1,000,000 KM BY BICYCLE. HOW MUCH IS ONE MILLION KILOMETERS?

by Sara Taglialatela.

On November 14, 2008, between the 22nd and 23rd hour of the 24-HR Desafio (Fortaleza, Brazil), Fabio reached an important goal in his cycling career: one million kilometres on his bicycle. It is hard to imagine and represent a distance of one million kilometres. It is still difficult even thinking back over the career of the first Italian cyclist to step onto the RAAM podium and one of only 10 athletes in the world to have finished the race in fewer than nine days: eleven RAAM competitions from 1996 to 2007; two Furnace Creek 508 races (2000-2001) and two Denver to Aspen Classics (2001-2002); the Giro d’Italia (Tour of Italy) twice in one leg (1995-1996), which then became the 1001 Miles (2006); two RAS (2007-2008); participating in the 24-hr Desafio (2008). One million kilometres are made up of deserts, mountains, rivers and North American plains. Then there are other mountains, the Karst ones in Eastern Europe, but there are also the rolling Italian hills. Elsewhere there are the rains and snow-covered streets, immediately before or after the sun sets your skin on fire. But one million kilometres is not only a distance on the Earth; one million kilometres is also, and above all, time lived. The time lived on a bicycle has such a density and intensity that go well beyond one million kilometres calculated while racing. The ultracycler lives each moment of the race with such attention and concentration for what happens during the competition that the athlete is not distracted by any detail, even if he or she is submerged by the surroundings, the natural setting or faces around them. Yet, alongside the physical effort and mental concentration, there is also space and time because the mind takes another trip: the one inside itself, inside memories, moving back and forth in time, knotting the threads of its own reflections. And for this reason I say that “one million kilometres” is an inconceivable distance: because it is difficult to represent it as a distance from one point of the Earth to another and because it conceals distances that remain unfathomable, even to the ultracycler. On November 14, 2008, on the occasion of the 24-hr Desafio (Fortaleza, Brazil), between the 22nd and 23rd hour of the race Fabio completed his millionth kilometre by bicycle. Without taking anything away from this goal, what is stronger than a distance is that we have struggled to represent ourselves as what we will travel going from one place to another in the world, what is more intense than the moment in which a point on the bicycle wheel has determined this success is Fabio’s determination in starting new projects, and looking for other roads and another time around himself or inside himself. One million kilometres is not a completed distance, one million kilometres is the direction of a gaze, which does not stay fixed too long on what has been done, rather it looks for new horizons, indifferent to the limits and goals set by inconceivable figures. Like one million kilometres, which is about the distance we would have to travel in space in order to admire the entire course of the moon around the Earth.