Cycling In Company

First Published in Options, The Edge Malaysia, Oct 10, 2016

An insider’s account of an annual Malaysian cycle-fest. 

It wasn’t just raining, rain was slashing in horizontally into the ferry in furious gusts. Outside, was the tossing brown sea, and beyond that, a homogenous grey.  On deck, I clomped around in cleated cycling shoes, with hundreds of other similarly drenched cyclists and several million dollars’ worth of bicycles.  We were on the last leg of our almost 500-km cycle ride, but we weren’t going anywhere: the ferry was docked at port to wait out the storm’s fury.

The journey began two days earlier at Kuala Selangor, where residents awoke to the sight of some 550 cyclists heading up north on the coastal road. This was the 19^th episode of the Pedalholics Cycling Club’s (PCC) Interstate, an annual cycle-fest that sells out within days, if not hours, of opening for registration, attracting cyclists from all over Malaysia as well as neighbouring countries. Decked in bright jerseys, helmets, cycling shorts and cleated shoes locked into pedals of high-tech carbon-fibre, aluminum or titanium-frame bicycles with skinny tyres, we must have looked like a cycling circus.

Riding the 2014 PCC Interstate

First published in The Star, (Malaysia) Oct 11, 2014

Photographs by James Bak

In road cycling, a ‘century’ is a 100mile or 160km ride.  A century is a non-trivial ride, but take 3 centuries, ridden consecutively back to back over 3 days, stretch them each a little, throw in a couple of big climbs and what do you have?

You have the 2014 PCC (Pedalholics Cycling Club) Interstate ride, a 3-day, 525km cyclefest of pedalling, more pedalling, camaraderie and lots of suffering.  The first PCC Interstate, held in 1998, attracted about 20 riders on mountain bikes, but the 2014 event had hundreds of cyclists riding road bikes.  

The event, which attracts plenty of attention from the cycling community, was fully subsribed within hours of opening for registration early in 2014, and saw cycling clubs and individuals from as far afield as Penang, Malacca, Singapore, East Malaysia and two monstrously strong Indonesians who rode all the way on their mountain bikes with knobby tires.