The reigning Transcontinental Race champion, Fiona Kolbinger, has posted a mind-boggling ride to Strava where she averaged 30.5km/h over a distance of 430km around the German countryside near Dresden, taking in three different countries along the way.
The massive ride took Kolbinger just over 14 hours and took on 5,042 metres of elevation, also averaging 191 watts in cool weather on Sunday June 13.
(Image credit: Strava)
During her impressive ride, she took 28 QOMs on Strava as well as multiple podiums and top 10s on various segments.
The route was not a pan-flat one either, with two climbs heading well over 1,000 metres in altitude and a couple just under that mark on her huge loop in Germany and over the borders into the Czech Republic and Poland.
Kolbinger is a 26-year-old ultra-endurance cyclist from Germany who is also a trained doctor, focusing on cancer research. She won the Transcontinental Race in 2019, which was around 4,000km in length, in a time of 10 days, two hours and 42 minutes. This was more than 10 hours faster than second place, Ben Davies. She became the first-ever woman to win the event in 2019 beating 257 other riders over 4,000km between Burgos in Bulgaria and Brest in France.
Unfortunately, Kolbinger has not uploaded her power data from this ride, but Strava has estimated it with a maximum estimated watts peaking at 450w, or 8w/kg, holding 360w for 10 minutes.
The weather was ideal for this sort of ride, clear with highs of 21 degrees centigrade. And her ride was with six other riders as they managed an amazing 30.5km/h average speed over the huge distance.
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The full distance of the ride was 428.68km, which is 129.68km further than the 2021 Milan-San Remo that was ridden by the men's pro peloton back in March. A distance considered huge in road cycling but is a normal ride for a transcontinental rider.
That being said, Kolbinger's last ride was just under 70km around the city of Dresden taking over two hours, so this seems to be a pretty epic training ride.
Unfortunately, due to the pandemic, the Transcontinental Race has been postponed until 2022 with more news about the route coming this November.
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Hi, I'm one of Cycling Weekly's content writers for the web team responsible for writing stories on racing, tech, updating evergreen pages as well as the weekly email newsletter. Proud Yorkshireman from the UK's answer to Flanders, Calderdale, go check out the cobbled climbs!
I started watching cycling back in 2010, before all the hype around London 2012 and Bradley Wiggins at the Tour de France. In fact, it was Alberto Contador and Andy Schleck's battle in the fog up the Tourmalet on stage 17 of the Tour de France.
It took me a few more years to get into the journalism side of things, but I had a good idea I wanted to get into cycling journalism by the end of year nine at school and started doing voluntary work soon after. This got me a chance to go to the London Six Days, Tour de Yorkshire and the Tour of Britain to name a few before eventually joining Eurosport's online team while I was at uni, where I studied journalism. Eurosport gave me the opportunity to work at the world championships in Harrogate back in the awful weather.
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