“I HAVE NEVER experienced the sensation of literally wanting to crawl under a tree and die with such frequency and ferocity as I have over the past couple of days,” wrote Emma Flukes on her Instagram (@oneflukeshot) back in September 2018.
She was in the middle of her first-ever endurance bike ride, the 2018 Race to The Rock – 3,602 km from Cockle Creek in far-south Tasmania to Uluru in the Northern Territory. And while it might not sound like it by her reflections at the time (nor, I imagine, have felt like it) – that was the adventure that kickstarted a love of bikepacking that would see Emma, within just a couple of years, become one of the most renowned and experienced endurance cyclists in the country.
A marine ecologist by day, Hobart-based Emma finished her PhD in environmental science back in 2015, when she was 24 years old. While she’d always been active, including as an internationally competitive sailor as a teen, cycling had never been her sport of choice. “I hadn’t been on a bike since I was about 10 years old,” she says.
Like riding a bike
However, towards the end of her PhD – on the insistence of a mate – Emma started dabbling in a bit of bike riding. She started out on a road
