Saskia Beudel
Peaking: One Hundred and Eleven Days on Two Wheels
Monash University Publishing, 2026
One woman’s genre-defying account of training for a gruelling alpine bicycle challenge
We’re sitting around a wood stove as she tells these stories. There’s a gale force wind outside, forest heaving. Another woman in the group ran the New York marathon a few years ago. ‘I wouldn’t do Peaks,’ she says. ‘It’s beyond a marathon, more like an ultra-marathon. You’ll be on the bike all day, maybe eleven hours.’ She’d run the marathon in just under five.
The three peaks are Tawonga Gap, Mt Hotham and Falls Creek in the Victorian high country. Organisers describe the Peaks Challenge as the most demanding one-day cycle event in Australia – the ultimate personal challenge. In her late fifties, Saskia Beudel decided to take that challenge.
Peaking is her genre-defying record of the hundred and eleven days spent preparing for Peaks – and of the event itself. An accomplished writer of both fiction and nonfiction, Saskia weaves together her training notes and wide-ranging reflections, the history of the bicycle and her own personal stories of cycling. She tussles with the state of contemporary life and the questions that come after long hours in the saddle.
What does it mean for a woman to enter this male-dominated event? As our bodies age, what new things can we ask of them? How do we take pleasure from our bodies and nature at a time when the world seems to be collapsing around us? How far can body – and mind – respond? Ultimately, what does it mean to ‘peak’ (or not)?
“What a riveting and illuminating book! Peaking moves with agile grace between memoir, history, art and the natural world in this far-reaching meditation on testing the body. It’s brilliant on exhilaration and fear – and everything else Saskia Beudel encounters along her way.”
About the Author
Saskia Beudel is a writer of fiction and nonfiction. She is the author of the novel Borrowed Eyes and nonfiction works A Country in Mind: Memoir with Landscape and (with Jill Bennett) Curating Sydney. Her books have been shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, a Dobbie Award and the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature. Saskia’s essays have appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Best Australian Essays, The Saturday Paper, The Sydney Review of Books, Kill Your Darlings, HEAT and The Iowa Review, among others. Her website is www.saskiabeudel.com.
