Sarnia to Barrie: A Deranged Plan
April 22, 2026
Last year I rode from Burlington down the Welland Canal to Port Colborne, out to Port Maitland, touched the lighthouse, and rode back up to Hamilton. 220 kilometers. I did this on a whim, on a commuter bike, fueled primarily by a whole pan pizza and whatever gas stations had. I was not training for anything. I had no particular reason to think I could do it.
The thing I remember most is not the ride itself. It’s the feeling at the end, not exhaustion, not pride exactly, but something closer to recalibration. Like I’d been operating with a map that had the wrong scale on it. The tank was bigger than I thought. Significantly bigger. And I didn’t know why, other than that years of swimming and running had apparently built something I’d never bothered to measure.
I kept thinking: I could have kept going.
So now I’m going to get on a train to Sarnia, clip in at 11pm, and ride 460 kilometers up the Lake Huron coast to Barrie without sleeping.
This is not a well-considered decision. It is the logical conclusion of that feeling at the lighthouse.
The route follows the lake the whole way up, Sarnia to Grand Bend to Goderich to Kincardine to Southampton, flat and coastal and dark for the first six hours because I’m starting at night. Then the escarpment up to Owen Sound, which is the part where the road starts to look like something and not just a line on a phone. Then rail trail for the last stretch into Barrie, car-free and flat, which is good because by that point I’ll have been awake for thirty hours and the fewer decisions required the better.
460 kilometers. I keep saying the number to people and watching their faces do math. Most recreational cyclists have never broken 80km. A few have done a century. This is nearly five of those, back to back, overnight, solo.
For a normal fit person this is a fantasy. For me it’s an extrapolation. I don’t say that to be impressive about it, I say it because the Port Maitland ride taught me something real about how aerobic fitness transfers across disciplines. The engine doesn’t know it’s on a bike. It just knows it’s been asked to go, and it goes.
The thing I love about ultra-distance cycling specifically, and I say this as someone who is not really a cyclist, is that it’s the most honest sport I’ve encountered. You can’t fake it. There’s no tactic that gets you out of hour fourteen. There’s no surge that ends the race early. You just have to have built the thing, and then you have to go find out if you built it.
Running hurts more per hour but it ends faster. Swimrun is chaos and cold water and you’re making decisions constantly. A 24-hour bike ride is different. It’s a long conversation with yourself, held at 28 kilometers per hour, with the lake on one side and the dark on the other. The suffering is low-grade and continuous and you just have to decide, periodically, to keep deciding to stay on the bike.
I find this extremely appealing. I am aware this is not normal.
The sun will come up somewhere around Goderich, which will be hour six or seven. This is the moment I’m actually planning around. Everything before that is just getting through the night. Everything after that is just riding a bike on a beautiful Saturday morning along Georgian Bay, which is one of the best things you can do with a Saturday morning, and the fact that I’ll have already ridden 260 kilometers to get there makes it better, not worse. Type II fun at its most concentrated.
The finish line is Barrie. After that, a bus back to Toronto, then approximately twelve hours of sleep.
The date isn’t set yet. But the plan is set, which is the part that actually matters, because I know from experience that once the plan exists, the ride is already mostly done. You just have to show up to the train.
I showed up to the lighthouse. I’ll show up to Sarnia.