Parallels 2023: Your Rides
Your rides have been submitted and the Global Parallels Map has been updated, so you can see how your ride compares to others this year and previous years. Here, we take a deeper dive into the map to see what our community got up to over the Summer Solstice weekend.
Based in Denver, Colorado, Paul Spencer is an adventurer and world record holder whose last major trip was riding all three Grand Tours in 2022. As you can imagine, after pedalling 14,500 miles with 750,000 ft of climbing in 134 days, Paul’s body was in need of some recovery and as such hasn’t been cycling as much as usual this summer. That said, Paul decided to give this year’s Parallels a go and managed the third-longest ride overall: riding from Leadville in Colorado to Albuquerque in New Mexico, coming in at just over 530km.
Despite battling headwinds and freezing cold temperatures, Paul said that he was “super happy with the day, super fun and I’m already thinking about how I can improve next year.”
Paul Spencer on his Three Grand Tours trip in 2022
Coşkun Gemici is a rider from Istanbul, Turkey, who also dabbles in marathon running. Due to Parallels falling on a public holiday in Turkey, Coşkun needed to execute some careful route planning in order to avoid the busiest roads. Coşkun ended up riding 603km in total, the most distance for this year’s Parallels.
“This challenge clashed with a public holiday in my country so I had to skip the crowded roads. Because of this, I decided to start from Mudanya, south of the Marmara Sea. Although I love climbing high mountains, the important thing in this challenge was to create a straight route. So I went around the region’s highest mountains and admired them from afar.
“I was happy to finish without any problems. I’m grateful for the beautiful views at day and night. Especially seeing the milkyway with my naked eye in the darkness. Sunrise was also epic on the oldest agricultural lands in history. I felt like a real warrior.”
Coşkun chose the flattest route around the mountains in order to travel further, faster
Riding from Tangerang to Alas Roban in Indonesia, Edmund Jeds’s ride captured the spirit of long rides with friends. Clocking in at 433km, Edmund and two other riders rode from dawn ’till dawn – even weathering a dramatic thunder storm in the middle of the night, forcing them to take shelter untill it was safe to ride again.
Indonesia has a flourishing audax scene and is quickly establishing itself as a destination for self-supported long-distance cyclists, even boasting an ultra-distance race – Bentang Jawa – which Apidura is proud to support.
Edmund Jeds and friends after their 433km Parallels ride