“I was looking forward to some saddle time in the 30°C of an Arabian winter”
Back in November I travelled to the UAE to catch up with friends and watch the last race of the F1 season at Abu Dhabi. At the time I was buried with work and my training had suffered. The weather in London was also turning so I was looking forward to getting some saddle time in the 30°C of an Arabian winter. Dan Lloyd’s GCN video climbing Jebel Hafeet looked especially good. Not so much the climb but the chance to push my luck on the descent and extend my personal top speed. The road looks ideal for that kind of thing, with smooth curves, wide visibility, an immaculate surface and no traffic. It’s even floodlit at night.
2015 saw the inaugural Abu Dhabi Tour; a four-day stage race which took in the Empty Quarter, Abu Dhabi, the Jebel Hafeet mountain and the Yas Marina Circuit that I’d also be watching the Formula 1 cars race on. I hadn’t had a chance to plan any routes yet but I figured as a last resort I could just copy some of the Tour routes. My friend Daanish, who put me up in Dubai, told me “you can’t ride on the roads here; you’ll be killed”. The driving standards are a bit interesting in the UAE but there had to be some roads that were safe enough for cycling.
Usually it’s possible to ride on the floodlit Yas Marina Circuit on Tuesday evenings. It’s opened up for free to cyclists, runners and walkers who all share the wide, smooth track. The nearby Yas Cycles offers bike for rent too. As the F1 circus was in town these nights had been suspended for race week, which was a shame. Yas Marina is one of the most striking F1 circuits and I quite fancied the chance to set a lap time. That box may be ticked the next time I visit Abu Dhabi.
“You can’t ride on the roads here;
you’ll be killed!”
Google wasn’t pulling up many results for bike rental in the area but my friend Josh seemed more resourceful and helped me arrange a bike from Adventure HQ. Over dinner that night he asked me where I was planning to ride and I confessed that I hadn’t planned that far ahead. I knew there was a dedicated cycle track somewhere close by and I’d seen signs for it on my way to Josh’s place that night. I’d just head that way. “You can’t ride on the roads mate, you’ll get killed” he said. People say that about London too and I’m confident enough in traffic to look after myself. Then he told me about a friend who actually died just recently after being hit on the short hop to the bike track. By then he was the fourth person to warn me off riding on the roads in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Hmm, maybe I needed a rethink.
I used Strava’s excellent heat map to see which roads where popular for cyclists. That looked suspiciously like a couple of closed-road events had taken place and no other riding. Then I checked out the local cycling club and found they seem to only do one ride a week. Always the same route and there was lots of talk about safety in numbers. That didn’t fill me with confidence. Do people simply not ride on the roads at all here? I hadn’t seen any cyclists.
The Al-Wathba and Al-Qudra cycling tracks are purpose-built tracks out in the desert purely for cycling, with no traffic to worry about. I’m not sure I’d enjoy being limited to those tracks for all my training but they’d make for novel rides for visiting cyclists. Sadly my lack of preparation combined with work and the F1 race meant it wasn’t possible to drive out to these tracks and so I haven’t yet experienced riding in the desert. Another box to tick on my next visit. The big annual event is the Spinney’s Dubai 92 in December which, until recently, used one of these circuits but now operates with rolling road closures from the Dubai Autodrome.
When writing this entry I also came across Wolfi’s Bike Shop in Dubai which has some advice on safe places to cycle in Dubai and Abu Dhabi (click on the button a bit further down that page). It seems you might be able to enjoy cycling in the UAE but you need to be a bit more prepared than I was. You can’t just rock up and wing it.
After the grand prix Olga and I moved to Qasr Al Sarab for a couple of days rest and relaxation, 200km into the Empty Quarter and the desert shooting location for the new Star Wars movie. This is an odd place; a luxurious oasis that has no business existing in the middle of the Rub’ al Khali, surrounded by nothing. I toyed with the idea of taking a rented bike there, conscious that the Abu Dhabi Tour started from here and that traffic was likely to be much quieter. But a bit of time on Google Maps suggested the roads were limited (it is the Empty Quarter, after all) and I wouldn’t get far before I was back to dicing with traffic on a major highway. The resort offers fatbiking but only as part of an organised group activity because getting lost in the worlds largest desert would really put a downer on your day. They warn participants that the ride might be as long as 5km. I got the impression it probably wasn’t for me.
I’m often jealous of runner friends who can keep up their training wherever they are with just a pair of running shoes to pack. My broken knees forbid me from running, but then it occurred to me that running on sand would be much less punishing. Maybe here I actually could run? I put a pair of shorts on, took my flip flops off and pointed myself up a nearby dune. The delusion didn’t last long. Running on sand is hard. Running uphill is hard. Running on legs that can’t remember how running works is hard. Most owners of healthy knees have no reason to pay attention to the many tiny muscles that stabilise the knee when you flex it. My legs work relatively normally when I cycle so I sometimes forget they’re still a bit rubbish at some basic stuff and they very quickly decided they’d had enough of all this running nonsense.
Rule #42: One should only run if being chased. And even then one should only run fast enough to prevent capture.
The Adventure Capitalist 
I suspect that even 5km on a fatbike on sand may be a bit like your run; not much fun.
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