Long distance gravel biking. Ordinary?
DOES IT FIT WITH A "NORMAL" 9-5 LIFE?
You often see grand tales of bikepacking across Central Asia or non-stop cycling from London to Brindisi in a few days. As impressive as these feats are they're usually not possible for "ordinary people", and by that I mean people connected to some form of job, family or children (or all of them if you're lucky/unlucky *delete as appropriate).
My guess is that cycling the entire Via Francigena off road would take an ordinary person 4 to 6 weeks and thats too much time to be away for me so I split it into approximately 1 week chunks over a few years (I originally thought 10 years but it went much faster than that: 39 days, even with some very slow bits through Tuscany with the family).
HOW FIT DO YOU NEED TO BE?
Ordinary is also ordinary in terms of fitness. As my family will attest, I probably should do more, but I do do something: an average of perhaps 80km a month off road in autumn and winter (though pretty much shutting down completely in December and January) and >200km a month in spring and summer. I'm probably averagely fit compared to my "ordinary" circle of friends and this has worked just fine for me. Its also been possible to "build up" during the spring to a reasonable degree by late summer. [Note that many of the "average roadies" that I know cycle >200km a week in summer].
It would probably be a mistake to be very unfit and very overweight and just hop on a bike in Canterbury and expect to get a long way. However its probably doable since you'll get fitter each day: if you were to do the full 6 weeks (although likely somewhat more if you're starting off slowly) and build up very slowly then by the time you got to the Alps a thousand metres climbing a day wouldn't feel like too much of a challenge.
WHAT ABOUT THE BIKE?
My current bike is a Bish Bash Bosh from the UK manufacturer, On-One / Planet-X. They don't make it any longer and I'm not sure why.
It works for me since it is a bit more upright riding position which helps with things like neck ache when you're riding all day (for me its sometimes after 30-40km).
The bike is carbon so very light and the gears / brakes have never let me down abroad. It is 1x which means only gears on the back wheel (I had a bad experience once with a gear cable snapping on another bike and having to cycle 40km in a crap gear isn't fun... so now I've reduced the chances of that happening by half).
I'm using WTB Nano 40c TCS Light 700 x 40c tires with tubes (I tried tubeless for a period and it is complete rubbish). These tires work very well on road too due to the big strip down the middle of them.
IS IT VERY EXPENSIVE?
One final thing is whether these trips are ordinary in terms of money.
High end cycling holidays will set you back **700-800 EUR a day** including bike, luggage transfer etc. but excluding flights and transfers (I'm looking at you Ciclismo Classico). At the other end there are people wild camping many nights (although that is difficult in Italy) and eating moldy milk and cardboard-like nut bars all day long: I'm guessing they can get by on less than **25 EUR** per person a day. As of right now I'm not sure what I've spent but its not at these extremes; I'm guessing on average excluding the flights I'm spending a bit less than **150 EUR a day** so around 1000 EUR a week > so over the approximately 5-6 weeks I'm looking at 5000 EUR over the 5 years. So yep... this is a bit of an indulgence.