I need to explain Badlands, because it doesn’t fit the usual description of a cycling event. It’s not really a race. There are no prizes, no podium, no timing chip, no rankings. Nobody wins Badlands. You either finish it or you don’t.
What it is: approximately 800 kilometres from Granada to Almería across southern Spain, with 16,000 metres of climbing, through terrain that includes Pico Veleta at 3,396 metres — the highest paved road in Europe — and the Tabernas Desert, the only true desert on the European continent. Roughly 350 riders start. Entry is by lottery, with priority given to women, underrepresented groups, and people who’ve applied before. The time limit closes after five days.
I start in sixteen days. I’ve been preparing for this since December.
What the Route Does to You
The Badlands route is not a fixed course in the traditional sense. There are checkpoints and a general corridor, but within that there is navigation, route-finding, and decisions about which of several possible lines to take across a given section of terrain. You carry everything you need between resupply points, which means you’re managing weight against duration against the physical conditions of southern Spain in August.
August in Andalusia is hot. Not “warm for cycling” hot — genuinely, objectively hot. The Tabernas Desert in August reaches temperatures that require the ride to be split around the middle of the day unless you’re comfortable riding through conditions that will damage your performance and your health. Most riders do a long morning effort, rest during the worst of the afternoon heat, and ride again into the evening and sometimes through the night.
Night riding across the Sierra Nevada and then the desert is its own complete experience. Temperatures drop significantly. The navigation demands more attention. The landscape, which is extraordinary in daylight, becomes something else entirely in darkness — vast and silent and completely indifferent to the fact that you’re trying to get across it.
Why I Applied
Badlands has a reputation in the ultra-cycling community as one of the most honest events in the world. That sounds like a strange thing to say about a cycling route, but it’s meaningful. There’s no prize money inflating the field with riders who don’t genuinely want to do it. There’s no TV coverage creating a performance. There’s a lottery that puts you into an adventure in southern Spain with 349 other people who wanted it enough to apply, and the event doesn’t care about your palmares or your power numbers or what you did at Unbound.
It cares about whether you’re prepared well enough to cover 800km of extremely demanding terrain over five days, largely unsupported, in August in Spain.
I wanted to do something this season that was categorically beyond anything I’ve attempted before. Not harder in degree — harder in kind. Badlands is a different category of challenge to a 200-mile race or a 360km gravel event. The duration alone puts it in a different physiological territory. The self-sufficiency strips away every external variable until what’s left is just the question: can you keep moving?
The Preparation
The entire 2026 season has been building toward this, whether it was obvious at the time or not. Every long event — the Traka, Unbound, The Rift — has added something to the foundation. The nutritional protocols I developed with OGT for the Everesting and refined across the season are specifically calibrated for multi-day sustained effort at moderate intensity. The bike configuration has been tested across genuinely rough terrain in multiple countries. The heat preparation has been real — the Girona training camp in spring, Andalusia reconnaissance in June.
Jacob and I have talked extensively about the psychological dimension. Badlands is a duration in which the mental challenge eventually becomes larger than the physical one. Your legs are capable of continuing long before the question becomes whether you want to continue. Managing that — having strategies for the dark patches, the moments of genuine uncertainty about why you’re doing this — is something you can prepare for, partially, by having done other long hard things and come out the other side.
I’ve done other long hard things. I’ve come out the other side. That reference point exists now in a way it didn’t twelve months ago.
The Tracking
Badlands uses dot tracking via DotWatcher, which means anyone with an internet connection can follow the riders in real time across the route. If you want to watch dots moving very slowly across a map of southern Spain for up to five days, I’ll share the link when it goes live. My dot will be the one moving stubbornly toward Almería regardless of what time it is.
What Finishing Means
I said there’s no winner at Badlands. That’s true in the conventional sense. But there is a very clear distinction between finishing and not finishing, and finishing means something specific: you covered 800km of some of the most demanding terrain in Europe, in August, mostly alone, and you did not stop.
That’s the season. That’s what I built 2026 toward.
From a football pitch in Blackpool to the UCI circuit to a crash in Belgium to a national championship in Dalby Forest in my third gravel race to this — 800 kilometres across southern Spain, just me and the bike and whatever the Andalusian desert decides to offer.
Sixteen days.
You can follow my progress at dotwatcher.cc from 30 August. Supported by Merlin Cycles, Ventum Racing, OGT, Gravaa, and Questa Financial Planning. Coached by Jacob Tipper at JT Performance Coaching.