The Slovenian Arrow

Pick your poison

Just before the starting gun, we get a moment to take in the race parameters by opening the famous red envelopes. The pack offers three route options, each consisting of a pair of checkpoints. Green: south through France — Lyon, then back east across Germany via Ulm. Red: Mulhouse on the French–Swiss border, then Campione d'Italia — a tiny Italian enclave marooned on the shore of a Swiss lake. Blue: the long northern loop through Germany — Stade, near Hamburg on the North Sea side, and Meißen, near Dresden in the east.

Whichever you chose, the routes then funnelled together: Salzburg in Austria, the basilica in Esztergom on Hungary's Danube bend, Varaždin in northern Croatia — and only then Ljubljana.

At this point, I’m just glad not to see any checkpoints listed at close range, meaning I can rely on my pre-race homework.

The city in between

My train out of Brussels to Paris didn't leave until 12:13, which gave me an hour to watch what everyone else was doing. Some of my fiercest rivals — Reuben, and chalkysbutchers — filed onto the Cologne train departing at 11:25, the German blue route. It genuinely surprised me: so much could go wrong on it, and even at its flawless best I couldn't make the numbers competitive. Yes, there is some value in minimising time stood still, and planning on the go is often better than taking too long evaluating options, but the difference seemed reasonably clear, all I could do is wonder if I'd missed something.

The Eurostar down to Gare du Nord involved first-class hospitality as we were plied with roast beef, wine and cheese. My table-mate: none other than Domino — one of the real characters of our strange little sport. For an hour it felt less like a race than a good train with good company. It’s easy to confide in racers who compete in another category.

Paris undid the good vibes quickly. Only stepping onto the platform did we learn the RER D wasn't running — the way across the city we'd planned on was simply gone. I’d excessively relied on prior knowledge and failed to check for conditions on the day. No phone signal to summon a cab, and the taxi ranks jammed solid; eventually between us we caught a taxi at last, heading across the city from Gare du Nord to Gare de Lyon, Domino settling the fare and pulling in with only minutes to spare.

Here is the mistake I didn't see until later. Ask a route planner for the Red route and it hands you the same answer every time: sit in Brussels until 13:17, take TGV 9874 through to Strasbourg at 17:37, and reach Mulhouse at 18:44. It will not send you via Paris, because it pads the Gare du Nord–Gare de l'Est transfer to half an hour or more when the two stations sit barely 400 m apart — a five-minute walk. Pad that, and the Paris route looks impossible, so the planner quietly ignores it.

But back in June I'd already identified and made a reservation for TGV 9575, the 13:52 out of Gare de l'Est towards Strasbourg which would unlock Mulhouse by 16:45 — two hours better than anything a planner would show me, and reachable from the Eurostar I was already on. Boarding at 12:13 hadn't necessarily committed me to Green at all: I could ride to Paris, watch how the field moved, and still take the Red route. I had that card in my pocket all morning and never once turned it over.

But I was mentally all-in on Green. I'd spent the Brussels train chatting with Domino and mapping my moves beyond Lyon, when I should have been doing the calculated move: firming up whether Red was truly out of the window, or quietly sharpening into the faster route. I didn't. It's the kind of error that could turn out to be catastrophic.

The fire drill

By Strasbourg it was dark, and the day had gone almost exactly to plan. Not for much longer. The first wind of an issue presented itself at 21:47 on the Flixbus app: the expected departure to Karlsruhe 22:50 struck through, 23:39 in its place, Karlsruhe at 00:48. At 22:07, one minute after I stepped off the train in Strasbourg, Flix followed up with an email: Hello from Flix. Your trip on line N880 is currently running about 63 minutes late. That single coach was the weakest link in the whole itinerary, the hinge the whole German leg depended on.

So I bought some alternative tickets onward from Karlsruhe as insurance to cope with the eventuality of a late arrival, but they were sub-optimal, either one would see me hit Salzburg around 09:55.

We went to the bus station anyway to see what else was running. The local buses were still running, and everyone piled aboard in a tight, good-humoured crush; one was signed for Rotterdam — not the Dutch port, of course, just a housing estate up the road wearing its name. Strasbourg has its little jokes.

Here is what made the situation frightening: there was no alternative to the Strasbourg–Karlsruhe Flixbus. It was the last thing moving from Strasbourg toward Germany that night — no later train, no other route. If it simply never came, I was sleeping on a bench in Karlsruhe and starting again in the morning, hours down.

And then, at 22:31, the coach simply arrived — nine minutes ahead of its scheduled arrival, never mind the sixty-three it was supposed to be down. The whole delay had been a phantom. We pulled out at 22:57, seven minutes late, and against a thirty-eight-minute buffer at Karlsruhe that cost precisely nothing.

The first real minutes lost

Heidelberg at twenty past two, and here the German rails finally showed their true colours: ICE 619 came in nearly half an hour late — the first real delay of my race, nothing to be done about it.

So we waited, and the platform was sparsely populated, 5 other racers still doing the same Green route. Ian and David, racing as a pair; Isaac and Chris, a father and son; Tal. It is an odd fellowship, standing on a platform at two in the early hours with the people you want to finish ahead of. I was worried about finding enough electrical power to finish the race — the USB charger was four hundred miles behind me under a table on the Frecciarossa — and it was Isaac and Chris who produced a spare and handed it over without a second thought. They would lose an hour or two of their own race a few hours later. I have not forgotten their kindness.

Then the train south, with thirty minutes of German delay riding along with us. I didn't sleep, which didn't much matter — this is not my first one of these, and a night without sleep is just part of the format.

Taxi turnaround

Into Salzburg at 08:58, and an urgent choice: a steady amble from the station to the Mozartsteg bridge and back for the safe train, or push for a twenty-four-minute turnaround to catch an earlier one. I took the gamble; not for the minutes, but for what the earlier train would accomplish downstream, avoiding a change so tight I didn't want it hanging over my afternoon. Taxi it is, the driver expertly navigating the city streets. Made it to the bridge just after Ian and David who had employed a driver of their own.

What I could not see, standing on that bridge, was that Fernando had already been and gone — through the same checkpoint at 08:08, a clear hour ahead of me. The number I had run on the Lyon platform was not pessimism. It was simply correct, and I was the one playing catch-up.

I made it back to the station ahead of Ian and David, but they overtook me on the way up the platform steps for the 09:22 which we caught with a minute or so to spare.

Tal looked at the same twenty minutes and decided it could not be done — that the run to the Mozartsteg and back simply would not fit — and stayed with the safe train. A perfectly reasonable read. Unfortunately for him, it also ended his race at the front: we did not see him again.

The unorthodox gamble

The check-in zone for this checkpoint sat oddly large on the map — large enough to reach the railway on the Slovak bank — and the basilica stands high enough on its hill to dominate the landscape. Might it be possible to claim it from long distance? Perhaps even without ever leaving the moving train. Ian had coined the idea; none of us could tell for sure whether it would really work. At Štúrovo, he and David stepped off the train to do it properly, on foot. I had worked out from Google Earth that the elevation profile ought to be favourable, and seconds before we pulled into Štúrovo, I found some first-hand reports from passengers on this line reporting sighting the Basilica. I stayed in my seat. If this worked, I kept the whole chain to Budapest and lost nothing; if it failed, I would have burned the checkpoint with a river between me and any second attempt, necessitating a timewasting loop back to Esztergom. That was the trade, and I took it.

It nearly fell apart in my hands. The phone was overheating in the afternoon heat, the camera stuttering, refusing to fire. I got one frame of the basilica away — but I was still outside the zone. I begged the app to check me in, and somehow it took. Then: trees. Trees, trees, trees. The sightlines were impeded by all the vegetation immediately next to the track? Am I going to mess this up? A sudden clear view — and I had the camera pointing the wrong way and took a selfie of myself. Then, just as we slid out of the far edge of the zone, one last snap: the dome breaking through the treeline, caught at last.

Done: a checkpoint claimed from a train on the move, using a phone that was trying to die in my hand.

And still I gave the rest of the chain no real credit. The coach, the gate, the 06:10 — too many links, too little slack. The ride-through had bought me a ticket to try; that was all I could do.

The net draws in

Budapest, then the coach south — Fernando, Laura and me — annoyingly passing within 8 km of Varaždin without stopping, because at that hour nothing does; you can only reach it by overshooting to Zagreb and going back. Into Zagreb dead on time, and then a mile or so walk from the bus station to the train station, the air still balmy.

I made it to the modern Croatian railways train to Zabok first, but it was not a surprise when Fernando and Laura joined, 5 minutes or so before departure.

Half an hour I never took

First light, back in Zagreb — and the bus station was teeming with racers, including those on the Blue route. In my sleep-deprived state, my stomach dropped: had the whole field somehow got ahead of me overnight? Then it clicked — most of them hadn't been to Varaždin yet, only now setting out for the checkpoint I'd claimed hours earlier. I was still in front.

The train back had done its job perfectly: out of Varaždin at three, through Zabok, into Zagreb Glavni at 05:34, dead on time. Nothing had gone wrong. And then, at 05:34 — as I stepped onto the platform — the email arrived. Your FlixBus trip on line N1900 to Ljubljana bus station is currently running about 121 minutes late. The coach I had built the whole ending around was two hours dead.

There was nothing to do except wait for the 07:15. The delay let two people back into the fight: Ian and David, and no one else. Truth of the matter is that even with a ten minute delay to the 06:10 Zagreb–Ljubljana bus they would have been able to catch up, so it was hardly unexpected.

Here is the part that stings, and it is not about speed. My train stopped at Zaprešić at 05:12, two stations short of Zagreb. From that same platform, at 05:18, a little local branch peels off up the Sutla valley — Savski Marof, Laduč, Sutla — and reaches Harmiča on the border at 05:32. From there it is a short walk over the river to Dobova and a Slovenian train that would have set me down in Ljubljana around nine. Half an hour better than the route we ended up taking, off a platform I was standing on.

The email arrived at 05:34. The branch train had left Zaprešić at 05:18 — sixteen minutes earlier. Had I known about the delay in time, I could have chosen that route. Instead, I was pulling into Zagreb Glavni holding a plan that had just died, with the fork already behind me.