Claudio Treig once made a living competing in a race that is 750 metres long. The sprint race on a velodrome is a paradox – months of preparation all culminate in under 60 intense seconds. Now retired from professional racing, he will ride 750 kilometres across South Africa’s Karoo, from Graaff Reinet to Shamwari Private Game Reserve, where the landscape passes slowly and the horizon stretches further away, the longer you look. 

In 1999 he was crowned Swiss National Track Champion. No mean feat in a country that’s produced numerous Olympic medals in cycling. He’s raced World Cups and lined up at several World and European Championships. In his chosen discipline, everything depends on a brief, violent effort, what Treig describes as “maximum output performance over just a handful of seconds.” 

For a long time those seconds defined his relationship with cycling. The precision, the speed, the strange intensity of a sport where an entire season, not to mention a rider’s career, can hinge off a single acceleration.

He recalls clearly how it ended. His team was unstable, and racing no longer felt like it once had.

“At that point I still loved cycling but was really done with racing – narrowly missed the Olympics, my team was in financial troubles and I didn’t enjoy racing anymore at all. So it was quite a relief when I ended my career.”

Nearly twenty five years later, and approaching fifty, Claudio Treig is preparing to pin on a race number again.

“After all these years it’s the complete opposite,” he says. “I feel so excited about lining up at the starting line, because it feels more like an adventure.”

Instead of explosive moments on a smooth wooden surface indoors, it’ll be hours and hours on gravel, heat lifting from the road, wind moving across the open plains and fatigue building slowly across the week. “A lot can happen within seven stages,” he says. “The mental game will be very different to what I was used to. Plus there is time to look around and enjoy the scenery.”

Till now he’s kept his participation mostly to himself. “I’ve only told my closest friends,” he says. “It feels a bit like my very own journey. I want to experience it first before everyone else has an opinion.” That changes now.

“I’m pretty sure that all my friends will call me a crazy dude when they realize what I’ll be doing out there in late October! A track sprinter out on the semi-desert gravel…”

It will be his fourth visit to South Africa, but the first time arriving with a bike. What draws him is not only the endeavour of a seven-day challenge but the scale of the landscape itself, gravel roads stretching across the Karoo for hours without interruption, riders setting off alone and gradually becoming part of a shared story.

“I know that I’ll be part of something bigger,” he says. “Even if I have an individual race number on my back, I’ll enjoy it and share it with all the other riders out on the roads and also in those remote camps each evening.”

When the week finally ends at Shamwari Private Game Reserve, there will be an ice cold beer first. Then he will make an important phone call.

“She’s my biggest supporter,” he says of his wife, Petra. “She’s the one who came up with the idea of signing me up for Gravel Burn!”