Paris Brest Paris

'Slow cyclist' Jack Thurston takes on the challenge of a lifetime with the legendary 1,200km audax in France

Paris-Brest-Paris was first held in 1891, making it older than both the modern-day Olympic Games and the Tour de France. I've always viewed this 1,200km audax with a mixture of fascination and horror. I loved that a relic from very early days of the bicycle was still going, and that a bicycle race had inspired a classic piece of French patisserie. But I could never imagine riding it myself (though I have eaten a good number of Paris-Brests: it's a wheel of choux pastry filled with silky praline cream topped with crispy flaked almonds, since you ask). You see, my idea of a perfect day out on the bike is a gentle 50 miles with plenty of stops for pints, pies and pastries along the way. It's the formula behind my Lost Lanes guidebooks and the Slow Cycling series that I present on GCN+. And yet, a quiet voice in the deepest recesses of my ego kept whispering, "What if? Maybe you could? You'll never know unless you try."

The trouble was, I'd rarely ridden further than 200km a day, and the few times I had, it had left me completely spent. What's more, as I approached my 50th birthday, I was feeling more out of puff on hills and tired out after rides that used to be easy. My wife kindly informed me I'd been putting on weight. To stand any chance of qualifying for PBP, let alone riding it, I'd need to get myself into the best shape of my life. It was a chance to kill two birds with one stone: fulfil a secretly-held cycling ambition while averting the descent into middle-aged decrepitude. When a couple of friends said they were up for it too, I was committed.