Johannes recently completed the 2025 Silk Road Mountain Bike race on his custom Starling Murmur, placing 23rd overall and completing 2000km, with 30,000m of climbing.
Here’s the story of the (unexpected) hardest day of his adventure.
Words and photos by Johannes Santen
Riding his custom Starling Cycles Murmur
When you sign up for an event that is often described as “the hardest bikepacking race in the world,” or sometimes even “the hardest bike race in the world,” you develop a set of expectations about what your experience will be like, mainly, that it’s going to be really fucking hard.
As you study the race manual and the route (you studied the route, right?) you learn exactly why it’s going to be really fucking hard.
It could be the first major obstacle, a 90km climb that takes you from 1000m elevation up to Koy Djul pass at 3811m. Or perhaps the 30km hike-a-bike section up to Suyek Pass at 4020m (“one of the longest and hardest hikes that has ever been included in Silk Road Mountain Race” according to the race manual). Then there’s the 400km stretch of absolutely no resupply options, mostly above 3000m. Did you bring enough food?
So you think about these pending difficulties, probably way too much, discuss with other riders what your approach will be. Then, you second-guess yourself when whatever they say seems more reasonable. But at that point you’re days or hours from the start, so there really isn’t much you can do.
And anyway, since a lot of this year’s route is new, no one knows what they’re getting themselves into.
In my case, I rode through the night (after a 6:12 PM start), up that first mountain pass, and all the way to CP1, totalling 311km and nearly 6000m elevation gain over the course of 26 hours.
The hike I ended up doing in two parts, sleeping at 3240m and waking the next morning to my tent and bike covered in frost, my river-crossing-soaked socks and shoes frozen solid, and another seven hours of hiking across or along or zig-zagging through dry and very much not-dry stream beds.
In the city of Naryn, the start of the long(er), remote(r) part of the route, I loaded up with enough food for three days to supplement my remaining four or five dehydrated meals. After that, more riding through beautiful valleys, over passes, and tucking into my aerobars when the headwind called for it.
Ostensibly, some of these days were the hardest days I’ve ever had on a bike. But they didn’t really feel that way. It was hard riding (or hiking) to be sure, but I knew it was coming and I had a plan. I knew the going would be slow and that I needed to bring enough food.
Importantly, I expected that it would be really hard. I settled into the rhythm of those days and got on with it.
No, the hardest day was the one that contained what the race manual described as “a significant hike down the valley” at the end of the second-to-last paragraph. An innocuous-sounding section that didn’t merit much more thought and besides, it was downhill. Surely a good chunk of it would be rideable, especially on my full suspension bike. I ride gnarly steep trails all the time!
After waking up to overcast skies and reasonable temperatures that morning, I rode up the rest of Tosor pass, which I had started the previous evening.
Soon, I was pushing my bike up a steep, rocky road into a snowstorm. No matter, this is what I had signed up for and the weather had been surprisingly good up to this point. It would have been a shame not to get snowed on (in August)!
After bike-herding a group of highland cows at the top of the pass, I descended some snowy switchbacks (fun!), which eventually turned into a vague animal track through swampy plains. I only almost lost my shoe once.
Needless to say, the going was slow, but at least I passed one or two people and I made steady progress through what I thought might be the hike-a-bike in question.
As it turned out, I was quite wrong about that.
Once the trail pointed (slightly) downhill, my GPS informed me that I had 11km to go until the mining road climb back up to 3800m. And these kilometers just did not want to budge. Much like the previous big hike, this trail undulated with the meandering of the nearby river, meaning constantly pushing your bike up steep and now muddy tracks, then trying to ride, but usually walking down the other side for fear of sliding out and tumbling down the hillside.
The snow had stopped, but everything was wet, which meant that all of the cow, horse, goat, sheep, etc. shit was nicely saturated and would stick well to tyres and bike.
Unlike the previous big hike, this trail (somehow named the “Tranquillity Valley Trail”) featured many piles of boulders, which required lifting your bike up, over, around, or somehow past these obstacles. So now I also had shit all over my gloves.
I’m not always a patient person, and I wasn’t really feeling the tranquillity of this trail, so I rode the downhill bits whenever the traction was good enough for my decidedly not very grippy XC tires. This made the kilometres tick by slightly faster, although whenever I got off the bike to start pushing again and I had made like 500m. The progress was not encouraging.
Then I heard the thunk-thunk of both rims bottoming out over a particularly pointy rock sticking out of the trail, followed immediately by the sound of both tyres venting all of their air. I hadn’t inflated these tyres in something like a week. Instead, I had actually let air out, riding over some washboard.
Luckily, after plugging the tyres and pumping them up again, they held. Anyway, time for a snack.
Only 2km to go on this stupid trail, and I should just walk the rest of it! But no, I rode the little downhill bits again, but this time with less confidence due to the tyre situation, and awkwardly endo’ed off the trail, landing in the grass. The bike landed even softer in a nice shrub. This could have been much worse if I had gone off the trail somewhere else…
By the time I finally got to the mining road, I had some frustration to work through, so I jumped on my bike and rode hard up the muddy mining road until it got too slippery to ride, then stomped my way to the top of the pass and back into a snowstorm.
It was windy and cold, but at least I was moving at a reasonable speed again and even had a tailwind!
This didn’t last long because I soon found myself walking through more grasslands that were almost entirely unridable because of how bumpy they were. It was still snowing, but at least I was heading toward what looked like a patch of blue in the sky.
After more of partly walking and partly riding through the bumpy grasslands, the weather did eventually clear up (kind of) and I made it to Jukuu pass for the descent back to civilisation, which, of course, started with hiking down a steep “road” made entirely of baby heads.
Eventually, it became quite rideable, which was a nice change of pace, with the three meters of visibility (it was now dark and foggy) and slippery mud only a minor inconvenience.
My friend Andrei had also caught up with me, which was great, because if I had been by myself, I might have fallen asleep at the wheel. I found myself wishing a few times that my damn tyres would just puncture again already, so that I could just stop and go to sleep, but, alas, they did not, and so I kept going.
After almost eating it on some surprise mud at the bottom of this five-hour descent, we eventually ended up in the town of Kyzyl Suu, which had hotels and guest houses. I wandered around, trying first a hotel (no one came to the door – it was midnight) and then a nearby guest house, which did not exist.
Starting to feel a bit desperate, I rode to the next-closest guest house and finally hit the jackpot with a soft bed, food, and running water! An incredible relief!
At the end of the day, I had covered 140km and 2200m of climbing, modest stats in the context of this race. The fourteen hours of moving time tell more of the story, although I only spent about two hours in the swampy plains and three hours hiking the Tranquillity Valley trail. But that time felt endless! It seemed like the end of the trail would never come and there was nothing I could do about it.
Often during ultra races, when I notice that I’m starting to feel this frustration over the difficulty of the terrain and the lack of progress, I put some music on (Rammstein remixes, if you must know) and it puts me in a much better mood. Even that didn’t work this time.
Compared to my second day of the dreaded 30km hike, I spent about the same amount of time off my bike, but it felt so much more difficult. Certainly, I had many more kilometers in my legs and maybe in the back of my head I was already thinking about the finish, but the real reason why this day felt so hard was that I hadn’t expected it to be. It’s not like I thought it would be easy, but I had this vague idea that I would make reasonably fast progress.
It’s not the first time (and I’m sure it won’t be the last) that I’ve learned this lesson, not to be disappointed, frustrated, or angry when what I thought would happen collides with reality.
In a situation like this, when you’re on your own in the middle of nowhere, these lessons can be particularly potent.
There is no one to blame but yourself (not that you need to blame yourself for anything) and you have a lot of time to think!
Thanks to Johannes for sharing his story, and for choosing a Murmur for the epic Silk Road Mountain Bike Race.
You can learn more about the Starling Cycles Mini Murmur, the setup Johannes chose for the race here.
