Mission Accomplished! Members of Mangalore Bicycle Club pedal Non-stop 100 Kms
Mangaluru: Mangalore Bicycle Club was founded on June 4, 2011, with an objective of making cycling more accessible to everyone, both as a sport and a regular activity for a healthy lifestyle. The Club is a group of passionate cyclists in and around Mangaluru with zeal for cycling. The Club welcomes any cyclists to the club; where they could be complete novices, cyclists riding for fitness, to professional cyclists. The Club is not doing anything groundbreaking, they are simply bringing people with shared interest together and forming rider groups based on ability and goals. To put it simply, they call themselves passionate cyclists, who come together with different ideas and ideologies and align it to bring out the best of cycling experience to the citizens of Mangaluru.
The club intends to bring together existing cyclists and encourage new ones to take up cycling. Cyclists are free to pursue it as a mere sport or with the purpose of staying fit or ride to bring down the carbon footprints to the environment or just for entertainment sake. MBC organize group rides monthly for cyclists of various skill levels. It’s the perfect way to discover new routes, new riding buddies, improve group-riding skills and connect with fellow cyclists. A rider also gets to learn from other cyclists. Various events are also organized for creating and spreading awareness on social, environmental and other causes.
They organize various initiatives in the city of Mangaluru like rides for various social, environmental and other causes. MBC focuses on promoting cycling and routing that as a media to communicate with the citizens to create and spread awareness on specific initiatives and also with the civic authorities on the need of safety for cyclists. The club believes in encouraging their riders to prepare for the bigger milestones by taking small steps at a time. So beginning of this calendar year, the Club started with their big step by introducing “Non-Stop 100”. Here the riders who have accomplished 100 km league participate to achieve their next milestone.
On November 4th, MBC had their 3rd Non-Stop 100 in this calendar year where five of their riders took part namely, Srikantharaja, Venu Vinod, Gururaj Patil, Joseph Pereira and Ganesh Nayak. They ensured that each of the participants is aware of the preparations required for this challenging ride. There were four important steps which were to be followed for successful completion of the task, which starts the previous day itself.
The Four steps were 1. Keeping them hydrated and consuming healthy foods which increase their energy levels; 2. Sleeping early is the key to waking up early to start the ride; 3. On the morning of the day of the ride, riders are required to consume dry fruits and bananas to ensure they stay energetic throughout the ride; and 4. Carry enough water to last through the ride. Since this was a non-stop ride, the moving time of the rider should be equal to the elapsed time on their Strava records which are referred to for evaluation purpose. The ride had to be completed within 5 hours which means an average speed of 20 km per hour.
Frankly speaking, this adventure was not a race and hence riders at any point in time were required to make decisions based on their own comfort levels whether they want to continue the ride or not. Everyone had a daring and adventurous non-stop cycling experience of 100 km, and all the five riders accomplished their mission. MBC plans to conduct five such non-stop leagues in a year.
