ED'S LETTER
Do you remember when doing a marathon used to be considered a major achievement? Go back a few decades and the idea of running for 26.2 miles was considered madness, something for only elite athletes and wild-eyed weirdos. These days your granny has run a marathon. People run them for fun, wearing rhinoceros costumes or dressed as Elvis, so the hardcore have had to move on to the next level. Now it’s double-marathons, ultra-marathons, multi-day marathons through the Sahara desert or Amazon jungle, surviving on rainwater and bugs. It looks like it’s happening with cycling as well. I can remember how proud I felt the first time I rode 100 miles. At the time it seemed like such a long distance, and I ached for days afterwards. Now it sometimes feels like a century is deemed the bare minimum to be able to call yourself a road cyclist, while the real riders are knocking off the kind of epic journeys that used to be reserved for heroic poems. If you want to impress your peers, you had better return from a weekend with tales of hostile environments, 48-hour races, extreme weather, fire and brimstone, plagues of frogs – a sunny century through the Cotswolds just won’t cut it any more.
This month’s issue is a case in point. We have two articles that demonstrate the new attitude to riding. First up, Cyclist writer Josh Cunningham fulfils a long-held ambition to tackle The Transcontinental (p80), a gruelling race across Europe that involves mind-boggling distances, wincing saddle sores and rare snatches of sleep in bus shelters. This is followed by deputy editor Stu Bowers’ week-long journey across the Colorado Rockies (p110), covering 819km of roads and gravel trails with over 15,000m of ascent.
In the face of these mighty undertakings I just have to keep reassuring myself: 100 miles is still a long way to ride.