Every time I talk to an ultra-endurance cyclist, they're missing a bit of skin somewhere. Sofiane Sehili turned up to our chat with a nicely layered scab on his hand and a tan from a few weeks riding Corsica, Sardinia and Sicily — which, he was quick to clarify, wasn't a race. That was his holiday. His job is riding his bike, and his idea of a break from riding his bike is riding his bike somewhere else.
That tells you most of what you need to know about the ultra mindset before we get into any of it. Sehili is one of maybe ten or twelve people on earth who ride self-supported ultra-distance for a living — events like the Silk Road Mountain Race, weeks alone in the high mountains carrying everything you need. It's a world most of us will never enter. But the way these riders think about the bike, about suffering, about managing themselves over days rather than hours, has lessons for every cyclist, even if your longest day is a hilly hundred. Let me pull them out.
It starts with loving the bike
Here's the foundation, and it's easy to skip past in the rush to talk about the suffering. Sehili rides ultra-distance because he loves riding a bike more or less completely. Not the racing, not the results, not the watts — the act of being out on the bike, all day, every day, on his own terms. His work is riding and his rest is riding. There's no separation, because there's no part of it he's trying to get away from.
I find that genuinely instructive, because it's the opposite of how a lot of serious amateurs end up relating to the bike. We structure it, we measure it, we turn every ride into a session with a purpose and a target, and somewhere in there the simple joy of just riding can quietly drain away. Sehili is a reminder that underneath all the training is supposed to be a love of the thing itself. If you've lost that — if every ride has become a job — the ultra rider's total, uncomplicated love of the bike is worth borrowing. Some rides should have no purpose beyond being out there. That's not wasted training. That's the point.
Sleep is the skill nobody talks about
Now the part that stops you cold. Sehili described riding for several days without sleep — three, four days — and the place that takes your mind. He told me about pushing his bike through snow up a pass in Italy, days deep into sleep deprivation, when a thought arrived with total clarity: it can't possibly be snowing in Italy in spring, so something is wrong, so I must be dead. And it made sense to him. He decided he had died, that this was hell, and that his punishment was to push his bike uphill through snow for eternity. The only thing that gave him pause was that he kept getting WhatsApp messages, which seemed unlikely in the afterlife.
Another time, in Switzerland, he had no awareness of anything at all — just following a line on his GPS without knowing it was a GPS, not sure whether his legs were pedalling or running, his brain split between "you should stop" and "follow the line."
This is not toughness. This is the genuine, dangerous delirium that comes from pushing the human body past what sleep deprivation allows, and it's the central, brutal skill of ultra racing: deciding when to ride and when to rest, trading speed against the catastrophe of a mind that's no longer working. The best ultra riders aren't the ones who never sleep. They're the ones who manage sleep cleverly enough to keep functioning.
And here's why it matters to you, even if you'll never race the Silk Road. The moment you take on anything long — a 200km audax, a multi-day bikepacking trip, a big sportive with an early start and a late finish — sleep and rest stop being background and become part of the plan. Skimping on sleep before a big event, or trying to tough out a long ride on no rest, isn't brave, it's counterproductive and at the extreme it's dangerous. Plan your rest the way you plan your fuelling. The ultra world proves, in the most vivid way imaginable, that sleep is performance, not the absence of it.
The craft you can only learn by doing
Sehili and I got onto a French word his old directeur used to throw at him constantly: le métier. It's hard to translate — the craft, the trade — but the meaning he landed on was lovely. It's all the small things you learn while doing a job that you can only learn by doing it. Not from a book, not from a video. From the experience itself.
Ultra-distance is le métier in its purest form. How to pack. How to fix what breaks at 2am in the middle of nowhere. How to eat when nothing appeals. How to read your own body's signals when it's lying to you. How to keep going when there's no one to keep going for. None of that comes from a training plan. It comes from doing it, getting it wrong, and doing it better next time.
The lesson for any rider taking on something big is humility about that. Your first long bikepacking trip, your first 300km day, your first proper adventure ride — you will get things wrong, and that's not failure, it's how the craft is acquired. Start smaller, learn the lessons, build up. The skill of riding far is earned, not bought, and every experienced ultra rider was once a beginner who packed the wrong things and bonked in the wrong place.
You don't need a pedigree
The last thing, and it's the most encouraging. Sehili didn't come up through a racing system. He grew up in a poor family in France, couldn't afford the expensive bikes, and for most of his life the bike was simply transport. He was a swimmer, sent to the pool for a bad back. He came to cycling as a way of getting around, not a sport with a number on his back.
And he became one of the best ultra-distance riders in the world. Because ultra rewards things a junior racing pedigree doesn't necessarily teach — patience, self-sufficiency, the willingness to keep turning the pedals when it stops being fun, the ability to manage yourself alone over days. Those are available to anyone, at any age, from any background. If you came to cycling late, if you never raced as a kid, if you feel like the door to doing something extraordinary on a bike closed before you found the sport — Sehili is the proof that it didn't. The longest, hardest, most adventurous riding in cycling is wide open to the rider who simply loves being out there and is willing to learn the craft.
How to actually start
If any of this has lit something in you, the worst thing you can do is treat the Silk Road as the entry point. The craft is built from the bottom, so start at the bottom.
The classic first step is the sub-24-hour overnighter: ride out one evening, sleep somewhere, ride home the next morning. One night, a route you know, an escape hatch if it goes wrong. It teaches you more about bikepacking than any amount of reading — what to pack, what you didn't need, how your body handles a loaded bike, how badly you sleep the first time and how much better the second. From there you build: a two-day trip, a longer route, your first organised event, your first proper adventure.
Test everything close to home before it matters far from home. The bags, the sleep setup, the fuelling, the navigation — shake them down on a local overnighter where a failure is an inconvenience, not a crisis. That's the craft being acquired exactly the way Sehili acquired his: by doing it, getting it slightly wrong, and doing it better next time. Nobody starts with the Silk Road. They start with one night out.
What the ultra mind gives the rest of us
You're probably not going to race the Silk Road. That's fine. But the ultra mindset still has four things for you: a reminder to love the bike for its own sake, the hard truth that managing sleep and rest is a skill not a weakness, the humility to learn the craft of long days by doing them, and the freedom of knowing that distance rewards patience over pedigree.
Sehili rides to the edge of what the body and mind can take, and comes back with stories of thinking he was dead on a snowy pass. Most of us don't need to go there. But the way he thinks about the bike — as a thing to love, a craft to learn, a test to manage rather than a war to win — would make every long ride you ever do that bit better.
Hear the full conversation with Sofiane Sehili on the Roadman podcast. For more from the ultra world, read the lessons from Lael Wilcox, and come find the adventurers on Skool.