Cycling Weekly can today reveal that ultra-endurance cyclist Dr Sarah Ruggins is planning a new expedition and world record attempt, Project Atlas, during which she will attempt to pedal around the planet faster than anyone has previously done.
The current Guinness World Record for circumnavigating the globe by bicycle is held by Mark Beaumont, who completed his epic journey in 2017, cycling 18,032 miles from Greenwich to Greenwich in a time of 78 days, 14 hours, and 40 minutes.
The British adventurer remains the only person to have achieved the big loop in less than 80 days, after Alaskan ultra-cyclist Lael Wilcox abandoned her attempt to best Beaumont’s time earlier this year, bailing after 14 days because she was suffering from heat exhaustion in the midst of a brutal heatwave that was scorching a large part of the planet.
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Wilcox does still hold the women’s round-the-world record – 108 days, 12 hours and 12 minutes – which she set in 2024, but Ruggins has the outright record firmly in her sights, and believes she can shave three full days from Beaumont’s benchmark, completing the 29,000km (18,000-mile) challenge in just 75 days.
To achieve this, the Canadian-born adventurer – who plans to set off from Peggy’s Cove in Nova Scotia, close to her family’s home, on 4 May 2027 – will need to ride an average of 400 km (250 miles) per day.
(Image credit: James Busby)
When you learn that Ruggins, who spent a decade recovering from a rare autoimmune condition in her teens, couldn’t even ride a bike just three years ago, you could be forgiven for doubting her ability to achieve this. But she has form.
The 38-year-old, who appears on the cover of the current edition of Cycling Weekly and features large in our article about Fastest Known Times (FKTs), already holds two outright records, one for riding LEJOGLE (Land’s End–John O’Groats-Land’s End) in five days, 11 hours and 14 minutes in 2025, and another for cycling 6042km (3754 miles) south-to-north across the European Continent in 13 days, 20 hours and 27 minutes earlier this year.
Both times are considerably quicker than anyone else, male or female, has ever achieved, before or since. “I look for challenging routes, where the fastest known times are held by men, and I look for routes that whose records have been challenged multiple times, and people have failed,” Ruggins told Cycling Weekly. The round-the -planet record, the ultimate FKT, certainly ticks all those boxes.
“We’ve been cooking this up for three years,” she says. “When we did LEJOGLE we took a country, and when we did the European record, we took a continent, and so now we’re taking the world.
“Our three-year trilogy was always country, continent, world. And the reason we did it that way is because I’m new to cycling. I got my first bike in 2023. And from there I’ve built the team. I’ve built my riding competencies, and so as we learn to work together, and as our skills developed together, so too, did the complexities of challenges we want to take on.”
(Image credit: James Busby)
Beaumont certainly doesn’t doubt Ruggins’ ability, nor the seriousness of her attempt to beat his decade-old time. “Mark texted me back in June and said: ‘You’re going to be the one to break my world record,’” she reveals. “He has been a mentor and a friend to me for several years. Mark opened many doors for me in this industry and he’s one of the people who has actually given me the belief that this is possible.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly then, Ruggins is keen not to present her new expedition as an all-out assault on her mentor’s biggest achievement. “I’m not saying I want to beat Mark Beaumont,” she tells me. “I just want to see if a person can go around the world in 75 days.”
Although it’s inevitable that people will portray her Project ATLAS ride as a race against the existing fastest time, in one important sense they’re not directly comparable, because Ruggins is taking a very different route to the one Beaumont followed.
“Mark had the benefit of going around the world in 2017, when there was far less geopolitical disruption than now,” she says. “He crossed through Russia down into China, and obviously, we can’t do that. So, my route will also be quite different from Mark’s. We’re starting from a blank sheet of paper.
“We’re bound by the exact same rules that that he was, but obviously we can’t go through Russia. We can’t pass east across Europe through Ukraine or Iran to get to the Stans. And every flight I take means I will have to increase my mileage every day versus his pace. So we have to be quite clever, and therefore the route is still under construction, but we will announce it in a few months.”
Cycling Weekly will report on the route and other elements of the expedition as they evolve, so watch this space.
