Individual time trial · 12–14 August 2026
The schedule that was written beforehand, held against the ride that happened
Every stage in the schedule was given a start time and a length before the ride, and the gaps between them were planned too — the transfers, the two sleeps, the crewed stop at the Ice Rink. The six stages were then ridden, and each start and finish was measured off the Strava files afterwards.
Those two things are laid over each other below. The top lane is the plan, the bottom lane is the ride, and both run on the same clock: hours since the gun at 9:00 AM Wednesday. Where the lanes drift apart is the whole story of the effort.
On stage
—
Between stages
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Worst deficit
—
Plan
Ridden
Behind
plan
Scroll the panel sideways for the full 58 hours
Stage 1 came in five minutes under its window and stage 2 started early, which is the last time the ride was ahead of anything. Stage 2 itself ran an hour and eight minutes long, and from there the deficit only grew: the first sleep ran long, French Pass on stage 3 held its planned time but started two hours late, and stage 4 — the Aqueduct, planned at 7:37 — took ten hours and four minutes.
That is the peak of the curve. At the end of stage 4 the ride was six hours and thirteen minutes behind a schedule built around a 58-hour cutoff, with two stages still to go. On the plan as written, the day was gone.
What follows is the part that does not show up in a finishing time. The second sleep — the one the schedule labelled the decision point, and gave six hours — was cut to two hours and seven minutes. Stage 5 was ridden eight minutes inside its window. Then Gold Dust, the sixth and last, planned at 6:15 after fifty-three hours on the course, went in 4:59 — the fastest riding of the whole effort, and on its own an hour and sixteen minutes of the deficit handed back.
Six hours down became forty-nine minutes down, and the 58-hour target held with twenty-three minutes to spare. The plan was wrong about almost every individual stage. It was very nearly right about the whole thing.
| Segment | Planned start | Actual start | Planned | Actual | Δ length | Behind at end |
|---|
Scroll the table sideways for every column
Behind at end is cumulative: how much later than planned he reached that point of the course, whatever happened before it. The Δ length column is the segment on its own.