Sami Sauri rode 280 kilometers in a single day on Route 66 at 31 km/h average, mostly on highway because the old road doesn't exist anymore. She did it coming from fixed gear racing. No grand plan, no training block designed for it. Just said yes and figured it out.
Key Takeaways
The thing Sauri keeps coming back to is that the barrier to starting isn't fitness or kit. She did her first 200k ever on the Route 66 trip. The Trans Labrador Highway was 680 kilometers of rocky gravel with professional cyclists including Gus Morton and Jacob Rathy, and she was producing the film at the same time. Nobody handed her an easy entry point. She just went. Her advice: start small, do flat roads if that's what you have, get comfortable with your gear before you worry about upgrading it.
The W Camps she's building in Girona for 2022 are built around the same idea. No minimum bike price, no minimum fitness level. She watched the women's camp culture develop in the US and couldn't find anything like it in Europe, so she started putting one together herself. The gravel scene has got this right in a way road racing hasn't. You can show up on a bad bike in the wrong kit and nobody's sending you home.
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If the gravel and adventure side of cycling interests you, the episode on gravel's first super team goes into how that world is professionalising fast. And if you want the other end of the spectrum, the Pogacar episode covers what it actually looks like when someone builds a career the traditional way.