Same day, same route, different races. Ben Perry and Millie Gibbons tackled the Pirinexus: a 354-kilometre loop around Girona that ventures into France and back, each chasing their own version of ‘fast’. Ben started at sunrise, gunning for the fastest known time. Millie rolled out two hours earlier in the dark, treating it as a sprint compared to her usual ultra-distance efforts. Somewhere around hour six, their paths crossed on a covered bridge — and for a brief moment, the British long-distance adventurer met the Canadian national gravel champion before they carried on alone into the night.

Ben had known about fastest known times as a concept, and was looking for a challenge with purpose — something beyond a training ride. “So many races now you pay tons of money and they’re like, ‘Here’s a GPX file. You can have a t-shirt if you want it,’” he says. “I thought maybe this could be something where anyone can do it. You can get in your car, drive here, and just do it. Set a time.”

The Pirinexus was right there. A network of bike paths doing a big loop into France and back, listed on a fastest known times website. “People always mentioned it or talked about it, but I never thought of it as the perfect challenge to take on until now.”

Millie's motivation was simpler. Ben approached her after Santa Vall with the idea, and she thought: any excuse to ride all day. “For me, it’s a relatively short effort compared to what I normally do. I was going to do 12, 15 hours that day anyway, so I thought, okay, I'll do it as some sort of event.” But this time she could put her racer brain on — take less gear, take some risks, and gun for a decent time. “It was really fun.”

“There's one section that's really off-road, but it's less than 5k,” Millie says. “The rest is bike paths, via verde — super nice — or road. In general, it's a really good route to go fast.” Ben knows most of it from years of riding around Girona — in dry conditions, almost all of it is road-bikeable. But they chose a day after heavy rain. Sections of the via verde had been washed out by a diverted river.

“There was a 200-metre stretch where you had to pick up your bike and walk because it was faster than trying to balance through it,” Ben says. “That section is usually just tarmac 10 months of the year. You could drive a Bugatti down there without worrying.”

Millie started at 5:57 a.m. Ben followed at 7:07, planning to catch her. He did — about six hours in, almost bang on halfway — as she rode onto a covered bridge. “It was literally one of the best parts of the ride,” he says.

Ben had built a schedule using a calculator that factored surface type, wind and elevation. It was wildly optimistic. “The calculator just sees ‘minus 3% downhill on average for this 50k section’ and thinks you should average 39 km/h. In reality, you’re weaving past dog walkers, hopping curbs, going behind houses.” His goal was sunrise to sunset. He fell short of that, but beat the existing record of 15:29 by two hours and 41 minutes, finishing in 12:33.

Millie targeted 15 hours, working off an average of 23 km/h. “When I was riding, I was happy sitting at that pace or even faster. But the actual average was quite a lot lower.” Constant stops, starts, right turns, underpasses. She finished in just over 16 hours.

They’d marked stations on the map for refuelling. Millie swears by Repsol. “Even on the women’s ride the other weekend, I was like, we’re going to the Repsol. The girls were like, oh, we’re not going to a cafe? I was like, no, Repsol is life.”

Nutrition was straightforward: eat as much as you can. Ben aimed for 80 grams of carbs an hour and carried a kilogram total. “I had an entire bag of candy in one go. I tried to do it really high-performance-wise, then at a certain point I was just eating everything I had.” Millie kept it simpler — eat on the hour, every hour, and keep the liquids coming.

Hydration was trickier. Ben had bottles only, no packs, and reckons he managed about 250ml an hour. Millie, meanwhile, was fighting a different battle. Her kit didn't have a pee-friendly solution. “I had to take all my layers off even when it was freezing,”' she says. “My Wahoo said it was minus two (celcius). My hands were so cold I literally couldn't zip up my jacket.”

Ben and Millie rode the FKT challenge in March — and both agreed on either side of summer as the ideal window. “In the height of summer, you'll be dodging tourists,“ Millie says. “But in winter you’d be battling a slim daylight window. I’d aim for the shoulder seasons — good dry weather but not too many people.“ Ben adds “October has highs of 24°C, lows of 10°C and the days are still kind of long; I think the average day length is 11 hours and 6 minutes.“ The route helps too. Starting from Girona, the climbing loads into the first third, then drops away. “The simplest parts are the first and last 50k,“ Ben says. “You wouldn't want to do the La Jonquera section in the dark.“ Finishing on smooth, slight downhill beats ending with a 10k climb over Col d'Ares.

The ride shifted something for both of them. Ben has been rethinking what he wants from gravel racing — drawn increasingly to ultra events like Badlands. “The self-supported or unsupported long events are kind of intriguing. I want to keep racing and doing what I'm doing, but focus more on the big races, as well as the longer races”

For Millie, “it ignited the flame of trying to get faster and optimising as much as possible” but also served as a reminder that scale isn’t everything. “Usually I’m getting ready for these multi-day trips and going on ‘life-changing quests’, whereas this was possible in just a day. You get the same feeling of giving it all your beans, seeing the sunrise, seeing the sunset, riding all day, but you get to do it from home.”

And for both, the parallel experience made it stick. Same day, same conditions, same washed-out puddles. “I would see your tracks in the mud,” Millie says. “There was a really muddy section and I was like, oh, there’s Ben’s tracks.” A shared day, experienced apart.

The Pirinexus is there, waiting. No entry fee, no race jersey, (and granted, no paella at the finish) — just 354 kilometres of bike paths, gravel and quiet roads that loop through two countries. Ben and Millie proved you don’t need a massive event to chase something meaningful. You just need a route, a plan, and maybe a friend doing the same thing a couple of hours ahead of you.

The FKT is now Men: 12:48:29 (set by Ben) and Women: 16:19:00 (set by Millie). But as Ben said, the point is to get more people trying this. Beat their time. Do it with friends. Meet in the middle.

Take on the challenge here.

Photography: Nick Cusseneers