Join us at Paperchain Bookstore to hear Saskia Beudel, author of Peaking: One Hundred and Eleven Days on Two Wheels, in conversation with Lachlan Strahan

One woman’s genre-defying account of training for a grueling 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.’
Michelle de Kretser, author of Questions of Travel and Theory & Practice

‘Woven through this gripping account of a precipitous marathon ride is an artfully distilled personal and cultural history of cycling. Peaking draws surprising connections between early stories of women cyclists, time, weather, ageing, memory and emotion. Here is Beudel’s grandmother in her “outdoor wheelchair”. Here is Simone de Beauvoir riding through the French Alps on a cumbersome bike with patchy wartime tyres. And here’s Beudel’s training diary of doubts, suffering and risk, as the turmoil of inner life gives way to a marvellously shifting outer world. In Peaking, cycling is a joyful act of communal striving and personal sovereignty.’
Mireille Juchau, author of The World Without Us

‘Peaking is a remarkable journey of both writing and endurance. This is the story of a determined woman, a pushbike and the love of Country. It is also an exercise in storytelling, of narratives embedded in our bodies and landscapes.’
Tony Birch, author of Women & Children

Dr 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.

Dr Lachlan Strahan is an Australian historian, writer and former diplomat. During a thirty-year diplomatic career (1993-2023), he served in Bonn, Seoul, New Delhi (deputy high commissioner), Geneva (acting UN ambassador) and Honiara (high commissioner). In Canberra, he ran the multilateral policy division, covering the UN and human rights, and the South Asia Division, and worked in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet during Tony Abbott's tenure.

Lachlan is the author of The Curious Diplomat (2025), a memoir about his foreign service career, Justice in Kelly Country, an account of his police officer ancestor who hunted Ned Kelly (shortlisted for the 2023 Prime Minister’s Australian history prize), Day of Reckoning, an exploration of crime in Papua New Guinea after World War II (shortlisted for the 2006 NSW Premier's Australian History Prize), and Australia’s China (1996 and 2010), one of the standard works on Australia–China relations.

This event is free but as space is limited please book to secure your place.

Contact the host of Saskia Beudel at Paperchain

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