Road Cycling“It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle.” -- Ernest Hemingway
I just watched a documentary about the Red Bull Trans-Siberian Extreme Challenge-- 9,105km, 77,000m of vertical, 25 days. In 2017, Alexei Shchebelin did it in 312h16m58s, for an average of 29.1kph-- that's 18mph. Average. He climbed a quarter of a million feet in 25 days.
One of the individual stages is 1,386km long.
That dramatically altered my impression of what is "elite."