A familiar finish line<\/p>\n
In fact, over a week after leaving Victoria, B.C. Rob\u2019s Big Ride Home finished, quite literally, at his parent\u2019s door step.<\/p>\n
\u201cFinishing in Regina was wild,\u201d Rob says of his must unassuming finish line yet. \u201cYou ride your bike pretty much the entire way across western Canada then roll up and finish with my mom, my dad, my sisters, my nieces, my best friend. It was really cool.\u201d<\/p>\n
Whatever his exact ride time was, it\u2019s not a route any one else is going to repeat. For Britton, that makes his Big Ride Home stand out among his many palmares.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo one\u2019s really going to get it, other than me, right? It\u2019s not their home. It\u2019s my home,\u201d Britton says. \u201cI wanted to do this because I\u2019ve biked all over the world, I\u2019ve traveled the planet as a pro. But we live in one of the biggest countries in the world and I just experienced big chunks of it.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Big Ride Home is the latest step in Britton\u2019s move away from the regimented world of road racing. The idea for the route, though, started five years ago. Back then, he was still officially in Rally kit. When the pandemic hit, Britton was, like other pros with no races to race, looking for some way to stay on the scene.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m probably the only professional rider, I think, that didn\u2019t do an Everesting challenge during COVID,\u201d Britton jokes. Instead, he was drawn into a challenge called Parallels, put on by Apidura. The idea was to see how far you could ride in a straight line, \u201cas the crow flies,\u201d over 24 hours of the summer solstice.<\/p>\n Britton rode the length of Vancouver Island with Taylor Little, a friend from his days of junior racing on the prairies. It was Little\u2019s idea that the ride could benefit WIRTH, an organisation that provides access to mental health supports for those that cannot otherwise afford them. Five years later, The Big Ride Home is still raising support for WIRTH<\/a>. Along with the connection to WIRTH, the Parallel\u2019s ride started Britton on his path to really big, long gravel rides.<\/p>\n \u201cBut I started to go down this rabbit hole of these mage-long rides. One of the ones I planned was around my friends. Jamie, from Calgary, Taylor from Edmonton. I was from Regina. We could ride home to visit our folks,\u201d Britton says. \u201cThey were definitely not interested in riding that long. They both have families and kids and jobs that make that almost impossible.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Big Ride Home becomes a reality<\/p>\n Five years later, with the road racing scene in the rear view mirror, that sort of adventure ride is exactly what Britton\u2019s job is. When a sponsor suggested a similar idea, kind of off-hand, it was all the push Britton needed to make Big Ride Home finally happen.<\/p>\n \u201cI just kind of chucked and said, \u2018funny you should mention that,’\u201d Britton says. And then he got to work, digging into maps and charging out a route.<\/p>\n \u201cOnce I got my teeth into it and started thinking about it and planning, it\u2019s really hard to switch that off,\u201d Britton admits.<\/p>\n Matt Clark, of Stirl and Rae Media Haus, who has worked with Britton on past media projects, signed on for the only nine days he had free all summer. The two put together a minimalist plan, splitting accommodation and gas, and got the project done just on time for Clark to fly out of Regina the same day they arrived. The result, titled\u00a0No Place Like Home,\u00a0will premier this Wednesday in Victoria<\/a>.<\/p>\n Unlike race courses and FKT routes, Britton had to map out the Big Ride Home himself. Avoiding highways meant heading into the expansive wilderness and open spaces of B.C., Alberta and Saskatchewan, some known and many unknown.<\/p>\n How do you plot a 2,600-km-route?<\/p>\n \u201cAs I\u2019ve said before, I\u2019m really good at bad ideas,\u201d Britton says. The route was more focused on the experience than any sense of efficiency.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cB.C. was pretty dialled, pretty specific on where I wanted to go. But it\u2019s Canada, right? There\u2019s just huge gaps between places where you can spend the night. Sometimes its hundreds of kilometres before you\u2019re in a spot with a hotel and a restaurant.\u201d<\/p>\n After B.C.\u2019s mountains, the prairies presented their own challenges.<\/p>\n \u201cI remember mapping out and adding turns, just to break the monotony. Because you can, from Lethbridge to Moose Jaw, you can just kind of go east and not turn. It\u2019s wild.\u201d<\/p>\n While the wide open spaces looked straight forward, quite literally, on paper, the prairies threw up their own unexpected challenges.<\/p>\n \u201cStrava, and I can say this because Strava won\u2019t give me a pro account, some of their mapping software is just garbage,\u201d Britton says, again with a bit of a laugh. \u201cIt won\u2019t let me map the ride through places I\u2019ve ridden hundreds of times. Completely legal, like a bike lane next to my house. But it put me down roads that have been closed for years. One bridge was out. One was now a swamp. Another went into a farm. Just a persons farm. I started to feel weird about the road, then I was just in their yard. Thanks, Strava, I appreciate that one.\u201d<\/p>\n Other challenges were less predictable. One trail through Cypress Hills looked great online but, in reality, had literally gone to the cows. \u201cIt\u2019s clearly been used as a free range cattle pasture. It was like riding through a mine field. It felt like my fillings were going to shake out of my head and it took me, no joke, two hours to go 23 km. Three or four years ago, that trail probably would have been insanely fun.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Then there was finding out his cell phone carrier didn\u2019t have coverage for an area covering 2-3 days of the route through the southern prairies. Or missing that another day\u2019s route didn\u2019t pass through a single town.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t know how I missed that one, but here was nothing. It was 30-40km off route, north or south, to the nearest town. It was 280km and the first really hot day, and I was stuck relying on Clark in the truck for water. That was stressful.\u201d<\/p>\n Along with the perils, there were unexpected pearls.<\/p>\n \u201cWe rolled into a place called Shaunavon in Saskatchewan. Unless you\u2019re from Sask, you have no idea where that is. I didn\u2019t. But there\u2019s a restaurant there that\u2019s been voted the best restaurant in Saskatchewan multiple years. It\u2019s in this persons very unassuming, vinyl-siding house. But inside, it\u2019s very nice. Very good service, and the food is unbelievable. I had one of the best steak tartare of my life in rural Saskatchewan.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n A Big ride defined by small moments<\/p>\n That one, amazing steak tartare was mixed in with endless moments along the way, the kind of moments that Britton doesn\u2019t usually get the luxury of enjoying when he\u2019s racing against the clock.<\/p>\n \u201cThere were times where I just stopped to look at something an enjoy it, or go over to the side of the road and have an ice cream and a coke. I spent so much time racing on the road where I didn\u2019t appreciate hardly any of it. Even now, like with Unbound XL or Badlands, I look at the videos from them\u201d and, Britton says, \u201cThey\u2019re hilarious because I look at them after and I don\u2019t remember any of that.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n For Big Ride Home, Britton had a different experience in mind.<\/p>\n \u2018I never wanted it to be, like, how fast could I do this? I think I still did it quickly, but I didn\u2019t want to shatter myself. This wasn\u2019t supposed to be that kind of ride.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n After the Big Ride Home, Britton returned to his new home on the west coast. Just a few days after his massive effort, he raced the RBC Gran Fondo Whistler\u2019s Forte distance. While not an international event, and almost the opposite event to his multi-day gravel expedition, for Britton, it was the company that race stand out. Taylor Little finished second.<\/p>\n \u201cI think that was the first time in our whole lives were we were on the podium together. Stuff like that, that\u2019s the best, thats really, really important to me,\u201d Britton shares.\u00a0\u201cBeing able to stay at my friends house, where we grew up racing together, and ride to the start line of an event, it\u2019s important for me to do stuff like that now.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Britton\u2019s ride and race calendar now is quite the opposite of his professional road days. That variety is, he says, very intentional.<\/p>\n \u201cBike racing on the road is the same thing over and over again. But now, I get to choose a lot more stuff, and I\u2019m in charge of a lot, like, basically my destiny a lot more. It\u2019s great getting to do stuff with with my friends and, like, seeing my family and all this stuff is amazing.\u201d<\/p>\n Riding across three provinces (and winning the 152km Whistler fondo) also sounds really hard, for a post-racing way to enjoy riding a bike. While Britton\u2019s not racing road, he has no plans on taking it easy any time soon.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI realized a long time ago that I just am a glutton for punishment. I don\u2019t think I can do simple or easy very well. I have lots of options to take a little more relaxed approach, but that doesn\u2019t really work out very well,\u201d Britton admits. \u201cSo as much as I joke about, like, my wife being a doctor, then I can actually retire, I think I\u2019d last about an hour before I went crazy.\u201d<\/p>\n No Place Like Home\u00a0debuts Wednesday, Nov. 5 at Whistle Buoy Brewing in Victoria, B.C.<\/a> with tickets going to support Triple Shot youth racing program. Britton\u2019s donation page for WIRTH remains open<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This one was massive, even by Unbound XL winner Rob Britton\u2019s outsized standards. 2,600 km. A staggering 26,000m…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":261835,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[445],"tags":[121289,49,48,635,113112,10599,121290,24373,82],"class_list":["post-261834","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cycling","tag-big-ride-home","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-cycling","tag-gravel-features","tag-regina","tag-rob-britton","tag-saskatchewan","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261834","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=261834"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261834\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/261835"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=261834"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=261834"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=261834"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/Rob-Britton-Home-photo-Matt-Clark-StirlandRaemediahaus-25.jpeg\")
<\/a>Photo: Matt Clark StirlandRaemediahaus
\nA ride five years in the making<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/Rob-Britton-Home-photo-Matt-Clark-StirlandRaemediahaus-26.jpeg\")
<\/a>Photo: Matt Clark StirlandRaemediahaus
\nThe perils \u2013 and pearls \u2013 of plotting a precise route across Canada\u2019s vast open spaces<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/Rob-Britton-Fondo-Whistler-photo-BICI-.jpeg\")
<\/a>Taylor Little, left and Rob Britton, center at RBC Gran Fondo Whistler with BICI\u2019s Ryan Anderson.
\nA podium decades in the making<\/p>\n