A piece by Harry Johnson | Bikmo #RideCrew
The peak of my 2025 Bike Wild Summer was condensed into 12 incredible days racing 4000km across Europe at VIA Race Chapter II. As you can imagine with a race covering seven countries and climbing almost the equivalent of five Everests, summarising it completely in a blog, vlog or Instagram caption is even harder than actually riding the thing! So I’ve picked the best story or moment from each of my 12 days and stuck them in this lovely blog. Read on!
Day 1:
Day one of an ultra this length is a very strange feeling. The legs and mind are crisp, excitement and fear are bubbling away in a weird potion of emotions and the finish feels impossibly far away.
There isn’t much that forces me off the bike, but the terrifying black clouds and subsequent torrential rain had me cowering in a bus stop wondering how I was going to climb the 15% slopes I had in front of me. With my trusted weather radar app telling me that it wasn’t a shower I could wait out, I braved the first mountain of the race with rivers rushing across the road and battled slopes so steep that I couldn’t get out the saddle without slipping. But we made it, the rain cleared and I dried off *just* before the sunset in Southern Italy.
Day 2:
The Apennines beckoned as we rolled north towards Campo Imperatore, a beautiful mountain meadow known as ‘Little Tibet’. As much as I enjoyed the views, the climb and the cows, the highlight was trying my first arrosticini from a takeaway van at 2000m.
Day 3:
I set off from my first hotel at 2am on day three for a big push through the early hours. As a reward, I was treated to one of the most stunning sunrises I’ve ever seen in my life. The whole sky lit up blue, purple, pink then yellow as I crawled my way up a 17km gravel climb. Caffeine is a great performance enhancer, but it has nothing on the boost a good sunrise gives me.
Day 4:
I could talk about how it felt to finally reach the Alps for hours. Seeing the mountains grow on the horizon, feeling the air start to change and knowing that the proper adventure was about to start. Goosebumps. The Alps are my favourite place in the world for a reason. These emotions are only elevated by knowing I’d truly earned them too. It took 1500km to get there through three thunderstorms, extreme heat and on Italian roads (IYKYK).
Day 5:
After overheating to the point of spending 24 hours on a hotel bathroom floor with heatstroke last year, the warm temps were my main concern when prepping for Chapter II. That all went out the window with the previously mentioned thunderstorms that continued into the Alps. Ultra cycling is all about problem solving and adaption, so to fix my problem of not packing enough layers, I bought the Sports Towel™ at a discount supermarket. The plan was to use it in various ways to keep myself warm, such as but not limited to: a neck buff, a thermal base layer, a wind block and a pillow. It worked flawlessly when descending from the highest point of the race, the Kühtai Dam in Austria, and I actually felt a little bit too warm when rolling into Innsbruck.
Day 6:
Only a few hours later at 2am the next morning, all the good vibes I’d been floating on were destroyed by an amateur mistake. After riding 30km up the valley towards Slovenia, I realised I had left my extremely important race tracker at the refuge. A 60km penalty in a 4000km race probably doesn’t seem that bad, but having to ride back the way I’d come in the middle of the night and in the freezing rain was beyond frustrating.
Day 7:
Another reason I love the Alps is their excellent bus stops. These little wooden huts of varying quality were where I grabbed the majority of my sleep, and on day seven I found a banger. It doesn’t look particularly interesting, but it was the perfect combo of clean, quiet, warm and wide enough to spread out on. I can’t actually remember where exactly this was, but the two hours of sleep it gave me got me up and over into Slovenia.
Day 8:
Saturday was probably the worst day I’ve ever had on a bike. It just wouldn’t stop raining. 16 hours of non-stop rain from 10am to 2am had me thinking it would never end and I’d be soaked to the bone forever. So wet that I couldn’t use my phone or earphones. My buff was so soaked through that I couldn’t use it above my mouth without waterboarding myself and my toes looked like raisins. Grim.
But, experiencing these lows is all part of the privilege of choosing to do these adventures and it adds to the inevitable highs later on.
Day 9:
It didn’t take long for the next high to come. A £45 picturesque German hotel directly on my route was the perfect place to reset and recover for the final 1200km push to the finish. I was fairly reluctant to stay in hotels this year due to the cost and convenience, so spotting this on Booking.com felt like a miracle. Bus stops are great, but finally getting in a bed for six hours was unbelievable and really did energise me enough to crack on with the last chunk of the race into France and up to the Netherlands.
Day 10:
The final mountain of the route came unusually early this year. We had to summit the Grand Ballon in France before shooting north to the North Sea. With just 2km to the top, I was passed by a small group of cyclists that seemed to know each other as they started attacking the group with increasing ferocity. Spurred on by my extra-long rest, I decided to launch a Pogacar-esque final acceleration against my new friends. I sprinted all the way to the top and collected my 10 imaginary KOM points but stopped short of posting up.
Day 11:
Honestly, not much happened on this day. I think I sat on the same German rolling road for hours and it made me go a little bit mad. I did see a cool jet though! Highs and lows and all that.
Day 12:
Just as I neared the final 200km, a fellow competitor text me to let me know there was a friendly competition to see who could set the fastest time from the final gate to the finish in Amerongen. 14 riders had already finished and Bruno (the overall race winner) had the best time of 8hr30m, not an easy time to beat with 3800km in the legs. Not one to turn down a challenge, I went full TT mode and sprinted across the Netherlands to knock 30 minutes off Bruno’s time. I arrived at 4:40am to an empty finish with everyone asleep expecting me to arrive in a few hours time. That small victory felt pretty good.
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