You’ve got the bike, you’ve done the training, you’re brimming with a sense of adventure. Now all you have to do is ride around the world until you end up back where you started. Easy.
Every cyclist has, at some time or other, thought about riding around the world. For most it is just a momentary pipedream, but for some it is a genuine consideration. If you’re one of the latter, here are the rules to being a true circumnavigator.
The minimum distance to cycle in order to say you have ridden around the world is 29,000km, or 18,000 miles, according to the powers that be at Guinness World Records. The journey should be continuous in one direction and go either east to west or west to east, and the total distance travelled (including flights, ferries, etc) should exceed the length of the equator, 40,175km.
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You can do it with a full support crew in attendance, or just on your own with a credit card and a phrase book. Some people are looking to break a speed record, while others spend years taking in all the world has to offer.
Regardless of how you plan to do it, one thing that every fledgling round-the-world cyclist needs is some insight into what it’s actually like. Luckily, we have four riders who have been there before, and are happy to share their experiences.
Nick Sanders
Rode around the world twice in 1981 and 1985 and set the original record. Has also been around the world numerous more times on a motorcycle
‘I do think adventurers tend to try to make riding around the world sound a bit more difficult than it actually is. Anybody can do it if you want to badly enough, but that’s the difficulty. You’ve got to want to do it badly enough.
‘When I first set off around the world in 1981, I didn’t have any money, I didn’t have any prospects and I didn’t think anybody would be interested. And that was absolutely the case – nobody was interested. I even had to borrow a bicycle. People don’t really care whether you do it or not and that’s a fact of life.
‘The second time was in 1985 and I got £25,000 from [retailer] Spar. You could have bought a house with that and, interestingly, even though it was a media-friendly project, I don’t think I’d have been in many papers if it hadn’t been for the fact we hired Miss World to set me off. I went around the world in 79 days, and that was the then Guinness record of about 13,600 miles. Guinness then changed it to 18,000 miles to be in line with the motorcycling world.
‘You have to have a single-mindedness that will allow nothing to distract you. I was on the Danube taking a canal boat down to Russia and Ukraine and there was a war going on, but the Danube is an international waterway so the United Nations couldn’t stop me.
‘I went through Uganda on a bicycle and because it’s part of the Commonwealth I didn’t need to get a visa, and because I didn’t need a visa I didn’t bother to find out what was happening because I was lazy. I was heading from the Gulu provinces in the north down to Kampala, but they were having this long war. It was the most dangerous road in the world at the time, but I didn’t know until I got there. I just carried on. It wasn’t my war.’
Markus Stitz
Rode around the world on a single-speed bike in 2015
‘Most people go west to east because that’s the prevailing wind direction. I decided to go east to west because my route was mostly dictated by my start date in early September. I knew that if I left heading east, I would be struggling to get over the mountains in Turkey and Iran because it would be proper winter by the time I arrived, so I went in the other direction instead.
‘My route was loosely planned around the seasons. I knew the US was lovely to cycle in autumn but I totally underestimated how cold it would be in November at over 2,500m altitude, so maybe the whole thing with the seasons didn’t work out. I was in Australia at the back end of summer so that worked well, but then I hit Thailand in the hottest month ever. That wasn’t really planned.
‘The most crucial bit of the route was the Nullarbor Plain in Australia [a 90-mile straight road], and I actually had a tailwind there. But to be honest, the whole wind game can be so hit and miss, especially when you’re on a single-speed, as you’re slow anyway.
‘I spent ten and a half months riding by myself on a bike. What I really appreciated about the whole trip was the simplicity of it. You don’t have any complex social relationships to deal with – you are simply on your bike finding somewhere to sleep, eat and then ride from A to B. That is much easier compared to normal everyday life. It’s definitely a privileged thing to do no matter what your budget is.’
Mark Beaumont
Fastest person to cycle around the world supported, in 79 days
‘I’ve cycled around the world twice, unsupported when I was 23 years old, and then when I was 35 fully supported, both times for the record. I’ve always been in a hurry.
‘When you’re unsupported it’s more about what happens off the bike than on it. People worry about fitness, the bike and how to fix the bike, but it’s all the stuff that’s nothing to do with cycling that actually occupies your mind. Where’s my next meal? Where am I going to get clean water? Where am I going to sleep tonight? The bike just becomes a means to complete the journey.
‘People think about it as just a bike ride, but once you get out there your perspective changes. It’s about all the different places you visit, the languages, the deserts, the mountains, the vast landscapes and all the unknowns. You get a completely different sense of the world.
‘It’s funny because when you think about an around-the-world cycle, you have the world in mind, but the silly reality is nobody actually cycles around the world; you just wake up and cycle a little bit further every day and one day you get back to where you started. That’s a better way of thinking about it.’
Jenny Graham
Fastest person to cycle around the world unsupported, in 124 days
‘Once you can ride 100-mile back-to-back days, the rest is in your head. Chances are it’s going to be your head and your resilience to deal with things that aren’t riding your bike that will stop you.
‘For me, every time I got off the bike it was a battle to get back on. When you’re riding, it’s just easy. I loved riding through remote areas, because I wouldn’t pass any services so I never had to think about whether I would stop. But all the way across Russia, every 20 miles or so there would be a service station and every single time I’d have a mental battle of wondering whether I should stop.
‘It’s funny because you cycle through so many dull and uninspiring places, but it makes you appreciate where you’re from. I’m from the Highlands in Scotland and any time I cycled through somewhere a bit rubbish it just confirmed that I actually live in the best place in the world.
‘Coming down Alaska and the Yukon were the only places where I had a sense of home. Other places were inspiring and a draw to go back to, but it was in Alaska and the Yukon where I connected with all the vast wilderness. I was absolutely bricking it about bears all the time, though, and I was so annoyed with myself because I felt such a connection to the landscape but all I was doing was hiding in toilet blocks from bears.
‘I wasn’t sure if I was too normal a person to be able to try to set a world record. It sounds ridiculous five years later saying it out loud like that, but that was the truth. Was I just too ordinary? I would sometimes think maybe I should just get back in my box and not give this a go because this is for other people. Every time I felt like that, I told myself to get out there and prove you can do it. And I did.’
• This article originally appeared in issue 145 of Cyclist magazine. Click here to subscribe
