Endurance book9/2/2023 He offers Four Pillars of Endurance Projects, which are a) the athlete b) logistics c) affordability and d) media. It is said that nobody plans to fail but plenty of people fail to plan and the first chapter makes it clear that the better planned you are the less likely to be derailed by the unforeseen. The book is divided into six chapters, which are probably arranged in order of importance. “Endurance” serves as a logical guide to making a cycling adventure a reality, with the only real difference between, say, my own 900 km ride along the Camino de Santiago, and his round-the-world junket a matter of degree. But the fact is that the vast majority of cyclists are not racers yet we all have, to some extent, the capacity to endure. A clever point is made when he states that the current style of bicycles is more Mark Beaumont than Mark Cavendish, something that the marketing machines of big bicycle manufacturers would be hesitant to admit. While the author, who has co-written the book with performance expert Laura Penhaul (one of an all-female team that rowed across the Pacific!), notes that the line between bicycle tourism and endurance riding has become blurred, the book is about his fascination of the meeting point where the bicycle can take you and what might be your physical and mental limits. The trip is the subject of a two-part documentary on the GCN+ streaming service. Unlike his previous circumnavigation, the 2017 effort was undertaken with elaborate support, allowing him to concentrate entirely on riding. Already dedicated to long-distance cycling as a teenager when he rode the famous Land’s End to John O’Groats route at 15, he rode around the world in 194 days in 2008, the next year riding from Anchorage, Alaska, to Southern Argentina. Mark Beaumont’s story, recounted in “Endurance,” is entirely different. She had set off on her retiree’s life of adventure being somewhat overweight, fiercely proud of being mechanically inept, and admitting to not having ridden a bike for three decades when she began. She was 76 and had used the bicycle as a way to follow historical roads. She wrote it up in “A Bike Ride,” then followed that with several other trips and books before falling ill and dying in Aleppo, Syria on yet another ride in 2009. Years ago there were stories of travellers who chose to cycle crazy distances, with my favourite being a retired English school headmistress and classicist, Anne Mustoe, who set out in 1987 on an around-the world ride that took her 15 months.
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