Between Home and the Horizon at Gravel Burn, South Africa

I used to believe the big, bucket-list adventures should wait until the kids are grown. But aging legs, growing kids, and a 7-day gravel stage race in South Africa challenged that rule. This story follows my decision to leave home well, line up for Gravel Burn, and navigate everything from rain-soaked forest stages and scorching Karoo climbs to the tension between helping others, racing hard, and coming home to my family grateful and whole.

Words by Josh from The Nxrth.

Photos by Bruce Viaene, James Camera Heron, Paul Ganse, and Fahwaaz Cornelis | Nedbank Gravel Burn

For years I held an unwritten rule that seemed sensible: the big, bucket-list adventures should wait until the kids are grown and out of the house. Save the long absences for the empty-nest chapter, when calendars are looser and no one needs help finding their shin guards after school.

I’m a dad and a husband who cares about being engaged at home, and I’m also a rider who’s always curious about the edge of staying present while going long.

The self-imposed rule worked, for a while. It kept my ambition in scale with the season of life we were in. I do a regular mix of friend bike trips and family bike trips. This year saw a couple long weekend bike trips with friends and a few long weekend bike trips with the family. It felt right to say yes to those and let the bigger ideas sit on a high shelf where they couldn’t tip over the rest of our lives.

Family bike and cabin weekend: Chequamegon 2025

But a belief can be both wise and incomplete. At some point, “someday” starts to harden around the edges. I began to wonder what I was really protecting: my kids’ needs, or my own fear of asking for something that took more from the family than the usual weekend away. The body I have now won’t be the body I have at 55. Fitness isn’t a savings account you can just deposit into for fifteen years and withdraw at face value. If I wanted to do something truly big and challenging, I might need to stop waiting for a perfect future and find a responsible way to do it now.

But would my kids and wife feel left behind? Was I honoring my role at home or asking too much? I didn’t rush those answers. I turned them over until they felt honest.

Once I gave myself permission to look, possibilities multiplied. And yet I kept coming back to the idea of experiencing my first gravel stage race and doing it on the other side of the world. A long traverse stitched from dirt roads and small towns, a moving camp that would let me see a new landscape each day. I wasn’t chasing the spectacle. I wanted an arc, a finite, demanding story that asked a lot and gave a lot back. Something that would let me meet a place at human speed and come home tired in the best way.

That idea finally found a name: Gravel Burn, a first-edition, South African 7-day gravel stage race that links the coastal forests of the Western Cape to the wide-open country of the Great Karoo and finishes at Shamwari Private Game Reserve. Built by the team behind Cape Epic, it’s point-to-point and fully supported. Not a spectacle for its own sake, but an arc with a beginning, middle, and end. Exactly the sort of storyline and demanding trip I’d been looking for. Gravel Burn wouldn’t erase the tension between presence and ambition; it offered a way to hold both where I could leave well, ride hard, and come home grateful.

Leaving Well

Before I could line up in South Africa, I had to make peace with leaving Wisconsin for the longest time ever away from my family and my life in general, 13 days. That meant several honest conversations with my wife. She was supportive from the start, but support isn’t the same as blind permission. We talked plainly about the opportunity cost and the risks. Does this trip really fit into the balance of values that I hold? Is this just idealism that I need to get over or am I really going all in on this?

Our family goes on plenty of adventures together. Those adventures matter to me precisely because we share them. And this one would be different. It was just me, far away, for a long time, for something big.

The day I left, my wife and kids handed me a journal they’d made: drawings, photos, little games, and pages with prompts. What happened today? What was South Africa like? Did you get eaten by a black rhino? What was the hardest stage? I packed it with my jerseys and energy gels and it let me bring them along in a way that felt connected.

Learning the Mountains

I live in Wisconsin’s Northwoods. We have long gravel lanes and hidden lakes, but we don’t have 2,500 foot climbs. Training for Gravel Burn meant learning how to fake elevation, stacking back-to-back long rides on weekends, simulating fatigue, building a kind of stubborn endurance I hoped would hold over seven stages in South Africa. I’d never ridden a stage race. I didn’t know whether my regular training of 2-3 hard days in a row over a weekend could teach my legs what day seven would feel like.

Day one took us through deep, green forest on the coast near Knysna, and it rained, soaking, unapologetic rain that turned everything wet and cold. I loved it immediately. The weather wasn’t an intrusion, it was the story. Part of the adventure I’d asked for. Most of the week was relentless sun plus one day of catastrophic wind that would neutralize a stage entirely. We were told to ride it safely and leave our heroics for another day.

The Karoo itself moved under our wheels. Semi-desert, intimate mountains, then farmland and towns that seemed to arrive out of the heat. One stage finished with a 2,400-foot climb in scorching sun that forced me into a slow conversation with pacing: energy gel, drink, salt, drink, repeat. On another day I floated down a 20-kilometer descent on a ribbon of perfect gravel that stitched the hills together. Some afternoons were rugged enough that my hands ached by camp. Others felt like I was a little boy, invincible, and easily entertained by flying down hills at break neck speed.

A Moving Camp

The Burn Camps moved each night. We traveled roughly 500 miles over the week and camped in six different places. That rhythm of waking up somewhere new, racing into another new landscape, and falling asleep under a different sky made the race feel less like a series of intervals and more like the best possible way to experience a new place on the other side of the world.

Camp life wasn’t complicated but it was complete. Being on my own gave me a new rhythm and total control of the pace and priorities of each day. The event was full-service so every day had 3 gourmet meals, espresso bar, evening drinks, onsite showers, and intimate campfires. The amenities felt luxurious and I basked in the daily 30-minute leg compression chair sessions, bike washes, cold wet towels at the finish line, and late night snacks and dessert. Most evenings, I found a corner of shade and opened the journal from home. What happened today? I wrote about the rain in the forest. About the neutrality of the wind day and the way it reset the group’s energy. About the long climb that demanded more patience than strength. Little details I would have forgotten in a week became the anchors of the story I’d tell the kids when I got back to Wisconsin.

There was comfort in the daily repetition but the scenery kept refusing to repeat itself. Each new campsite changed the cast of background sounds and smells. Each morning felt like a clean sheet.

When to Help, When to Go

All week I tried to ride with my head up. I’d pulled over more than once for riders stranded with punctures. Shared a tube, lent a pump.

On Stage 7 I wanted to go full gas and put everything I had left into that final stage. I found a fast group that felt right but after 2 hours, a rider stood off to the side, hand raised for a pump. I sat up, drifted out, and unclipped. The group didn’t slow. I felt the sick drop in my stomach that comes when you watch a good wheel vanish up the road knowing that this person’s flat just cost me my final day of racing with all my heart.

At the shoulder I asked if he was ready for air yet, and there was no answer. I asked again and the answer was “not quite yet”. My pump wouldn’t help for a few more minutes, and this was a fully supported event with plenty of riders still coming. Right then I changed my mind, put the pump away, clipped back in, and chased back onto the group I was with while the rider shouted for me not to leave.

It didn’t feel like indifference. It felt like permission, narrow and specific, to put my own race first on the one day I wanted to empty the tank. I’d done my share of stopping earlier in the week; now the right call was to go. I finished Gravel Burn exactly the way I’d hoped, and with a clearer sense that helping and racing aren’t opposites much in the same way that being there for my family doesn’t have to rule out chasing a big adventure on my own.

The cherry on top (and I couldn't WAIT to tell my kids and wife) was that I won the Challenger jersey that final day, given to the one man and one woman who made the biggest single-day leap in the standings each stage. I had been striving and dreaming of earning it since Day 4 and just barely snagged it that final day.

The Finish and What Followed

We finished at Shamwari Private Game Reserve, and I crossed the line with nothing left that I wished I’d done differently. I’d arrived in South Africa wondering if seven days would break me down for never really stacking training rides further than Friday, Saturday, and Sunday back to back in Wisconsin. Instead I felt proud of my fitness and deeply grateful for my body. If there’s a single word that stayed with me, it’s gratitude. Gratitude for the means to come, for the people who made it possible, for the weather I didn’t get to choose, and for the version of myself that showed up when it mattered.

On the flight home, I paged through the journal, now filled with messy handwriting and thought about how I’d tell the story to the people who’d built it with me from afar. Back home in our kitchen, my kids opened the journal and took turns reading the prompts they’d written. Each line turned into a story I could finally tell them in person. What was South Africa like? Big and dry and full of sky. What was the hardest stage? The hot one with the climb that didn’t blink. What happened today? I raced the way I wanted to and came back whole.

Coming home didn’t feel like the end of something epic or a slide back into “real life.” It felt exactly right. I was ready to be present again and glad for it.