The ultimate challenge
Imagine this. It’s 1 a.m, the moonlight is playing with your surroundings, and all is quiet. All you can see is sprawling countryside speckled with the sheen of a hundred cyclists, wrapped up in a silvery cocoon of protective gear.
There is no sound…until, of course, your thighs start screaming for mercy and you mutter to yourself-“you must be crazy.”
Imagine cycling for two days straight with only two hours of sleep to show for it. The cycle is you, you are the cycle, and it seems like it would never end.
But it did-1200 km and many an aching, burning muscle later Chaminda Perera is the first Sri Lankan to complete the Paris-Brest-Paris with a time of 89 hours, 5 min and 51 seconds. To put that into perspective, he only slept for four hours in total the entire ride.
The Paris-Brest-Paris is what could be described as the ultimate challenge for a non-professional enthusiast. The first PBP was in 1891, and was originally a 1,200 km bicycle race from Paris to Brest and back to Paris.
Today it is no longer a race (the goal is to finish the distance in under 90 hours) yet thousands of cycling enthusiasts take part every year-after a significant amount of training and then qualifying, of course.
Perera was a Boy Scout as a student of S. Joseph’s College in Colombo, so he did his first long distance ride from Colombo to Bentota at the age of 14.
As a cyclist he’s quite relieved to have been able to switch the dusty, bumpy and colourful roads of Lanka for the smoother inclines of the roads in Seattle, USA, where he now lives.
He’s based with the IT industry and has been since he studied engineering (following it up rather unusually with an MBA).
Perera took up cycling seriously around 10 years ago-he is already quite active as a white-water rafting guide and frequent skier.
“It just felt good to be back on the bike,” he tells us over an interview conducted when he was in the country for a vacation. “I started out with five miles and slowly built up from there, and made some great friends along the way.”
It was with their encouragement that he decided to take on PBP, a sporting event that falls under the category of randonneuring.
Randonneuring is long-distance, unsupported endurance cycling that is non-competitive in nature-but riders must pass specific checkpoints on a pre-determined route while adhering to strict time limits along the way.
Perera decided to take on the PBT to celebrate turning 50 last year-“I wanted a major challenge,” he smiles “and what could be more challenging than covering 1,230 km in under four days?”
Thus equipped with his bike, a Titanium MOOTS Vamoots LT, and several qualifying courses under his belt (200km, 300km, 400km and 600km brevets, or randonneuring events), Perera travelled to Paris, where the journey would begin on August 16 (2015).
“Training is the easy part,” he says of the roughly 5,000 km distance he covered over the course of a year to prepare).
Euphoriac at finishing the event just 54 minutes under the allotted time of 90 hours, Perera says he will remember the many French men, women and children along the way, always at the ready with coffee and baguettes.
“I was proud to represent Sri Lanka,” he says. “I had the flag on my bike and people would always ask me about it.”