By At dusk on February 20, Amit Samarth was on the outskirts of Bhubaneswar in Odisha. He’d been cycling for six days on his Ride Across India — a solo bicycle challenge along the 6,000-km Golden Quadrilateral highway network — pedalling through heat and cold for about 20 hours a day.
And suddenly, there on both sides of the highway, were hundreds of commercial sex workers dressed in all their finery. “I had never seen anything like it before. Of all the things I saw, it stuck in my head,” Samarth says.
By the time the 40-year-old pedalled to a stop back where he had started out, in Mumbai, he had missed his target of finishing in under 12 days. Yet, there was reason to celebrate. His time of 13 days and 9 hours was still the fastest on the stretch, breaking an existing record of 14 days, 23 hours and 52 minutes, set by Bharat Pannu in 2020.
Samarth is no newbie to the world of ultra-cycling. In the past, he has finished endurance races such as the Race Across America (4,940 km from coast to coast) and the Trans-Siberian Extreme (9,100 km from Moscow to Vladivostok in Russia).
