Taking on the epic Seven Serpents unsupported gravel ride: 850km of riding featuring mud, slop and terrifying trails with 16,000 metres of climbing? It went about as nicely as it sounds for our intrepid VecchioJo... cycling
gravel event by my partner Claire, who visited the area a while back and professes that it’s a lovely place to ride a bike. Pictures do seem to back up that claim, plus it’s an area of Europe I’ve never visited before and I’m always keen to colour in new bits of the map.
I’m riding the Seven Serpents together with Claire, and while we have both done lots of multi-day events separately and loads of bikepacking trips together, we’ve never entered an ultra event as a bona fide Pair. Riding in a pair brings with it the benefits of safety, the shared experience and shared snacks, cheering along the other person when they’re having a bad day in the knowledge that it could be you the next day, drafting where possible and a thousand other bonding experiences.
Along the road, turn right, up a gap between the houses, into the woods again and up the hill again. I’m following a line on the screen when it all starts to look horribly familiar, and I’m heading down the track we came up first thing this morning.
I check in on Claire and she’s still too far away for comfort, so I make my way up and over another off-road hill when my Garmin dies. Swear. Probably due to water ingress and stress absorption. That’s it. I let Claire know about this further spiralling down of my day, but luckily she’s found a cafe to shelter in Borovnica, somewhere she remembers from her previous trip to Slovenia, and she’ll wait for me there.
There’s no easy escape from this situation anyway. We still have to get out of here and make our way towards the finish in Trieste, so I finish all the food, pick up my resolve and we shortcut it to our already booked accommodation in Postojna. This involves an 18% tarmac climb immediately out of town that goes on for some time, and it's still raining.
Claire mends the tyre as best she can by sewing it together with dental floss and we shove a tyre boot in there for good measure, but it really isn’t up to several hundred more kilometres of gravel. We head into town for the google-promise of a bike shop, which is shut. There’s an Intersport just down the road, which is a long shot and only offers up some inner tubes. I buy them for backup, plus a handful of energy bars that would come in useful later in the day.
While the silent nothingness is absolutely wonderful, there is the downside that there’s nowhere to stock up on food and water for the entire 100km. We weren’t hungry enough to try the dead horse that hunters had left out for whatever eats horses in these parts... The weather is, as predicted, atrocious. It’s hammering down outside, gutters are gushing and it’s quite a bit blowy. We’re meant to cross to the island of Krk, but they’ve shut the bridge to all traffic. This is a problem for the more serious Seven Serpents riders who are all huddled in a transport cafe, but less of an issue for us because we’re staying in a comfy room with an endless supply of coffee pods. And some schnapps.
From here on in we’re going to be following the Small Bite route all the way to Trieste, and while it’s not necessarily easy, it’s easier than the full Seven Serpents as it bypasses the needless climbs and hike-a-bike sections. The weather has also cheered up a lot as well, so we don’t have to wear all our clothes and our bags are heavily crammed full with the extra thicker layers we thankfully don’t need any more.
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