Jonas Deichmann Embarks on 10,000km Cycling Leg Through Russia

Jonas Deichmann stepped foot in Russia on Wednesday after waiting 13 weeks to obtain a visa. The extreme athlete from Germany was stopped midway through his 40,000km triathlon around the world after Russia’s borders were closed due to the coronavirus pandemic.

“Now the route to the Pacific is free of any bureaucracy and I can concentrate on riding my bike,” Deichmann captioned his social media post on Wednesday.

Deichmann now has 10,000 kilometers of cycling en route to Vladistok, the last stop on his third leg of the 40,000km triathlon that circumnavigates the globe. The journey began on September 26, 2020 in Berlin, Germany and was estimated to take 12 months. This did not include the extra 3 months of travel time he incurred while waiting for a visa.

In his 4th video diary, Deichmann shows that he hand-wrote one of his visa application documents on a piece of paper, using the hood of a car as a desk. You can see Deichmann’s wide grin as he pulls out the visa from the envelope after waiting for 13 weeks.

Deichmann calls this next leg, cycling through Siberia, “the big challenge.” The region makes up more than ¾ of Russia’s land but is only home to 23 percent of the population, according to the 2017 census, due to notoriously harsh winter conditions. Britannica wrote that temperatures as low as -68 degrees Celsius have been recorded in Siberia, in Sakha.

“Siberia in the winter,” Deichmann said in German, “I’m looking forward to it.”

He predicted that he will encounter temperatures as low as -20 degrees Celsius on his route through Siberia, or what he called “a bit chilly.” Siberia’s weather report estimates the lowest temperature of this week will be -13 degrees on Friday and next week will be -11 degrees Celsius on Wednesday. But, this 10,000km cycling leg will take much longer than two weeks. Deichmann estimates he will arrive in Vladistok after 60 days on the bike.

Once he reaches Vladistok, Deichmann plans to hitchhike on a boat to North America where he will run 5040 km (3,131.7 mi) from San Francisco to New York. There, he will board another boat that will take him across the Atlantic Ocean to Lisbon – the starting line of his final leg. Lastly, he will cycle from Lisbon and finish his 40,000km triathlon in Berlin.

Deichmann has already set one record on this trip by finishing the longest unassisted open water swim of 450 kilometers in December. Completing this triathlon would demolish the current Guineas World Record for the longest triathlon, 6,938.25km by Dirk Leonhardt (Germany) in July.