On January 1st this year, Marin de Saint-Exupéry set off from home with the goal of spending eleven months on the road.

His first stop is Morocco, to race the Atlas Mountain Race in February. Then he heads to Greece for the Hellenic Mountain Race in May, before finally heading to Kyrgyzstan for the Silk Road Mountain Race in August. With a bit of luck, by the time he gets home towards the end of 2024 the journey should have covered around 30,000km.

Marin has chosen to do this in his own way, leaving his smartphone at home and travelling to the races via the ‘no fly’ route. Here he describes why he’s chosen to go on this journey.

"My name is Marin de Saint-Exupéry. I am not an aviator, but a bike messenger. My thing is the Vélopostale, not the Aéropostale, but really it’s the same, we just arrive at a different time. My bike allows me to dream, to cross countries and continents and to live great adventures. On a daily basis it’s my working tool to make deliveries around town. My passion is to race long distances, an emerging discipline, still on the sidelines of mainstream cycling. Self supported races over several days, hundreds if not thousands of kilometres, over mountains, across continents, by day or by night, eating on the bike and sleeping by the side of the road. A parallel is often drawn with the early days of the Tour de France, a time when racers were named forçats de la route.

The long distance cyclist crosses continents powered by the energy in their legs rather than by fossil fuels. Part of me enjoys evolving the concept of self supported, freeing myself from a techno-centric system. To travel the world and see all of its beauty, to be aware of its value, its fragility and the changes to our environment. To perform in long distance cycling, one must focus only on what is essential to progress: trusted and durable gear, over and above anything else.

It’s a big deal to race all over the world, and we rely too much on the plane as a mode of transport. A polluting and elitist way of travelling, which is incompatible with environmental goals. It’s an ongoing debate in the bikepacking community. In 2017, after my first Transcontinental Race, a small group of us took a boat back from the finish in Greece. This summer, the race organisers created a Green Leaderboard to empower overland travel. Other races like GBDuro have some fly free policies. These evolutions give me confidence that the sport is heading in the right direction.

I have always believed in this approach. In 2019, I didn’t hesitate to jump on my bike to reach Kyrgyzstan from Switzerland to take part in the Silk Road Mountain Race. Three years later in 2022, I took the boat and my bike instead of a plane to reach Morocco and I won the Atlas Mountain Race. It was nice to win, but I ended up understanding that the real success was something unexpected - the opportunity to empower more people to hopefully travel by bike. Whether that be at home or travelling the world, it doesn’t matter! Be it racing at the limit of human imagination in crazy conditions, countless kilometres or big performances, it still doesn’t matter! It just needs to make us dream, to help us feel capable, to make us desire travelling in this way.

A bit like this first time, when at age 14 I took my worn fixed gear bicycle and I rode the 27 kilometres from the train station to my Grandmother's house. On that day I shut down all the fear of my family who insisted they come and collect me from the train station in their car. After that, it just became a matter of scale. Pedalling allows us to view continents at their human scale: the bike has this power, and I hope my project will have this power.

So for 2024, I decided to dream, to ride far and to race on three different continents without flying. For once I will put my introverted character aside. I’m going to speak about it, and I hope that it speaks to you. Whether that’s to commute, to ride to the next town or to leave for adventures across the world.

It will be long. 10 months, travelling from race to race by bike and on three different continents. I will leave on January 1st, heading south and aiming for some sun. The first race will be the Atlas Mountain Race, starting from Marrakech in Morocco on February 9th. Once the race is over and the legs take some rest I will get back on the road towards the Mediterranean sea, heading north until I arrive in Greece for the start of the Hellenic Mountain Race on the 25th of May. Once again after the race, I will rest a little before getting back on the road, heading east to Kyrgyzstan on the Silk Road to reach the start line of the Silk Road Mountain Race. After that third race is where I think things will get spicy mentally. My legs will be tired and I might miss home. It will be hard to see fellow racers jumping on a plane and back home in one day when I will have to get back on the bike and ride thousands of kilometres to get back home.

At first glance, we would expect that with all these kilometres in the legs I will be super well trained. But nowadays to perform in sport you need a rigour and routine, close to a sanitised environment. To be on the road is the exact opposite: you don’t know where you will be the next day, you sleep in the tent everyday, you hit some new roads everyday, you eat some food that would destroy any western untrained stomach, you go through snow storms or cross deserts in the middle of summer, burning at 50°.

To go from race to race by bike won’t remove the ambition to be competitive at each race. If anything, it makes the challenge even more interesting. I will have to become resilient. It might even become an advantage for bikepacking races where facing the unknown is a recurring challenge. All along the tour I will try to do some training, such as doing interval training or trying to periodize my calendar to balance rest and tiredness.

Marin’s bike is a Fairlight Holt

To want to perform at races is also a challenge for my gear. A touring bike is quite different from a racing bike. On top of that, the races I aim to do are off-road, so I will need an MTB. I have one bike that I will adapt along the way, depending on the terrain. A bike to resist the challenge, with a steel frame, a material neglected by professional pelotons and offering a reliable and comfortable solution whilst still being high performance. In my bags I will need a wide range of gear for travel and for the races, for winter or for summer, but first of all some strong and reliable things. At each race I will drop some bags and gear to keep only the essentials.

Such a project is a financial challenge. On that side I am lucky to have the trust of sponsors that believe in the project, equally as much for the competitive element as the activism element. While using their products for a whole year and in the conditions I will encounter, the hope is to promote durability: to buy less but to buy better, while still keeping in mind that a product is never green.

A small detail is about this little device that doesn’t leave our pocket anymore, whose thousands of functions seem to sometimes supersede our own intelligence. This Smartphone scares me at times. It gives me access to so much information that I'm afraid I'll miss what's right in front of my eyes. It keeps me connected to so many people that I'm afraid I won't engage with those in front of me, it lets me do so much that I'm afraid I'll stay locked in my comfort zone. I've decided to leave the smartphone at home. Of course I'll have a phone, if only for security reasons, but the simplest one, and I aim to leave it in my bags.

Instead, I'll take a notebook and a pen, and take the time to write notes and letters, a way of staying in touch. Paper correspondence is afterall, one of the last reasons for bike couriers. We transport mail by bike, stacks of papers, administrative and professional mail. I think that it’s unfortunate how we take less and less time to use a pen to correspond. I think it's wonderful to take the time to write to someone, it gives value to the exchange, it humanises it.

To plan such a route also makes you more aware of the global geopolitical situation and its many crises. Travelling through the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, still recently shaken by an earthquake, not being able to cross the Moroccan-Algerian border that has been closed for years, feeling the violence that is still palpable in the territories of the former Yugoslavia, approaching Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh, not being able to go to Iran under the yoke of an authoritarian regime, to travel through the former USSR while in Ukraine people are fighting for freedom. All this makes us aware of the luxury represented by a European passport, the luxury of having the chance to travel, the luxury of living in a rich country. And it makes the responsibility of our rich countries to act on the climate and social crisis even more important.

I hope, as I travel, to be able to talk about it. Cycling is a simple, accessible tool that can revolutionise the way we get around, appease our cities, make us travel, entertain us, be a high-level sport and help us discover new continents. And all by the power of our legs."