[blasdel]

My personal fastest 24 hour split was about 600km, while riding the first half of the Paris-Brest-Paris brevet in 2019. I had my first sleep after that in Brest and took much longer breaks for the return journey for a total ride of 1240km in 78:02:21 (with ~26 hours spent stopped).

I'd done many 600km brevets before that comfortably in 35-37 hours with a ~4hr sleep in the middle, but at PBP there were thousands of other strong riders and it was fun to work together.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randonneuring is a lot more "normal" of a way to ride your bike all day than the Ultracycling approach in the article. Instead of grinding out laps of a racecourse solo, ride from town to town on pleasant backroads socially.

[_kyran]

My dad has done it twice and I believe the first time (56:13:00) he didn't sleep at all. The second time, 12 years later was 70:21:00.

Congrats on the ride! I still don't quite understand what it takes to be able to push through beyond what most people would consider immense fatigue.

Did you find it harder physically or mentally?

[blasdel]

If he were an American, that time would put your father in La Société Charly Miller: https://rusa.org/pages/CharlyMiller

I had fun the whole time!

Mentally I don't really suffer anything, though I did cry like a baby while riding through misty valleys at dawn the third day. I had realized I'd crossed into Normandy, and got emotional from working out from first principles why I new that detail of french geography. In the first town I passed through in daylight the locals were hanging up large banners for their 75th Anniversary of Liberation by the US Army.

I had a few serious physical setbacks from my ankle, losing a cleat bolt, a wrong turn — but it was easy to run into old friends out on the course to regroup and make new friends along the way helping each other out of predicaments.

I lost a lot of my endurance abilities from Covid, so when I do it again I will definitely be shooting for a different goal: https://adrianhandssociety.com/

[jacquesm]

Hey Fred, that's insane. Wow. How was the aftermath of that ride?

[blasdel]

Haha I just kept gallivanting around Paris afterwards, I spent 10 days in France and cumulatively slept maybe 30h total.

I hadn't done much riding that summer because of a broken ankle and actually re-fractured it mid-ride from vibration/stress while descending into Brest. The biggest trouble was that it was impossible to get any ice for it, but I found nice self-adhesive bandages to immobilize it the next day and was fine completing the ride.

[jacquesm]

Oh, that kind of complication certainly doesn't help. I hope that healed up properly, ankles are quite vulnerable. And sometimes what seems to have worked out well catches up with you later on.

[windowsworkstoo]

It’s not really, ask all us audax riders. it’s surprising to think that 250km in a day was so life changing when I/we do 1200km in 3 days regularly and at a leisurely pace

[jacquesm]

It all depends on what you are used to, and on the weather. A 30 km stretch of 6-8 Beaufort will take the piss out of anybody, trust me on that one.