Ulrich Bartholmoes, 2023 Tour Divide winner

The Adventure Stache

In 2023, just four years after competing in his first bikepacking race, Ulrich Bartholmoes won the biggest race of them all, the Tour Divide. The 2,745-mile route is always at the mercy of the elements, but Ulrich and his two fellow race leaders found themselves in a particularly strange (and scary) predicament when cold temperatures and constant rain left more than a hundred miles of the route unrideable. In a stroke of luck, the three racers happened upon a porta potty in the Great Divide wilderness, where they huddled together for almost 12 hours.
Ulrich has a lot of stories like this from racing. A couple weeks ago, during the Atlas Mountain Race in Morocco, he got food poisoning, climbed down from a second-story window with his bike on his back at 2 a.m., and suffered a collapsed lung after a run-in with a dog...all in the span of about four days. Payson sat down with Ulrich (still recovering from the crash) in Girona last week to get the inside scoop on that now-legendary porta potty, along with his unique take on bikepacking. He talks about how using granular data actually makes racing more fun for him, what he thinks about Lachlan Morton’s unofficial Divide record, and the mental recovery of such long events. He also talks about his plans for this year, which include tackling the Triple Crown.

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