Frozen water isn’t nearly as flat as you might imagine, which becomes an issue when you’re crossing 160km of it on a bicycle. Around me, huge, fractured slabs of Lake Khovsgol, in its solid seasonal form, rear up in jagged stacks, like the ruined battlements of some frost king’s fortress.

Hauling the bike across the most manageable heap, I squint through my balaclava slot at a vast white world, very distantly bound by spindly forests and unclimbed, snow-veined mountains. The frigid desolation is giddying and the silence profound, until the lashes of my left eye freeze together and I break it with a panicky yelp.

Khovsgol is Mongolia’s largest lake by volume and one of the oldest bodies of fresh water on earth, created by tectonic activity more than 2mn years ago. Tucked up by the Russian border near big sister Baikal, it lies in the loneliest corner of a far-flung nation. Getting there from Ulaanbaatar, home to half of Mongolia’s 3mn people and its only international airport, proves a useful preparatory bonding experience for our 30-strong party of participants and crew: a 13-hour minibus convoy, on road surfaces that rack up 12,400 steps on my fitness watch.

It is late February, and the drive is a showcase for Mongolia’s bleak grandeur, an enormity of largely treeless hillsides, stippled with snow, beige grass and the full spectrum of livestock, from yak to camel. There are few settlements: outside the capital, most families still lead semi-nomadic lives, herding animals and pitching gers. It’s not quite a timeless existence. Every household in Mongolia appears to own a Toyota Prius, imported second-hand from Japan, and will merrily employ it to round up their sheep.

Eighteen of us have signed up for the Mongol 100 — a billing derived from Khovsgol’s length in miles — pledging to traverse the frozen lake “by any means necessary”. The event is one of 30 that will be staged this year by a company called Rat Race, most of which combine the thrill of adventure travel with the focus of a tangible physical challenge. The company grew out of the “adventure racing” scene that was developing in the 1990s: long-distance competitions contested by mixed teams, usually in wilderness settings, and typically involving a combination of running, cycling, kayaking, orienteering and perhaps swimming or climbing.

In 2003, sitting in a tent on the Peruvian mountain Alpamayo, 23-year old British climber Jim Mee came up with the idea of the “Rat Race Urban Adventure”, which would bring adventure racing to cities, with events staged over the course of a weekend, thus making it far more accessible to those tied down by jobs and families. Soon, hundreds of enthusiastic teams were abseiling down buildings and orienteering through parks in Edinburgh, Bristol and Manchester, but the company gradually migrated back into the countryside and then, in a pivot adopted even more enthusiastically post-Covid, towards “bucket-list” international adventures. Next year 11,150 people are expected to take part in 40 events that range from running across the Namib desert to a cycle traverse of the Andes. Though the objectives might seem outlandish, most are achievable in a week’s annual leave — Mee calls them “extraordinary adventures for regular folks”.

Our four days on the ice in Mongolia are bookended by two at the start for preparation and two afterwards for recovery. By the time we hit the hard stuff at Khankh, a medieval scatter of wood, canvas and yaks up at the lake’s northern tip, I’ve established that everybody else has chosen their own feet as the necessary means, in two cases with ice skates attached.

Supplied by the organisers, my ride is a fat bike with chunky, nail-studded tyres. It’s my debut on one of these two-wheeled tractors, which proves surprisingly nimble as I thrum noisily along Khankh’s foreshore towards the jaunty little start banner. Glimmering in the dawn sun, Khovsgol stretches endlessly away before us. It’s -12C, and we’re thickly layered in fur and fleece. Breath steams through snoods and balaclavas; our cleated shoe coverings puncture the ice with bubble-wrap pops as we stamp warmth into our feet. A cowbell is rung with vigour, and with a muffled cheer and a chorus of grating swishes, we head out across the ice.

I spend those first hours unlearning many of cycling’s most basic common-sense principles. Instead of avoiding the ominous patches of mirrored black-green ice, I gravitate towards them: on these tyres, the smoother the surface, the better the grip. You also need to go faster when you want to go slower, ironing out slips and wobbles that at low speeds can pitch you over. Yet you must do so with only the gentlest inputs from your hands and feet. Press too eagerly on the pedals and the back wheel slides round to say hello; the front says goodbye with anything more than the tiniest twitch of the handlebars. The do’s and don’ts of braking: don’t brake.

If you don’t like freeze-dried food and can’t handle eight days without a shower, this is not the trip for you.

Yet even a slow and nervous cyclist will outpace any pedestrian, and after a very ginger start, I apologetically reel in the field. Ahead of the walkers are a pair of very determined runners; ahead of them are the two skaters. Both power across the ice with a graceful composure that defies their inexperience. One had prepared with no more than a couple of laps around his local rink in the Midlands. The other had just put on skates for the first time in his life.

Such were my remarkable fellow participants: a mix of ages, genders and backgrounds, brought together by a shared passion for gung-ho, spartan adventure. If you aren’t up for a pretty hefty physical challenge, don’t like freeze-dried pouch food and can’t handle eight days without a shower, this is not the trip for you.

Our minibuses have gone on ahead, erecting red kite banners to plot our course, and setting up pit stops where we’re plied with calories, hot fluid and encouragement. An hour or so beyond the second of these, I spot a huddle of tall white cones among the snow-wigged shoreline pines, each sprouting a neat coil of woodsmoke. A welcome volley of whoops and cowbells confirms I’ve reached our tepee camp. Time and distance seem governed by different rules on the ice, thwarting all attempts to gauge progress across a feature-free void. It feels as if I’ve been out there for 10 hours and covered 100km; in fact it’s four and 40.

Beer in hand, I sit by my tepee’s stove, pull up the canvas door flap and watch the rest of the field run, jog and shuffle in under a setting sun. Bringing up the rear is our winsome broom wagon, a horse-drawn wooden sled with a couple of weary stragglers on board. Ahead lies an evening of freeze-dried fireside feasting, beneath a profusion of stars. Vodka-wise, there’s a balance to be struck: enough to take the edge off those close-quarter snuffles in your five-person tepee, not so much that you spend half the night trooping to and from a demarcated hole in the cold, black woods.

The Mongolians in our support crew are a perennial astonishment: erecting and dismantling our nightly camps at fast-forward speed; knocking up an epic fire from huge lengths of tree, then bunging a Soviet-era pressure cooker on it, abrim with reindeer stew. They wear extravagant fur-lined robes and hats, but never gloves, not while securing our water supply by chain-sawing a hole in the ice, nor while manually repositioning the red-hot woodburner in my tepee. At first they seem bemused by our mission, by the fact that people from very far away would spend a lot of money to wobble and blunder across this most hostile of environments. But we win them round with our sheer indefatigability, plus a few rounds of campfire vodka and a go on my bike.

The days begin in shuddering cold, filling our bottles with smoke-flavoured lake water boiled up on the breakfast fire. On some mornings the ice seems alarmingly fragile, fracturing under my front wheel with a reedy tinkle as little cracks shoot jaggedly away in all directions. Scarier still are the distant artillery booms that thunder out as the ice rears up and shatters, bullied to breaking point by compressive temperature shifts or the currents that surge beneath it. The smaller catastrophes leave the white plain decorously strewn with a million glinting shards, as if someone had dropped a chandelier from an airship. The more brutal have me dragging the bike through mile-long quarries of frozen rubble.

There are mesmerising sections of deep, dark emerald ice shot through with veins, like transparent marble or a shattered-windscreen hall of mirrors. I judder over flash-frozen ripples and wavelets, and cratered moonscapes clumped with wind-sculpted Henry Moore snowmen. My hanky freezes to cardboard; my phone periodically dies of cold. There are no daydreams on this journey, no moments of mind-wandering distraction. For every single second of every single day you are thrillingly, viscerally aware that you’re in outer Mongolia, crossing an enormous frozen lake.

Of course, there are times when the glacial isolation gets to me. I linger at the pit stops, havens of sweet blueberry tea and human contact, and begin to envy the walkers and runners, who coalesce into chatty, pace-matched pairs or trios. My social routine becomes weirdly binary: I’m either smothered with company, crammed together under canvas or round a heap of blazing pine trunks, or the only man alive on God’s frozen earth.

“The days begin in shuddering cold and the ice seems alarmingly fragile, fracturing under my front wheel”

On the second day a bullying sidewind knocks me over a few times, and I’m beaten to the finish by one of the power runners. The day after, our route overlaps with an unofficial ice road and we encounter the occasional slithering Prius. One afternoon, beside a little pine-clustered hump of an island in the middle of the lake, we arrive to find our tepees pitched on the ice. A pre-dinner doze is cut short by an apocalyptic shuddering boom that segues into a symphony of whiplash cracks, muffled aquatic slooshes and ethereal rustles.

Parting tepee flaps we see our Mongolians staring doubtfully into a jagged fissure that has ripped the ice asunder a few metres offshore. It transpires this wasn’t a standard glacial event but an earthquake, which we later find notched 4.8 on the Richter scale. With parts of Khovsgol already beginning to thaw — it is usually frozen from November to April — this news doesn’t ensure a perfect night’s sleep. The next morning we awake to find the wood burner, solicitously fed by the crew through the night, has liquefied our tepee floor.

On the final day, the trail-finding lead minibus encounters patches of open water and our route is redrafted on the hoof. Khovsgol narrows as we approach the town of Hatgal, where an annual ice festival is in full swing, luring giggly pedestrians and pirouetting novice drivers out on to the frozen water. After all that deserted wilderness, the clamour is almost overwhelming. Just past a jetty where summer ferries and derelict cargo hulks stand entombed in the ice, I am politely accosted by a family who are intrigued by my bike, prodding its bulbous, armoured tyres with ungloved fingers. They all want a quick spin, and several selfies. The Mongol 100 finish banner is already in sight, and a belated bunching of the field means I cross it three abreast with a runner and one of our skaters, amid a cacophony of whoops and cowbells.

Achievement comes mixed with relief, and a dose of regret as we watch the balance of our expeditionary force stride, slide and stumble over the line. That’s the trouble with any shared endeavour, particularly when it’s played out in a slightly terrifying wilderness. It’s as if I’ve just been through a very intensive and hugely over-engineered team-building challenge with people I’d never previously met, but now can’t imagine ever being apart from.

Details

Tim Moore was a guest of Rat Race (ratrace.com). Entry to the Mongol 100 costs $4,750, including accommodation, guides, vehicle support, all meals and transfers but not flights. The next Mongol 100 events start on February 25, 2024 and March 2, 2025.