PEGGY'S COVE — Ultra-endurance cyclist Dr Sarah Ruggins will attempt to rewrite cycling history with Project Atlas, a bid to circumnavigate the globe faster than anyone before. The Canadian-born adventurer plans to depart from Peggy's Cove in Nova Scotia, close to her family's home, on 4 May 2027, aiming to complete the 29,000km (18,000-mile) journey in just 75 days at an average of 400 km (250 miles) per day, shaving three full days off the current Guinness World Record of 78 days, 14 hours and 40 minutes held by Mark Beaumont for his 18,032-mile Greenwich-to-Greenwich ride in 2017.
Beaumont remains the only person to have completed the loop in under 80 days. Alaskan ultra-cyclist Lael Wilcox, who holds the women's round-the-world record of 108 days, 12 hours and 12 minutes set in 2024, abandoned her attempt to best Beaumont's time earlier this year after 14 days due to heat exhaustion during a brutal heatwave. Ruggins said she targets routes where barriers remain: “I look for challenging routes, where the fastest known times are held by men, and I look for routes that whose records have been challenged multiple times, and people have failed,” she told Cycling Weekly.
The scale of the ambition is stark given her recent entry to the sport. The 38-year-old, who appears on the cover of the current edition of Cycling Weekly, spent a decade recovering from a rare autoimmune condition in her teens and couldn't ride a bike just three years ago. She got her first bike in 2023. Since then she has set two outright Fastest Known Times — LEJOGLE (Land's End–John O'Groats-Land's End) in five days, 11 hours and 14 minutes in 2025, and a 6042km (3754-mile) south-to-north crossing of the European Continent in 13 days, 20 hours and 27 minutes earlier this year — both quicker than any man or woman before. “We've been cooking this up for three years,” she said. “When we did LEJOGLE we took a country, and when we did the European record, we took a continent, and so now we're taking the world. Our three-year trilogy was always country, continent, world."
Ruggins credited Beaumont as mentor and friend, revealing his early belief in the project. “Mark texted me back in June and said: ‘You're going to be the one to break my world record,’” she said. “He has been a mentor and a friend to me for several years. Mark opened many doors for me in this industry and he's one of the people who has actually given me the belief that this is possible.” She added: “I'm not saying I want to beat Mark Beaumont. I just want to see if a person can go around the world in 75 days.”
The attempt will not directly mirror Beaumont's route due to geopolitical disruption. “Mark had the benefit of going around the world in 2017, when there was far less geopolitical disruption than now,” Ruggins said. “He crossed through Russia down into China, and obviously, we can't do that." She noted she cannot pass east across Europe through Ukraine or Iran to reach the Stans, and that every flight will require increased daily mileage versus Beaumont's pace. "We're bound by the exact same rules that that he was, but obviously we can't go through Russia. We can't pass east across Europe through Ukraine or Iran to get to the Stans. And every flight I take means I will have to increase my mileage every day versus his pace. So we have to be quite clever, and therefore the route is still under construction, but we will announce it in a few months.”