Paris-Brest-Paris

Paris-Brest-Paris: Race out, Party home The elephant in the room Paris-Brest-Paris (PBP) has been an eight year long elephant in my room. It’s the pinnacle of endurance riding and one that for many many years was beyond me. Held once every four years PBP attracting 6,500 riders from all over the world, it's a 1,220km ride with 12,000m of climbing to be completed in 90 hours. I contemplated doing it in 2011 and even had a hotel room booked on the start line, but as with so many people this year I found out that as you move up the required qualification distances from 200km to 300km to 400km and finally 600km, it doesn’t just get physically harder – it gets exponentially mentally harder too – I used to ride 200km and 300km rides every weekend come rain, snow, ice or storm – but those are rides you complete in a day – move up to 400km and you are now riding through the night and the first time I attempted one, fuelled by a massive dose of sugar and caffeine it was miserab