There are places that try to impress you.
The North West is not one of them.
It simply stands there. Big skies. Thorn trees. Yellow grass. Brown-red earth. Old farm roads stretching so far into the distance that they eventually stop looking like roads and become thin lines someone has drawn across the land.
It is only after you have spent hours riding them that you begin to understand just how beautiful this place really is.
And how unforgiving.
The Munga Grit North West is strange like that.
On paper, it looks almost civilised compared to the full Munga. Fewer kilometres. Fewer days. A smaller monster.
But paper lies.
I have ridden the North West a couple of times, and found myself thinking afterwards: the full Munga was easier than this bloody thing.
Because Grit somehow takes the Munga’s entire character and compresses it.
The endless gravel roads.
The corrugations.
The long hours when nothing happens.
And then nothing happens again.
And then, for good measure, absolutely nothing.
Just you, your bicycle, and a horizon that seems to move a few kilometres farther away every time you get close.
Then comes the corrugation.
Not the polite kind that merely reminds you that you are riding gravel.
I am talking about proper North West corrugation,the kind that slowly shakes your bicycle apart until you begin to suspect your teeth should also have torque settings.
Krrrrr.
Grrrrr.
Krrrrr.
For kilometres.
The irritation eventually becomes almost hypnotic. Your hands go numb. Your shoulders burn. Your backside formally announces that all negotiations have been terminated.
And still the road keeps coming.
This is where the Grit feels so much like the full Munga.
The Munga’s greatest weapon has never really been distance.
It is monotony.
The ability of a road to slowly convince you that nothing will ever change again.
There will never be another town.
There will never be another water point.
This climb will never end.
This gravel road probably continues all the way to Namibia.
And you are going to spend the rest of your natural life sitting on this bicycle.
None of that is true, of course.
But after enough hours in the saddle, the mind begins telling very convincing stories.
Then comes Groot Marico.
On a map, the country around Groot Marico looks fairly innocent.
Never trust a map.
The landscape begins to fold.
The road climbs.
Then it climbs again.
And just when you are convinced that must surely have been the last one, another gravel road appears in the distance, crawling up the side of a hill like a snake with personal issues.
On fresh legs, a climb is simply a climb.
After a few hundred kilometres, it becomes philosophy.
You start negotiating with yourself.
Just to that tree.
Then to the next telephone pole.
Then to the next bend.
Twenty pedal strokes.
Another twenty.
This is how endurance really works.
Not with heroic speeches.
Not with dramatic music playing somewhere in the background. (It helps when you have music blasting in your ears)
Just small promises you make to yourself and, hopefully, keep.
One more kilometre.
That is all.
Then another.
And another. Hopefully you will meet Arij along the road, and his smile, jokes and a sip of water or Coke gives you new motivation.
Yet somewhere in all this punishment is something I forget every year until I am back there again.
The North West is extraordinarily beautiful.
Not Cape Town beautiful.
Not dramatic mountains, oceans and vineyards posing for Instagram.
This is a quieter kind of beauty.
A lone tree standing against an enormous blue sky.
A farmhouse kilometres from anywhere.
Cattle watching you with the calm expression of animals absolutely convinced that you are the stupidest species on earth.
The late-afternoon sun turning the entire landscape gold.
Dust hanging behind a bicycle.
Long shadows stretching across a gravel road.
And then the night.
That enormous North West night.
The temperature drops and the world suddenly becomes very quiet.
No traffic.
No phones.
No meetings.
No emails.
Nobody needing anything from you.
Just the beam of your bicycle light cutting a small tunnel through the darkness and millions of stars above you.
It is difficult to feel very important in a moment like that.
And that is probably healthy.
Modern life has a way of convincing us that everything is urgent.
A race like this corrects that very quickly.
Urgent becomes:
Water.
Food.
Warmth.
Direction.
Keep moving.
Everything else can wait.
Perhaps that is one of the reasons I keep coming back to events like this.
Not to prove that I am tough.
A bicycle ride can destroy that illusion very quickly.
I come back because there are very few places left in modern life where you can disconnect from the noise for long enough to hear your own thoughts properly again.
And after a few hundred kilometres, those thoughts become remarkably honest.
There is no LinkedIn version of yourself on a gravel road at two o’clock in the morning.
No title.
No position.
No status.
Just a tired, cold human being trying to work out whether he can ride another twenty kilometres.
Usually, they can.
Perhaps that is the biggest lesson.
The mind pulls the handbrake while there is still fuel in the tank.
And strangely enough, those failures later made the full Munga feel more manageable.
Because once you have sat beside a road somewhere in the North West wondering how the hell you got yourself into this situation, you gain perspective.
The full Munga is longer.
Bigger.
More intimidating.
But some of the hardest conversations I have ever had with myself did not happen there.
They happened here.
In the supposedly smaller race.
On some corrugated road between nowhere and a little more nowhere.
That is why I would never describe the Grit as simply “half a Munga”.
Distance is mathematics.
Character works differently.
The Grit carries the same DNA.
The same isolation.
The same monotony.
The same small crises.
The same strange euphoria when a tiny light in the distance finally turns into a water point.
The same discovery that an ice-cold Coke can become surprisingly close to a religious experience.
And the same people.
Not necessarily people whose names you know.
Just people.
A hand on a shoulder.
Someone slowing down because another rider is struggling.
A bottle of water passed across.
A joke delivered at exactly the right moment.
A voice in the darkness saying:
“Kom boeta. Laat ons trap”
But difficult roads teach you something slightly different.
When the days become dark, it simply becomes easier to see who is still riding beside you.
Sometimes it is a friend.
Sometimes it is someone who was a complete stranger a few hours earlier.
That is part of the strange magic of the Grit.
You arrive to ride a bicycle race.
You leave with dust on your face, tired legs, a few new stories, and a slightly different perspective on yourself.
Because the North West does not teach you that you are unbreakable.
We all break.
It teaches you something far more useful:
You can go much further before you break than you think.
And when it gets hard, you do not have to conquer 450 kilometres.
Just the next climb.
The next corner.
The next kilometre.
The next pedal stroke.
That is endurance.
Perhaps that is life too.
Keep moving.
The North West Grit is not a cruel place trying to break you.
A beautiful place that simply refuses to make things easy for you.
And perhaps that is exactly why we keep coming back.
Grit North West.
Half the distance.
All the Munga.
And not a damn thing easy about it.