The Art of Learning Through Action

Vedangi Kulkarni is sitting in front of an impressive array of bikes as our Zoom call connects. Her cheeks are rosy pink thanks to sun and wind burn she collected on a recent trip across Svalbard in Norway’s Arctic North. Now though, Vedangi is in her office/bike workshop/spare room and over the duration of our conversation I get an impromptu tour of the room as she darts around, swapping from her desk to sitting on the floor. She pulls a bobble hat on, takes it off; spins around and reveals a large world map on the wall. She crosses her legs, stretches her arms. Kulkarni has energy to burn at every turn. 

Early in the morning, Vedangi wheels her mountain bike out of the house, and through the back gate. She has only been in Inverness since January, but has quickly got to know the quickest route to the trails. Cutting through streets and parks on the outskirts of Inverness, it isn’t long before she’s climbing through the commercial forest at the base of the ‘Mast trails’ (so named thanks to the large communications mast at the top of the hill). Spring comes late this far north and the bluebells are still in full bloom; bright violet contrasting with the sunshine yellow of the ever-present gorse flowers above the treeline. Cresting the climb, Vedangi is greeted with a hundred options. Threads of singletrack tumble down the hillside – each built by locals – each with their own personality, from high speed flow to assault-on-the-senses rocky steepness. Kulkarni rolls down a whale-back of bedrock, feathering her brakes as she transitions from rock to loamy earth. Despite racking up hundreds of thousands of miles in the saddle, she is a relative newcomer to mountain biking. Every ride is an adventure in discovering new limits; which is what Kulkarni lives for.

Our conversation pings from one subject to another in a similar manner; like one of those bouncy balls from your childhood, somehow magically finding more momentum as it launches in a new found direction. I find myself frantically typing trying to keep up with the stream of consciousness, making notes of off-the-cuff comments that I want to return to: whether that is mundane insights or, y’know, small stuff like riding around the world or “I’m hoping to climb Denali this year” or the two races she is planning on organising in 2022. Three hours later, as the call finally disconnects, I sit back in my chair, exhausted but energised. Meanwhile Kulkarni is heading out on her second ride of the day. “I just love it, Tom. I just need to decide what bike to ride.”

And riding bikes is as good a place as any to start Vedangi’s story. She was born and grew up in India, on the outskirts of a city called Pune, which is a hundred miles or so inland from Mumbai. As a child and teenager she loved football, eventually playing it professionally for a while, and used a bike to commute to training. That bike then became a tool to explore further afield on longer and longer rides, until at the age of seventeen, she decided to ride across the Himalaya. 

“I’d looked at these guided groups, but they all said I was too young to do the ride, so I decided to do it by myself. My parents were understandably very protective, but also wanted to be supportive. So in the end, we reached a compromise where they would drive the route and maybe see me at the end of each day. The route was around 800km and went over these four big passes. But I rode it all, just out there by myself most of the time and I think that it was those experiences that awakened the true desire to explore more”.

A year later, Vedangi had moved to the UK to go to university in Bournemouth and study Sports Management. Her £100 hybrid felt like the perfect tool to explore her new home; in the widest sense of the word.

“I set off with a kind of plan to ride to London and back, but I’d got this big map of the UK with me. The first night I realised my lights were so bad I couldn’t carry on in the dark and knocked on the door of a friendly looking home. They took me in, and asked me where I was going. We laid the map out and I’d heard of John O’Groats, so I pointed there. We worked out a kind of route and that’s what I did.”

It was during this ride – with its associated (mis)adventures like negotiating city centres and accidental motorway excursions, cold nights huddled in bus shelters in just the clothes she was riding in, and discovering a country whose landscape, culture and climate was so far removed from the one she had grown up in – that Vedangi realised that this was what she wanted to do. She wanted to travel more, see the world, and the bike could be the tool by which she did it. 

“That ride completely redefined what I thought I could do. I’d keep on finding these new limits and exceeding them over and over again. I discovered a mental resilience, but also a sheer love for the solitude and the sense of purpose that long distance riding brings. It was also during this trip that I was inspired to ride around the world.”

Call over, but with hours of daylight left, Kulkarni grabs her gravel bike and loads it up with a minimal overnight setup. Stuffed inside a bar-roll and saddle pack is a bivvy bag, sleeping bag and mat; and a little food. Heading south-west of Inverness, she dives onto deserted singletrack roads at the earliest opportunity, tugging her jacket hood over her helmet as squalls of rain blow up the Great Glen. Rolling along the eastern shores of Loch Ness, wind-driven waves crash against the pebble beach. With little protection from the elements on offer, Vedangi heads inland and climbs to the smaller Loch Ruthven. Occasionally the sun breaks through the overcast sky, illuminating rain drops like jewels. Patches of woodland are interspersed with open moor. Tracks so thin that they are almost entirely obscured by heather lead their way past a large boulder; the perfect shelter from the prevailing storm.

Vedangi Kulkarni was 20 when she arrived by bike in Kolkata, India. She had left Perth, Australia 160 days beforehand and in the intervening five months had covered 29,000km, celebrated a birthday, been chased by a bear, negotiated with russian border guards and was mugged at knifepoint in Spain. She was (unofficially) the youngest woman to ever circumnavigate the globe, and the probably the first Asian (although this was a feat that Kulkarni only became aware of as she was reported as such).

We dwell on that one word – unofficial – for a long time. Kulkarni received some criticism within the rarified world of record setters and endurance racers (and more widely amongst a handful of keyboard warriors) for not being able to substantiate her claimed time with either a live satellite tracker or a full GPX record of the route. She had been using a tracker, but switched it off, partly in response to being mugged, but also because as a lone woman, she felt uncomfortable with others knowing her exact whereabouts 24 hours a day. Such was the scale of her ride that her GPS recording device ran out of memory and, before she had realised, started to overwrite large chunks of her route. This was compounded by the theft of a recording device when she was mugged.

We dwell on that one word – unofficial – for a long time. Kulkarni received some criticism within the rarified world of record setters and endurance racers (and more widely amongst a handful of keyboard warriors) for not being able to substantiate her claimed time with either a live satellite tracker or a full GPX record of the route. She had been using a tracker, but switched it off, partly in response to being mugged, but also because as a lone woman, she felt uncomfortable with others knowing her exact whereabouts 24 hours a day. Such was the scale of her ride that her GPS recording device ran out of memory and, before she had realised, started to overwrite large chunks of her route. This was compounded by the theft of a recording device when she was mugged.

“It’s hard in some ways. I know what I did, and I’ve never tried to claim a record. I’ve just talked about what happened and what I achieved. But I’ve received a lot of criticism. It hurts sometimes, and one day I’ll go back and set the record straight, but I know what I did and didn’t do. And ultimately, I didn’t set off to claim a record. I set off to see what I was capable of and I exceeded my expectations.”

Dreaming and planning 

We change tack and talk about future plans. A return to riding around the world is on the cards, but not this year. The already energetic Kulkarni positively effervesces as she relays what 2022 has in store. 

“Well, I've signed up for the Highland Trail 550 – a mountain biking bikepacking race in Scotland and then there’s also the Silk Road Mountain Race [a similar style event in Kyrgyzstan]. I’m still deciding on Highland Trail though. To be honest with you, the group start is making me nervous. I’m not sure if I would rather do it by myself instead. I really want to ride across Scandinavia and that might have to take the place of doing the Highland Trail this year. And, yeah, I might even be on my way to Alaska. I’ve somehow managed to blag a place on an expedition to Denali, but I need to raise the funds to be there. I’m halfway, so if I can find the rest, I’ll do that.”

The more you speak to Vedangi, the more you begin to realise that her plans are rarely rigid, but rather than nebulous ideas and dreams doomed to never get off the ground, the opposite is almost true, and they evolve and grow until they reach the point that Kulkarni is inspired to take them on; just as her John O’Groats ride had. You also begin to realise how someone who hasn’t yet turned 24 has squeezed so much into life so far.

“There’s just so much I want to do, you know? But I think there are a few things that really drive me. I love the adventure of the new; whether that’s new skills or new places or whatever. I just love learning. And actually the other big one is I love helping other people achieve their dreams, or just discover how great riding bikes can be.

“I’m actually organising two races this year. I put on my first last year; it was a downhill race at Gorton Woods in Devon. I wanted it to be as inclusive as possible, and I think it had the highest ever female participation of any race in the country at 24%. It was also the first ever adaptive bike [adaptive or adapted bikes are any cycle that has somehow been adapted to allow individuals with physical or learning disabilities to cycle] race in the UK. I put the event on in response to a friend’s spinal injury and it felt like a good way to raise some money, but also to further the racing scene in the UK. So this year, I’m organising another round… maybe two. And I’d like one to be the first ever adaptive bikes national championships. I want to end up with 50/50 gender representation and non-binary athletes to feel welcome. I think we should be able to get 30 riders in the adaptive category too. 

The other race I’m organising is more of a community weekend. It’s going to be a ‘level up’ competition, all about developing skills. Riders will pick a course: beginner/intermediate/advanced and ride it at the start of the weekend. They’ll then be coached and work together to improve their skills on certain aspects before riding it again at the end. The winners will be the most improved.”

Learning and sharing

The theme of learning and developing is one the Kulkarni keeps returning back to. When she’s not pursuing her own adventures, she has a business that applies everything that she has learnt so far and helps others plan and execute expeditions, covering everything from fundraising to logistics. 

“The Adventure Shed allows me to apply all my experience, including learning from all the mistakes I made, to help others. There’s so much that you need to know when you are planning an expedition, but there are so few resources to help you. I want to overcome that a little. I want to follow it up with a podcast along similar lines; talking to adventurers, but focussing on the practical nuts and bolts of how to apply for funding, or negotiating a specific country’s bureaucracy, or even just find out more about the day-to-day challenges of operating in arctic temperatures. There’s no real one-stop-shop for that information at the moment.”

Vedangi effuses about practical advice. It’s a trait that she seems to have adopted from her parents, and her father in particular. Given relatively modest means, they may not have been able to offer financial help all the time, but her father was always at hand with suggestions for ways his daughter could pursue her dreams, always keen for her to travel the world and experience the freedom that life has to offer. 

“I have a love/hate relationship with my own social media. I understand that it’s an important part of what I do. But I want it to be authentic… not just the highs, but the mundanities of how those are achieved. It feels as though if I am sharing the positive parts of my life, I am doing people a disservice if I am not sharing the other elements. I want to do more than just inspire. I want to be able to empower others to be able to do the same thing. And to do that, I think you have to be open about how you achieve things, show that whole learning curve. I actually think I have another podcast idea… How to do anything. Everything we do is based on skills, right? But so many of those skills aren’t taught. We pick them up as we go along, and some people are better than others. And a lot of them aren’t specific to a given career or pass time; they are transferable and can be developed and adapted. So I’d love to interview extraordinary people and find out what the skills are that they consider most important for where they have reached, whether that’s becoming a world champion bike racer, or a president of a country, say. I think there’s so much that we could all learn.”

Fear

“Do you get scared?” I ask. It’s almost impossible to imagine the confident, all achieving individual I’ve shared the last couple of hours with as someone who gets scared.

“Not really. I’ve built so much confidence through experience, and I have a lot of trust in my ability. I’m remarkably good at getting myself into sketchy situations, but I know I can get myself back out of them again. We all carry our personal toolkits around, and I put a lot of effort into making sure that mine is as well stocked as possible. I’m not afraid to ask questions and research and the rest is just putting in the work. That’s not to say I don’t feel the fear sometimes, but I don’t let it hold me back.” 

Vedangi rolls out her sleeping bag and climbs in as a watery sunset casts warm light across the rolling moors. With her back rested against the boulder she sips at a warm drink and looks out at wind-driven clouds racing across the sky. Her bike is propped up next to her, ready to go when she is, which – knowing Kulkarni – will be soon.