‘What a riveting and illuminating book! Peaking moves with agile grace between memoir, history, art and the natural world in this far-reaching meditation on testing the body. It’s brilliant on exhilaration and fear – and everything else Saskia Beudel encounters along her way.’
Michelle de Kretser, author of Questions of Travel and Theory & Practice
‘Woven through this gripping account of a precipitous marathon ride is an artfully distilled personal and cultural history of cycling. Peaking draws surprising connections between early stories of women cyclists, time, weather, ageing, memory and emotion. Here is Beudel’s grandmother in her “outdoor wheelchair”. Here is Simone de Beauvoir riding through the French Alps on a cumbersome bike with patchy wartime tyres. And here’s Beudel’s training diary of doubts, suffering and risk, as the turmoil of inner life gives way to a marvellously shifting outer world. In Peaking, cycling is a joyful act of communal striving and personal sovereignty.’
Mireille Juchau, author of The World Without Us
‘Peaking is a remarkable journey of both writing and endurance. This is the story of a determined woman, a pushbike and the love of Country. It is also an exercise in storytelling, of narratives embedded in our bodies and landscapes.’
Tony Birch, author of Women & Children
One woman’s genre-defying account of training for a gruelling alpine bicycle challenge
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 under 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)?
