I did not finish Badlands. The official 2026 results list me as DNF — no time, no position — and I’d rather write that here than leave the last word on the site being a preview I wrote sixteen days before the start.
Badlands was the race I built the whole of 2026 around. Roughly 800 kilometres from Granada to Almería, 16,000 metres of climbing, Pico Veleta at 3,396 metres, and the Tabernas Desert at the end of August. About 350 riders start, entry is by lottery, and there is no podium and no prize money — you finish or you don’t.
The Scale Of It
The DNF list is the honest measure of how hard this race is. Piotr Havik was the quickest solo finisher at 36 hours 15 minutes. Danni Shrosbree, who I know well, finished in 48:15. Rebecca Sykes rode for 108 hours. Victor Bosoni and Robin Gemperle — two of the favourites — don’t have a time beside their names either. Roughly a third of the solo field didn’t finish.
What I Did
I prepared for it since December. Two days before the start I rode the full ultra rig round the lanes near home and called it, on Strava, “full ultra rig giving me the ick” — which remains the most accurate thing I’ve written about this season. And then I stopped, and I haven’t worked out yet what I want the longer version of that to say.
What I will say: giving up is not something I’m comfortable with, and that’s a feature of how I’m built as well as a problem. In Girona on the Traka 560 I ran out of food at 5am with five hours to ride and got to the finish on a can of Coke, because the alternative wasn’t available to me. Badlands is a different kind of hard and it beat me.
What Happens Now
The goal I set for the season didn’t happen. That doesn’t retract the season — it’s the same season that produced a national silver medal in August and a win in Wales thirteen days later. But I’m not going to pretend the entry was the story, and I’m not going to quietly delete the preview either.
I’ll write properly about what happened when I’ve had time to think about it. For now, this is the record: I entered Badlands, and I didn’t finish.
Supported by Merlin Cycles, Ventum Racing, OGT, Spatz, Coros, ABUS, and Kenetik.