all images by Erik Peterson unless stated.
He was the last to arrive, bedraggled and leathered, haggard and weathered, skin red where it had been exposed and almost ghost-white everywhere else, lips cracked and eyes shot with fine, wayward lines of blood. Had it not been for the lycra you’d have guessed he’d spent the past 5 days at sea, battered at night from raging waves and scorched in the daytime by the fiercest sun.
Last he may have been but he rode into camp that penultimate day not as a pauper but as a king, like a man who had crossed a desert, forded rivers and ascended to the heavens. Which, of course, he had. The camp, most already showered and fed long before, watched the blurred silhouette on the horizon grow until it became a man on a bike, then whooped and hollered as he crossed the line with an exhausted one-armed salute to his tribe.
Crank Punk Coaching Systems for the GENCO Mongolia Bike Challenge 2014 