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An event that lasts longer than a day is not a long bike ride. It is a different sport that happens to use the same equipment, and almost everything you know about pacing, eating and preparation has to be re-derived from the start.
The clearest way to see why: in a one-day event, you finish before most of your limits arrive. Sleep does not matter. Saddle comfort is an irritation rather than a constraint. Your energy deficit is survivable because tomorrow you eat. Cross the 24-hour line and every one of those becomes the actual race, while the thing you spent the winter training — your ability to produce power — turns out to be nearly irrelevant, because you will be riding well below the intensity where it is the limiter.
This is an introduction to what actually changes, and what the evidence does and does not say about it.
Pacing: far lower than you think, from the first hour
The pacing literature across endurance sport says much the same thing about very long events: the realistic choice is between starting conservatively and slowing down a lot, or starting hard and slowing down enormously. Nobody negative-splits a 1,000 km race.
In practice that means an intensity most riders find embarrassing. A useful starting point is somewhere around 55–65% of FTP as a normalised figure for the first day, dropping from there. Not a threshold effort, not sweet spot, not even a firm endurance pace — a pace at which you could hold a conversation for six hours and be mildly bored.
The reason is not just fatigue. It is that intensity drives two things you cannot afford: glycogen use, which you cannot replace fast enough, and gut blood-flow diversion, which decides whether you can eat at all. Riding 20 watts harder on day one buys you perhaps 40 minutes and costs you the ability to digest on day two. That is a terrible trade and it is the most common mistake in the sport.
The quality that actually decides ultra results is how much of your power survives hour after hour — durability rather than peak. We cover the trainable version of that in your power at hour four, and it is the single most transferable thing a first-timer can work on.
Sleep: the part with the most guesswork in it
Here is where the evidence is thinner than the confident advice on forums suggests. There is a large and solid literature on what sleep deprivation does to people, and almost none of it is about cyclists riding across a continent.
What is well established: restricting sleep to six hours a night for two weeks produces cumulative deficits in sustained attention roughly comparable to a night or two of total sleep loss — and, crucially, the people involved rated their own sleepiness as only slightly worse while their performance kept degrading. You do not feel how impaired you are. That single finding should shape how you plan.
Reviews of sleep and athletic performance find the effects fall most heavily on prolonged submaximal work, on perceived exertion and on cognitive function, and least on brief maximal efforts. That maps almost exactly on to an ultra: your sprint is fine, your ability to keep making sensible decisions at 4 a.m. is not. Short naps have reasonable support — a 30-minute nap after restricted sleep improved alertness and sprint performance in controlled work — which is the best evidence we have for the roadside 20-minute bivvy that experienced riders swear by.
Stylised. The schedule is one plausible plan, and the debt curve is illustrative rather than measured — no accepted model converts hours awake into a number like this. The shape is the honest part: a ratchet, not a sawtooth that returns to the floor.
The practical planning rules that follow from the evidence, stated as what they are — reasonable inferences rather than proven protocols:
- Plan the first sleep before you start, and take it. Riders routinely skip it because they feel fine at hour 20. Feeling fine at hour 20 is not information.
- Sleep before you are desperate, not after. The quality of a decision taken while microsleeping is poor, including the decision about where to sleep.
- Somewhere between three and five hours seems to be what most finishers use. There is no trial telling you which is optimal, and anyone who says otherwise is extrapolating.
- Treat a 20-minute nap as a legitimate tool, not a failure. It has more support behind it than most things in ultra-racing.
The energy arithmetic over multiple days
This is the calculation that explains why ultra riders finish looking the way they do.
| Item | How | Energy |
|---|---|---|
| Mechanical work done on the pedals | 150 W × 13 hours moving | ≈ 7.0 MJ |
| Metabolic cost of producing it | at about 22% gross efficiency | ≈ 7,600 kcal |
| The other 11 hours of the day | resting and off-bike metabolism | ≈ 700 kcal |
| Total for one 300 km day | ≈ 8,300 kcal | |
| Realistic maximum you can absorb | 90 g carbohydrate per hour riding, plus real meals | ≈ 6,500–7,000 kcal |
| Shortfall, every single day | ≈ 1,300–1,800 kcal |
Worked estimate, not a measurement, for a 75 kg rider on a 300 km day. Change the average power or the hours and the numbers move — the deficit does not go away.
You cannot eat your way out of this, and that is not a discipline problem. Work on extreme endurance events has identified a ceiling on sustained energy expenditure of roughly 2.5 times basal metabolic rate over long durations, and argued that the limit is alimentary — the gut's capacity to absorb, not the body's willingness to burn. A 300 km day sits far above that ceiling. Measurements on riders in a 1,230 km ultra-endurance bike marathon found substantial energy deficits despite riders eating continuously throughout.
So the strategy is not to close the gap. It is to make the gap as small as you can while keeping carbohydrate availability high enough to keep riding, and to accept that you will finish several kilograms lighter. Practically: eat to a schedule rather than to appetite, because appetite disappears; keep carbohydrate intake high on the bike and add fat and protein at stops, where digestion has a chance; and train the gut beforehand. Absorption is adaptable, and our guide to getting to 90 g of carbohydrate an hour is the place to start, months out.
Eating from petrol stations, honestly
At 2 a.m. in rural Europe, a 24-hour fuel station is often the only option, and what it sells is not what a sports nutritionist would choose. It is also fine. Coca-Cola, crisps, chocolate milk, sweet pastries, rice pudding, tinned fruit, salted nuts, ice cream. The two things that matter are that carbohydrate keeps arriving and that you get some sodium with it; the rest is preference. Riders who insist on a "clean" approach for three days generally stop eating by day two, which is worse than any packet of crisps.
Carry a fallback for the gaps — two gels or a bar you actively like — and never pass a shop in a region where the next one is 60 km away. Route planning for resupply is a real skill, and bikepacking route planning covers the water and daylight side of the same problem.
The four things that actually end ultras
Not tiredness — the moment where you are asleep for two seconds while still moving. It is the only failure mode on this list that can kill you, and the research is consistent that people are poor judges of how impaired they are. Riders who scratch at 3 a.m. on night two almost always describe it as a decision. It usually was not.
Compression of the ulnar nerve where it passes through the wrist produces weakness and numbness in the ring and little fingers — handlebar palsy. It is well documented in cyclists, it follows long hours in one position, and recovery can take weeks. If you cannot operate a brake lever, the race is over regardless of how your legs feel.
Perineal pressure over many consecutive days causes numbness, skin breakdown and infection. This is the single most common reason first-time ultra riders stop, and it is almost entirely a fit-and-hygiene problem rather than a toughness problem. Two pairs of shorts, a wash at every stop, and a saddle you have already ridden for 400 km.
Gastrointestinal distress is one of the most frequently reported complaints in ultra-endurance events. You are asking the gut to absorb food for eighteen hours a day while blood is being diverted away from it. It is trainable, slowly, and it is not trainable in the last fortnight.
Notice what is not on that list: fitness. Riders who abandon rarely do so because they could not turn the pedals. The contact points and the sleep are the race. That should change how you spend the six months beforehand — at least as much time on position, on a saddle that works over 12-hour days, and on a bar setup with several genuinely usable hand positions as on intervals. If your hands already go numb on a four-hour ride, fix that first; it will not improve on its own at 600 km.
Self-supported rules, and why they exist
Most modern long-distance races are self-supported, which has a specific meaning rather than a vague one. Typically: no private support of any kind, no assistance that is not equally available to every other rider, nothing booked in advance, and no drafting — riders who meet on the road ride socially or ride apart, but they do not share the work.
The logic is that it keeps the race about the rider. The practical consequence is that every problem is yours: a broken spoke at midnight in a country whose language you do not speak is part of the event, not an interruption to it. Carry the tools you can actually use and know how to sleep outdoors, because at some point you will.
Route choice matters more than in any other form of racing, because in most of these events you pick your own line between checkpoints and the fastest line is rarely the shortest. Building the route with the climbing profile and the resupply points visible together — Moveee's route planner will do this from a GPX — is worth several evenings, and it is the work most first-timers skip.
What to do first
Ride a 400 km day, alone, including the dark. Not as training for fitness, but as a rehearsal of everything else: whether you can eat at hour 14, whether your hands hold up, whether you can ride at 3 a.m. without becoming unsafe, and whether your lighting really lasts as long as the box says. Then do it again having slept in a bivvy bag the night before.
If you have not yet ridden through a whole day, how to plan a 200 km ride is the right previous step. Ultra-distance racing is mostly the accumulation of ordinary long rides, done slower than feels right, with the sleep decided in advance and the food decided by a clock.
Sources 10
Where this article summarises a study, the study itself is linked — not a write-up of it.
- 1 Van Dongen HPA, Maislin G, Mullington JM, Dinges DF The Cumulative Cost of Additional Wakefulness: Dose-Response Effects on Neurobehavioral Functions and Sleep Physiology from Chronic Sleep Restriction and Total Sleep Deprivation · Sleep · 2003
- 2 Fullagar HHK, Skorski S, Duffield R, Hammes D, Coutts AJ, Meyer T Sleep and Athletic Performance: The Effects of Sleep Loss on Exercise Performance, and Physiological and Cognitive Responses to Exercise · Sports Medicine · 2015
- 3 Waterhouse J, Atkinson G, Edwards B, Reilly T The role of a short post-lunch nap in improving cognitive, motor, and sprint performance in participants with partial sleep deprivation · Journal of Sports Sciences · 2007
- 4 Abbiss CR, Laursen PB Describing and Understanding Pacing Strategies during Athletic Competition · Sports Medicine · 2008
- 5 Thurber C, Dugas LR, Ocobock C, Carlson B, Speakman JR, Pontzer H Extreme events reveal an alimentary limit on sustained maximal human energy expenditure · Science Advances · 2019
- 6 Geesmann B, Mester J, Koehler K Energy Balance, Macronutrient Intake, and Hydration Status During a 1,230 km Ultra-Endurance Bike Marathon · International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism · 2014
- 7 Jeukendrup AE Training the Gut for Athletes · Sports Medicine · 2017
- 8 Knechtle B, Nikolaidis PT Physiology and Pathophysiology in Ultra-Marathon Running · Frontiers in Physiology · 2018
- 9 Capitani D, Beer S Handlebar palsy — a compression syndrome of the deep terminal (motor) branch of the ulnar nerve in biking · Journal of Neurology · 2002
- 10 Leibovitch I, Mor Y The Vicious Cycling: Bicycling Related Urogenital Disorders · European Urology · 2005
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