My name is the one that goes on the certificate. The record does not belong to me. It belongs to a team of people whose names you will never see on it — and the longer I spend in this sport, the more certain I am of that.
A solo ride is the most misleading phrase in ultra-cycling. Yes, I am the only one pedalling. But behind me, every record I hold was built by a small organisation working around the clock, and the difference between a finish and a DNF is far more often a logistics decision than a fitness one.
The roles that make a record
Sit in our follow vehicle during a record attempt and you will see a machine with many moving parts.
There is a crew chief who runs the whole operation — for many of my rides that has been Darshan Dubey, and for the Golden Quadrilateral, Jyoti Tripathi — making the calls I am in no state to make myself. There are navigators who keep us precisely on the certified route, because a wrong turn at kilometre 3,000 is not a detour, it is a disqualification. There is a physiotherapist patching the body back together each night; on several of my rides that has been Aarti Nagrani. There is a bike expert — Arham Shaikh has kept my machine alive through brutal distances — whose job is to make sure mechanical trouble never becomes the reason I stop. There is a rider-care team feeding me, watching me, keeping me human. There is the nutrition crew planning and timing every handup. And there are the people behind the camera, capturing it so the ride exists for more than just us.
Above all of it, and often half a world away, is my coach, TRACY MCKAY, reading the data, shaping the strategy, and steadying the plan when things wobble.
A record is an operation, not a ride
I come from the Army, and I have come to see a record attempt the way I would see any operation: it lives or dies on planning. Long before the start, the route is studied and recced. The support cadence is worked out — when the vehicle leapfrogs ahead, when food goes up, when I sleep and for how long. Contingencies are written for the things that always go wrong, because at this distance, something always does. The riding is the easy, visible part. The planning is the part that wins.
The forms this takes can be surprising. When RAAM moved indoors in 2020, my entire "race" ran out of an apartment in Wakad, Pune — two bikes on two smart trainers, two big screens showing the virtual road, inverters humming against power cuts, and a crew of seven keeping me fed and moving for twelve days inside four walls. When I rode Kashmir to Kanyakumari, the operation was leaner — a SCOTT Foil, a single saddle I trusted, and a crew that got me across the length of the country with one hotel stop the whole way. Different rides, same principle: the support is engineered as carefully as the ride.
And it isn't only Indian crews. When I rode the Race Around Austria, a local family, the Moshammers, helped two strangers from India get to a finish line in the Alps — proof that the crew you need sometimes appears where you least expect it.
The part no one talks about
Here is what the certificate hides: the crew suffers almost as much as the rider. They lose the same nights of sleep, eat the same cold meals at odd hours, and carry the weight of every decision while I get to disappear into the simple task of pedalling. When I am hallucinating in the dark, they are the ones staying sharp. When I want to quit, they are the ones holding the line. Morale in that vehicle is as important as anything on the bike.
So when people congratulate me, I have learned to gently correct them. I didn't set that record. We did. Team Pannu did — every navigator, physio, mechanic and friend who gave up their own weeks so that mine could end at a finish line.
If you're chasing something big
- Build your crew before you build your fitness. The right people are the real preparation.
- Plan the operation — route, support cadence, sleep, food, contingencies — in obsessive detail.
- Give every job to someone, so the rider's only job is to ride.
- Choose people you trust to make decisions when you can't.
- And remember whose record it really is. Say "we." Mean it.