Paris-Brest-Paris

Cakes, street parties, hallucinations, droopy necks: the world's oldest big cycle event runs again in 2023

- Rob Ainsley

You have to enjoy something a lot to do it non-stop for up to ninety hours, except for snatched doses of sleep. Cycling the 1,200km of Paris-Brest-Paris (PBP), the world's most celebrated long-distance amateur ride, requires just that.

It's not a race, of course. As participants will stress, before talking details about timings. Riders get little chance to enjoy Brittany's rugged scenery, culture or cuisine en route. The maximum time allowed to do it in is ninety hours; the average is around eighty hours; the best is a delirious 42hr 26min by Germany's Björn Lenhard in 2015.

It's not the longest non-competitive endurance ride (variously known as a 'randonnée', 'brevet', or especially in the UK, 'audax'). London-EdinburghLondon (LEL) for instance is 1,500km. And 'P'B'P' doesn't even start in Paris, but in Rambouillet, 20km south of the capital. Nevertheless, it's the one to do, the audaxer's bucket-list challenge.