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In this article, I’m sharing a few thoughts on the effects that an ultra-distance event can have on a participant’s physical and mental health. This isn’t from a medical or scientific standpoint—as I am not a healthcare professional—but rather from my own experience and learning. My aim for this is to serve as a starting point for each person to delve deeper into the topics that interest them, always accompanied by a professional.
A few weeks ago, while preparing a short paragraph for the Polvu.cc article “4, 6, 8 hrs. Rest and Safety in Ultra-cycling”, a topic was reignited in me that has always troubled me; one I feel is rarely discussed, certainly much less than its importance deserves. In an era where ultra-distance competitions are blossoming everywhere, and when some of them (too few, unfortunately) are beginning to raise the issue of minimum rest, I believe it is vital to delve deeper and create a debate about the possible effects these types of events can have on our health if we let our momentum run wild—and, above all, if we lack a basic knowledge of self-care.
It tends to be a recurring theme in the conversations I have with many of the travellers from all over the world who pass through Teruel. It’s common for them to have arrived at Montañas Vacías after a flirtation with ultra-distance. In many of those conversations, I use this example: What would we think if a car or motorbike race passed by our front door, where the drivers hadn’t slept for several days? The comparison suggests that this is a two-dimensional issue when we talk about physical integrity, as it includes both the participant’s safety and that of other road users, where traffic remains open and life carries on with all its normality and fragility. But that is another topic, equally interesting, which would call for another long conversation. This time, I will focus on the dimension of the participant and their health.
1000 Kilometres
Midnight. I’ve just reached my van, which I parked there about fifty hours earlier. It’s 2017—a year when the ultra-cycling trend hadn’t yet exploded in Spain, but was already inspiring hundreds of enthusiasts elsewhere with events like the Transcontinental or the Tour Divide. That same year, just a few weeks prior, Mike Hall passed away. He was possibly the greatest source of inspiration for me to be lying there that night, completely destroyed, on the bed of my van. His death while participating in the Indian Pacific Wheel Race in Australia, after being struck at six in the morning, was a weight I carried during those weeks and throughout that 1000km brevet I had just finished. It was also the primary trigger for me, that night, to decide that I would never do anything like that again.
It was one of the first little seeds for what would eventually become Montañas Vacías: a response, an example of a different experience, another way of living the bike, reflecting what I also saw emerging outside of Spain. However, over the years, what crossed the Pyrenees with force was this ultra-cycling boom we’re living through today.
Categories of Health Effects
Returning to my state after that 1000km brevet: despite it being only a little more than two days of pedalling (with its two nights), I had barely slept a couple of hours in total. That experience made me confront a version of myself I wasn’t particularly proud of, so that night, for my own integrity, I decided to lock that version of me away.
Numbness in various parts of my body, lower back and neck issues, and extreme fatigue were some of the symptoms. Some lasted for months. They now serve as a good starting point for establishing a general classification of the potential effects of these events on our health:
- Structural / Postural Aspects: This is the most evident damage. Our «chassis» suffers from repetitive movements and maintaining a forced posture. We find lower back, neck, or joint strain, chafing at contact points with the bike, or nerve compression that can lead to numb hands or burning feet.
- Digestive / Metabolic Aspects: Under stress, our body stops prioritising digestion. We feel a lack of appetite, nausea, or an inability to process food, leading to an energy deficit that the mind tries to compensate for simply through willpower. If we season all this with a bit of a «petrol station diet»—ultra-processed foods, sugar, and empty calories—the cocktail for your digestive system can be a ticking time bomb.
- Immune / Endocrine Aspects: Our defence system becomes exhausted. An excess of cortisol—the stress hormone (I know, I promised not to get too scientific, just a quick mention)—maintained for days causes our defences to plummet. And we don’t always see the result immediately: after a few days, we might think we’ve recovered because our legs no longer ache, but our immune system is still at war. This is why many catch a cold or the flu 15 days after the end of an event.
- Mental / Cognitive Aspects: Sleep deprivation impairs mental sharpness, judgment, and decision-making. In extreme cases, it can even cause hallucinations—which are sometimes discussed with humour in these circles, but are a very dangerous symptom. Our perception of reality and risk becomes blurred, and that’s where we enter the danger zone. Furthermore, our light/dark cycle (the circadian rhythm) is blown apart: it’s not just the lack of sleep and rest; we are «de-syncing» a vast number of our hormonal systems. Digestion, repair, and mood are all affected.
It is vital to understand that all these areas are interconnected. Nothing is just postural, or just digestive, or only the effect of sleep deprivation. Let’s look at an example: that neck strain causing you pain and sustained physical stress will raise your cortisol levels. You enter survival mode, and your digestive and immune systems scale back their functions, basically to keep you alive. You start digesting poorly, and to make matters worse, the only things you’ve found are ice creams and caffeinated soft drinks at a petrol station. They feel terrible, but you perceive they give you «fuel» for a few more hours. You’re barely sleeping, so as the days pass, you realise you’ve entered «auto-pilot»: you just pedal, eat, and sleep. Internally, you don’t feel entirely bad because, with that routine, your daily problems disappear (or rather, they are paused until you return). With that cocktail, your mental clarity goes out the window by the second or third day. You might interpret it as mere lack of sleep, but it’s much more complex. Everything is connected.
Approaching the complexity of all these body systems can be made simpler through frameworks like PNI (Psychoneuroimmunology), which can be defined as a discipline that studies how all these systems communicate. Our personal context and our thoughts affect our hormones, and these, in turn, affect the state of our defences. This isn’t new—its foundations have been developing for decades—but perhaps it’s lately that it has gained more presence and become more accessible. We shouldn’t see it as a «new medicine,» but as a more multidisciplinary perspective of it. In the same way that the number of enthusiasts with a coach or nutritionist has grown exponentially compared to just a few years ago, it wouldn’t be so far-fetched for one of these professionals to help you understand all those interrelations in your body if you are preparing for an ultra-cycling event—or, why not, to do a general debrief after one.
Because in these circumstances, physical exercise—which we can see as controlled stress that brings benefits due to adaptation (what we call hormesis)—ceases to be health. Stress stops being a stimulus for improvement and becomes mere degradation.
Understanding the Psychological Aspect
If we talk about health and ultra-cycling, we must not overlook the mental health of the athlete. However, at this point, it would be very interesting to see it from another dimension: perhaps it’s not about studying the effects on mental health that these types of events can have, but rather the psychological aspects that lead us to face them. What do challenges of such magnitude express about you? What is the motivation or the needs that exist behind them? These are questions that would undoubtedly fill an entire article on their own.
Final Reflection
No matter how much you prepare for the nights, you can never compete (I’ll put that in italics, yes) against someone who suffers from recurrent sleep disorders. Or, for example: I myself have lived with what is known as Irritable Bowel Syndrome since I was a child, and I could never compete against someone who can nourish themselves for several days on petrol station food without compromising my digestive integrity for weeks. The reality is that the goal shouldn’t be to train or prepare for a facet that is fundamentally unhealthy: you wouldn’t want those sleep disorders we mentioned, nor to maintain the effects of a petrol station diet in the long term.
That’s why I believe one of the greatest difficulties when planning an event of this nature is knowing how to disconnect the ego and the momentum; to keep a cool enough head to decide for yourself where to place that line you should not cross to avoid compromising your health. Because we have to understand that crossing that line doesn’t just mean you might fall asleep and miss a stop sign; it goes much deeper. it’s about maintaining a relative balance between all the interdependent systems that make up your body. A balance that is the only foundation for long-term health.
So, get to know yourself, learn; because the goal shouldn’t be to achieve the highest number of consecutive hours pedalling, but to ensure we have many years of pedalling left ahead of us.
(Please share your opinion on the Spanish version of this article.)