The hardest part of John Crouch’s 2,500-kilometre bike journey from Whitehorse to Victoria was that steep bit coming out Lillooet.
“It’s like six kilometres straight up,” said Victoria’s Crouch, who was 70 when he undertook the trek.
In his new travel memoir, Six Highways to Home, the 73-year-old describes the final stretch of this uphill climb, a lung-burning 13 per cent grade.
“Pain and fatigue were accumulating fast. ‘How long can I stand this? How long can I go on?’ I began to doubt myself,” Crouch writes.
Most cyclists would have walked it. But not Crouch, who was determined not to succumb to the dreaded “w-word.”
“I said to myself and friends, it’s no big deal if I have to get off. But there was no bloody way,” he told me with a laugh.
Crouch is a remarkable fellow. He’s won triathlons and duathlons. Of the 16 marathons he has run, he’s won five in his age category. Since turning 60 he has climbed Mount Baker, Mount Whitney and the Golden Hinde. Before his Whitehorse to Victoria trip, he completed long-distance bike tours of 1,400, 1,100 and 800 kilometres.
Before writing Six Highways to Home (available in local bookstores), Crouch penned three guidebooks on walking, hiking and biking in Victoria. This latest book is different though. In matter-of-fact language, he tells what it was like to complete a solo bike ride few men half his age would attempt.
Biking from Whitehorse to Victoria in 2011 took him just 25 days. He encountered 14 bears and one mountain sheep. The self-sufficient Crouch carried no cellphone. One day he rode 154 kilometres over 9 1/2 hours. Then, exhausted, he made dinner, set up camp — and did it all over the next morning.
For the first week, he was often joined by other cyclists. For the rest of his journey, Crouch was on his own. Such nature-wrapped solitude sounds meditative. But don’t buy Six Highways to Home expecting a chin-stroking cyclist’s equivalent of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
“I’m not that introspective really,” said Crouch, who based his book on a journal he kept. “It wasn’t like I was getting my life philosophy out.”
It’s true. Six Highways to Home is an unadorned telling of a remarkable story. One senses it’s partly Crouch’s modesty that shapes his narrative style. In person, he’ll tell you singular things with a shrug or a grin.
For instance, the book relates his encounter with a massive bear. It was frightening — the bear regarded Crouch with small, penetrating eyes. The cyclist didn’t lose his cool though, merely strolling to the other side of the highway without incident.
Another time, Crouch and a temporary cycling companion, Andy, turned a corner to run into a startled mother bear and her four cubs. If you know anything about mother bears and cubs, you can imagine how potentially dangerous this was. Again, by playing it cool, Crouch encountered no problem.
“I said, ‘Andy, do you want to take a photograph?’ He said, ‘No!’ ”
Crouch undertook such a momentous cycling trip because he likes a challenge. He had a nobler motive as well. His feat raised $13,000 for the Parkinson Society British Columbia. Crouch selected this charity because his nephew, Richard Cox, suffers from early onset Parkinson’s (it was diagnosed at age 34).
A wiry affable fellow with a close-cropped white beard, Crouch has been an athlete all his life. He grew up in Leicester, England, where his father was a lathe operator and his mother worked for a hosiery business. In college he was active in track-and-field, soccer and cricket.
He moved to Prince George to work as a teacher in 1967. Later, Crouch became a registered massage therapist. He ran most of his adult life but turned to cycling in his 50s when leg injuries became more frequent.
“I fell in love with it, actually,” he said.
The Whitehorse-to-Victoria trek may be a crowning lifetime achievement, but Crouch’s passion for cycling in his eighth decade continues. He’s poised to take a solo trip along the coast from Victoria to San Francisco. He’ll do it on a different bike, however. Someone stole his lightweight touring bike (built by Mountain Equipment Co-op ), so he replaced it with the identical model.
Undoubtedly, there will be tough times on the way to San Francisco — perhaps even challenges comparable to that muscle-straining stretch out of Lillooet. But Crouch regards it all with a stoicism typical of the endurance athlete.
“At the end of the day,” he said, “you sleep pretty well.”
