Peaking

We’re sitting around a wood stove as she tells these stories. There’s a gale force wind outside, forest heaving. Another woman in the group ran the New York marathon a few years ago. ‘I wouldn’t do Peaks,’ she says. ‘It’s beyond a marathon, more like an ultra-marathon. You’ll be on the bike all day, maybe eleven hours.’ She’d run the marathon in just over five.

The three peaks are Tawonga Gap, Mt Hotham and Falls Creek in the Victorian high country. Organisers describe the Peaks Challenge as the most demanding one-day cycle event in Australia – the ultimate personal challenge. In her late fifties, Saskia Beudel decided to take that challenge.

Peaking is her genre-defying record of the hundred and eleven days spent preparing for Peaks – and of the event itself. An accomplished writer of both fiction and nonfiction, Saskia weaves together her training notes and wide-ranging reflections, the history of the bicycle and her own personal stories of cycling. She tussles with the state of contemporary life and the questions that come after long hours in the saddle.

What does it mean for a woman to enter this male-dominated event? As our bodies age, what new things can we ask of them? How do we take pleasure from our bodies and nature at a time when the world seems to be collapsing around us? How far can body – and mind – respond? Ultimately, what does it mean to ‘peak’ (or not)?