In September of 2025 I was part of the media team covering the Alps Divide Ultra Cycling event. A 1000km off-road ultra bike packing event from Menton on the Mediterranean coast of France to Thonon-Les-Bains on the shores of Lac Leman. This is a series of interviews, footage and race commentary that originally went live on both my Instagram and the DotWatcher.cc Instagram to provide ongoing insight into the race.
In this clip I chat to ReiRey about their reasons for coming over to Europe from the US to take part in the race.
Yeah. Uh, my cup number is 62, right? Yeah. Yeah. Okay, good. I can confirm. My name is Lraena Reyes. I go by Ray Ray. Um, and I’m from Flagstaff, Arizona. Um, which is the high desert and uh really enjoy um riding technical terrain and I love journeying from one place to the next on my bike. Awesome. Well, look, great to have you over here from the US. Uh, what brought you to this race? Um, I went on a deep dive um, social media tour of all of the bike packing races I could find and this one just struck me. Um, the images were beautiful and I have lineage from a generation ago. Um, my father is from Portugal and his family um, was in the north um, and talked a lot about the Alps and so growing up I’ve just always dreamed of coming here. Wow. Amazing. And um I wrote uh Katie Lee and the race was closed and I came back from um another race and found an email in my inbox that said that there was a spot that had opened and so I’ve pushed in every way to get here to do it. Oh, amazing. What a story. Uh so this is this your first time in the French Alps? First time in Europe. First time in the French Alps. Wow. Amazing. And I I mean I guess you know we come here all the time so we it’s it’s all very familiar to us. What are you what are you expecting? Um to take a day at a time and uh believe it or not to remind myself to slow down. Um race pace is always a goal of mine but I think for this particular time I just want to take in as many uh joy nuggets as I can. There’s just so much to see and um hopefully I’ll pedal quickly through that, but um taking lots of pictures and being present in the moment. Awesome. Have you had a chance to look through much of the route? Are you well prepped? I feel pretty well prepped. Uh most of the names um aren’t familiar to me. So, they all kind of look the same, but the regions and the zones and the elevation gain I feel good about. And I’m excited to have such frequent water resupply. Um, where I’m from, that’s very rare. Yeah. So, I’m used to carrying up to six lers at a time. Right. Okay. Yeah. No need no need for that here. France is great in that, you know, every single town will have a little fountain that you can fill up from. Um, cool. And mountain bike or gravel bike? Mountain bike. Full suspension. I was going to say next question. Full sauce or heart tail? Full sauce? Full suspension. Good. Excellent. Well, look, Ray, Ray, great to talk to you. Have an amazing race and hopefully I shall see you out there on the road. You will, Neil. Awesome. Thank you.