At 07:00 (CET) last Saturday morning, Mark Kowalski cycled across the border from Bulgaria into Greece, came to a stop, pulled out his phone and dialled his fianceé. He had news. With that final border crossing, the London-based Canadian ultracyclist and bikepacker had just broken a bike-riding world record.
Kowalski’s tracker showed that he had just cycled exactly 2798.59km. But the record he’d just stamped his name on had nothing directly to do with distance. Since setting off at 09:00 (CET) on the previous Saturday, from a border town in The Netherlands, Kowalski had pedalled through 21 different countries in seven days, beating the previous tally of 20 nations.
In the end, the 40-year-old finished his race against the clock with two hours to spare. But for the entirety of the previous seven days he had been living on his nerves. “The whole trip was super stressful,” Kowalski tells me. “Before starting, I was 65% sure I could do it. But I had enough doubt that I didn’t tell anyone about it until just before I left. Even towards the end, I was never completely confident. Never at any point did I think it was a shoo-in.”
“My strength isn’t speed,” he admits. “I’m slow and steady. The first day I rode for 12 hours, and the last day I had no sleep at all and rode for 24 hours. But my usual pattern was to get up at 2am and ride for 19 hours, with about 1 hours pause time built into that.”
(Image credit: Myrna Macgregor)
A three-time veteran of the 4000km Transcontinental Race, Kowalski is no newcomer to enormous self-supported cycling challenges, but this was a bit different to anything he’d done before. Chasing the erstwhile record, he had a dot on his tracker, showing where he need to be.
“That red dot never slept,” he tells me on the phone from Greece, with fatigue still evident in his voice. “I’d go to sleep ahead of it and then wake up and have to chase it. At the beginning it was very stressful. I was riding through a heatwave. I called my partner on the second day, really doubting myself. It wasn’t until around day four that I came out of the doldrums and I could see the light at the end of the tunnel.”
From Vaal – which is conveniently positioned on the border with the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium, enabling him to tick three countries quickly off the list – Kowalski went south, passing through Luxembourg, France and Switzerland. Tracing Lake Constance, he crossed into Austria, collected Liechtenstein then went east through the Tirol.
After darting south from Innsbruck into northern Italy, he steered northeast to visit the Czech Republic, then dropped south through Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro – doing a quick out-and-back to touch his tyres on Albanian soil – and then continuing east to North Macedonia, Bulgaria and finally into Greece.
(Image credit: Mark Kowalski)
“My partner asked me to give the Transcontinental a break, and so I came up with this idea instead,” he tells me. “But when I first started researching it, I thought the record was 19 countries. I’d had worked out that I could do 20, or 21 at a real push. Then I discovered that the record was actually 20, set by Craig Nilsson in 2025. That was a blow!”
“I was designing my own route, and then I looked at Craig’s, and it was so obviously the best one. I did try and vary it, but when I did I mostly went wrong. Like when I ran into a fence trying to reach a bike trail along the Danube, and had to backtrack. I hit a stretch of gravel and it felt wrong. I was riding alongside this fence thinking ‘I’m just going further and further in the wrong direction here’. In the end I only lost about 20 minutes.”
A Green Party councillor in London, Kowalski used his ride to raise money for Action for Refugees in Lewisham. Confined to the capital, for the most part, he prepared for his expedition by doing endless 6-hour indoor training sessions, and working on a nutrition plan that meant he could stomach taking on 100g of carbs per hour. “Wine gums and mints are great,” he confides. “Mentos are basically 100% carbs!”
During his odyssey, he was riding a Reilly Titanium Reflex gravel bike. “It’s got aero bars and a massive dish on the back for the hills,” he says. “But really it was built for comfort, and I had Redshift suspension seatpost, which really helps with back pain. I put a whole new drive chain on it, but it kept slipping. I just kept going – I wasn’t going to take it to a repair shop to wait hours, only to be told they couldn’t fix it.”
Fully loaded, he estimates the bike weighed about 20kg. “I carried some spare clothing, an emergency sleeping system – a bivvy and blow-up mattress, which I used once. I carried tools – I was probably over prepared in that sense.”
Slippage aside, he got away likely with technical issues, and only suffered two punctures during the entire trip, while running Continental GP5000 32mm tyres.
Does he worry about Nilsson coming back to reclaim his record – something he’s already done once? “Not really,” he tells me. “To reach another country, you’d have to ride another 300km. To do that you’d need to be Victor Bosoni [the young French rider currently winning events like the Traka].”
