience, personal growth and insight offered by the route are guarded by the elements and once you’ve penetrated to the desert heart where they lie under the dragon scale shale of the rocks and claimed them as your own, those same elements do everything to keep you there. But leave you must, or the prize is lost. So, 7 hours for 62km including a walk up Matroosberg with a 6-time Mungafarian is what it took to get to the other side.

There is one piece of mercy on that stretch, and it is the group of young locals who set up an informal refreshment station. They gave us ice cold coke. And watermelon. And someone told me they’ll pray with you if needed. I needed it and so did everyone else I saw.

I only realised how finished I was when I dismounted and bent down to sign in at the race village. I felt lightheaded and dissociated – not connected to my body or to reality. I sat down. I ate a meal of chicken and rice. I managed myself to a mattress in the noisy and crowded space, put my open run pros around my head, and I lay there listening to the music I love telling myself that it didn’t matter if I couldn’t sleep.

It had been the right decision to push through from da Doer all the way to RV 5 without resting through the heat of the day at the Padstal. This enormous effort on the back of the midnight to 9am run from Sutherland, through Ouberg to da Doer ensured that I was at the last race village, exhausted but with ample time to rest a little, pull myself together and ride the last 100 kilometers through Ceres and over the Bainskloof pass at a leisurely pace, and more or less assured of meeting the 120 hour cutoff.

As I have remarked elsewhere with reference to the “There be dragons” byline of the Munga, I am the most frightful dragon out there and I almost got in my own way quite spectacularly outside Ceres.

I had ridden the whole desert without so much as a missed gear change – no technical issues at all. Then a hiss from the rear wheel. The sealant plugged the hole but the tyre was soft. Not a problem, I have CO2 cartridges and a pump. I bombed it and then thought that the front tyre was a bit squirrily,

“I’ll just give it a little blast from the cartridge” I thought, “because ‘Waste not want not’”

Big mistake. The valve core comes out, the tyre deflates. This mamil has 10 thumbs and once scored in the “Borderline retarded” category on a standardized IQ subtest for visual spatial and motor integration, so sometimes opening a takealot box can be a challenge. In the state I was this capacity was even further impaired and so after 25 minutes of fart arsing around, all my spare parts were lying on the ground in front of me on Mitchell’s pass, I was pulling water out of USWE to rinse off the valve core, sticky with sealant, that I had dropped in the sand at least 5 times and I was laughing at myself and my frustration.

Here I was, cruising in to complete one of the toughest cycling events in the country, claiming a place in a very small minorty of riders who can say they have completed a Munga, being almost undone by one the simplest bike maintenance tasks there is.

I got it done though and with my tyres uncomfortably overinflated, I climbed Bains’ at maximum speed and skidded and bounced over the last technical descent to Doolhof at 07:55 on Monday morning, 114 hours and 55 minutes after the start gun where good friends and the chica met me and cheered me across the line.

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There are lots of other experiences I haven’t mentioned here. The Munga is a rich adventure.

I saw a herd of Blou Wildebeest at close range charging and snorting through the virgin bush alongside a 19^th century battle site. I reflected on almost every aspect of my life and in the altered state that the effort produces, new ideas and directions of thought emerged in all domains.

The process of the ride has many of the elements of other personal transformation and growth contexts – removal from the familiar and everyday, a move into something unknown and emotionally significant, removal of comforts and distractions, a container of people holding the functions necessary to hold life and limb together.

In this last regard, the Waterpoints in general and the Sutherland race village in Particular, are superb. Make no mistake, if you are looking for a boutique experience with no shortage of ice, an endless supply of luxury sports nutrition and a glamping style mountain bike experience you will not find it here. But if you are looking to arrive a water point, worn down to the ragged bleeding bones of your arse, with your spirit on the verge of breaking and your ride outcome in jeopardy, you’ll be met by a proper person who has an idea of what you are going through and can offer you solid, practical and realistic support.

The Munga is superbly managed by Jacques Swart (Jack Black) and Alex Harris. It is a logistical achievement of note to support a field of 250 riders through such an adventure. More than that it reveals a connection to the land and the community of people that live on it and provide the food and shelter along the way that speaks volumes about the event.

I also emerged from the Munga more in love with riding than before and more convinced that the bicycle has a key role to play in humanity’s recovery from the escalating series of crises that began a few centuries ago and that is culminating in the economic, climactic and geopolitical denouement that looms before us.

I would not have been able to complete this ride without the support of the Gear Change in Mowbray or without the expertise of my personal trainer Armand Nel who has worked with range of movement, balance and strength imbalances in my body in a subtle and methodical way that has made a real difference to my riding.

My physiotherapist Michelle, who also has breast cancer and the many conversations we have had about the neurology and psychology of pain and whose whatsapped me “Tell your Achilles it’s going to be fine” played in my head in the 100 kilometers after Sutherland. I far prefer this to the default mantra “Shut up legs”. Far better to tell the legs that the distress they are feeling is not as compelling as they think it is and can be safely ignored. “You’re going to be fine” is a much better thing to say to one’s body.

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Early bird entries for Munga are open if you’re interested. If it piques your interest in any way I say go for it. I won’t be buying one. But I will ride another Munga in the next few years for sure.

The time commitment to training is significant. At peak volume I took a 3 day long weekend, fully kitted weekend of riding away from home and that was bracketed by weekend home based rides of 8 and 10 hours. Financially it can be ruinous – bags, bike maintenance, lights are all expensive and the event itself has logistical costs of getting there, accommodation and so on.

The reward however, is equally as significant. Not least of these rewards is the realisation, or at least confirmation of something I know about me, that I can be good company for myself and I think that’s key to getting yourself through an adventure like this and a very good way of being to cultivate.

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What’s next for the Mamil asked his mother as she tried to figure out what’s wrong with her son that he has to do these crazy things? Well I’m going to spend December mucking around on the local trails wearing my Munga socks and hoping someone who knows what that logo is will look at me with respect and awe and ask me what it was like. If you do, you’ll probably spend the next hour regretting the question so be warned.

Then I’m going to start building some speed and shorter duration power onto the massive volume of zone 2 effort I have behind me, and mount a more competitive effort against the collection of average Joes in the unseeded open category at the Tour du Cap roady show in April 2025. I’ll be wearing my Munga casquette personalised with my race number (nice touch that) just to try intimidate all you other MOFO mamils.

Here’s a gallery of snaps from the long road