Highway To Hell

London-to-Paris record holder Jonathan Parker set his sights on a far more formidable parcours — the 340-mile highway across China’s ‘Desert of Death’

- David Bradford

Three years ago TV daredevil Guy Martin set a new record for cycling the world’s longest desert highway. He clicked off the 340 miles across the Taklamakan Desert in north-western China — AKA the ‘Desert of Death’ — in 28 hours 17 minutes. Sitting at home watching, barrister Jonathan Parker thought to himself, “I’d like to have a crack at that.”

Just one month earlier, Parker had ridden from London to Paris in a world record time of 12 hours 31 minutes (including the five-hour ferry crossing).

“Breaking that record was a means to an end of raising money for Cyclists Fighting Cancer,” he tells me over the phone from his home in Qatar, “and it was the same this time: I knew that if I wanted to raise a lot of money, I’d have to do something big.”

Granted, it doesn’t get much bigger than cycling non-stop across a shifting-sand desert the size of Germany.

Parker is a 44-year-old with enviable time trialling palmarès: he has won multiple age-group championships and achieved top-10s in national ‘50’ and ‘100’ championships; before relocating to the Middle East two years ago, he was the man to beat in open TTs in Kent. But riding hundreds of miles non-stop across a desert would require him to develop new depths of endurance — while training in the sweltering heat of Qatar.