Looking for a sterner test than your local sportive next year? News of the Cross China Race broke this morning: a new, self-supported 3,500km event in the style of epic races like RAAM and the Transcontinental.
Early details are sketchy, but what we do know is exciting. The event website simply states:
The Cross China Race is a self-supported endurance race from Shanghai to Chengdu. Covering over 3500 kilometers, racers will be given 14 days to complete the race. With four control points to break up the course, riders will be responsible for their own routing.
One clue to a likely checkpoint is the cover image on the event website, which shows Tianmen mountain in south-central Hunan Province:
It certainly looks spectacular, and if we've found the correct Strava segment it should be quite a challenge on a laden bike too.
The first edition of the CCR is set to take place in June, and the organisers appear to be the same people behind Factory 5, a Shanghai-based collective producing a range of framesets and kit mainly aimed at fixed-gear cycling.
Some of the Factory 5 team have experience in ultra cycling events, with co-founder Jeff Liu completing the last two editions of the Transcontinental Race. Jeff's report on riding TCR4 is well worth a read for anyone interested in endurance cycling events.
Factory 5 also organised a 405km mini-endurance race, Shanghai to Moganshan and back, in late 2015. Starting and finishing at Factory 5 HQ, the event may well have served as a test run for the new, altogether more ambitious, Cross China Race.
The new event will join a growing number of self-supported endurance races in the calendar. Alongside the Race Across America and the Transcontinental, September saw the second edition of The Japanese Odyssey - a 2,400km ride from Tokyo to Osaka via some of the country's toughest mountain passes.
It may be no coincidence that Factory 5 member Tyler Bowa rode this year's edition of The Japanese Odyssey on a Factory 5 bike... Check out his report and kit breakdown here: wearefactoryfive.com/posts/the-japanese-odyssey-tyler.
As we say, it's early stages for the CCR - but we look forward to discovering more as details are released. To sign up for news, visit crosschinarace.cc.
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