If you thought the Tour de France looked tricky, imagine a bike race with stages of up to 1,400 kilometres (nearly 900 miles).
The Red Bull Trans-Siberian Extreme, which got under way on 18 July in Moscow and reaches the finish in Vladivostok on 10 August, is the world’s longest bike stage race and surely the most arduous.
There are 14 stages in all, and they vary in length from 300km up to a staggering 1,400km, that distance the equivalent of nearly half of this year’s entire Tour de France route.
In total, at 9,238km (5,740 miles) it is nearly three times longer than the Tour and covers a total of 79,000 metres of climbs.
It is perhaps no surprise then that last year no one individual actually managed to complete the entire route in the allotted time frame, the last trio of riders pulling out towards the end because of adverse weather conditions.
That said, both teams in the duo category: German pairing Martin Temmen and Matthias Fischer, as well as Mikhail Manyahkhin and Roman Markaryan, managed to make the finish line with the German duo holding the edge.
During the course of the competition, the riders will pass through five climate zones, seven time zones, travel the length and breadth of Ural mountains and pass four of the longest rivers in the world – an indicator of the magnitude of the task at hand.
But there is something poetic too about the endurance nature of the race reaching its finish point – the cut-off point for the competition for riders 10 August – at the Far Eastern Opera House on the shores of the Pacific Ocean.
The race is open to anyone who wants to take part but a maximum of just 20 cyclists are accepted each year to compete in what is something of an elite field.
Among those in action on the course are Gervais Dubina, a cancer survivor and ultra-distance cyclist bidding to become the first woman to complete the course.
Prior to the start, she said: “I actually feel pretty confident going into it,”
…but she is not the only woman in the field with Shangrila Rendon, of the Philippines, also in action.
The men’s field includes the likes of former professional cyclist Alexey Shchebelin, who was quickest over the stages travelled a year ago.