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Fixedgear.at recently organized the second Slovakia Experiment, an informal ride/race across the snow strewn landscape between Vienna and the City of Bratislava. This is one of those events where the ride is the story, not so much the finishing order. Some 70 singlespeed and fixed riders trudged through 15″ of fresh snow in teams of two to pass through three checkpoints before finishing in Bratislava, making their own route along the way. For what it’s worth, the fastest team made it in just over 3 hours, with the last finishers coming it at over 7. Read the whole report and see plenty of pictures at fixedgear.at.
Looks like a fun winter ride, but I do not see the big deal considering people ride their bicycles from Anchorage, Ak to Nome, Ak in the dead of winter (1100 miles) in the iditasport impossible. http://www.allweathersports.com/isport/isport.html
FWIW, I attempted the Iditasport Impossible in 1999 (its first year) together with Dan Bull as the only riders. To cut a long story short, we were the only guys to try this that year, and if I remember correctly we only managed about 400 miles (I got severely sick and Dan banged up his knee pretty badly). To my knowledge this was also the only attempt ever made at the distance in winter.
@XCWhite: I guess the people you’re talking about are not riding fixed road bikes…
there was second race going on on this day from vienna to bratislava: PIRATISLAVA. a group of 30 people didnt wanted to join the “official” race for various reasons and dressed up us pirates and did a race on their own with own checkpoints and so on. We started as teams of 2 or more people and one fixed/singlespeed/freak-bike per team was mandatory. Most bikes were fixed but we had tallbikes and homemade cargobikes dressed up as ships too.
http://www.piratislava.tk (some entries are german, some english, some mixed)
and the gallery at:
http://www.gallery2.goldfisch.at/v/festivals/piratislava2010/
next years the two races are probably joined or will take place on different dates.
The weather was incredible bad with loads of snows the day before and snow and rain during the race, BUT I’m very sure there are much harder races and much harder people somewhere on the world. we didnt do it to be hardest, but to have load of stupid fun in snow and rain and pain
One team from the official race (5 people) did the whole race on the snowcovered and waterflooded bikepath along the danube-river on singlespeed-MTBs. They are no pirates, but definitely the strongest riders on that day