Tiramisu Express Ultra Cycling: Ventoux to Sicily, No Assistance

What Tiramisu Express Ultra Cycling Actually Asks Of You

The premise is simple and slightly unhinged: the organisers give you fixed waypoints, and you build your own route between them — road surface, distance, elevation, weather exposure, all of it is on you. Total self-sufficiency is mandatory. That means sourcing your own accommodation, booking your own ferries, feeding yourself, and covering every kilometre without outside help. Nobody’s handing you a bottle at kilometre 200.

Running 12–20 September 2026, Tiramisu Express ultra cycling gives every rider, regardless of route, the exact same deadline: Sunday the 20th, 6pm. Finish by then or you’re not a finisher. That single shared cutoff is what turns this from a tough ride into a genuine race against the clock.

Two Routes, Two Different Kinds of Suffering

This is where Tiramisu Express ultra cycling splits into something closer to a choose-your-own-punishment format.

The Islands path runs roughly 1,300km with 19,000m of climbing over 7 days, threading through Corsican and Sardinian canyons and hopping ferries out of Toulon, Bonifacio, and Cagliari. Miss a sailing and you’re not just losing time — you’re rebuilding your entire day around whenever the next boat leaves. There’s something almost romantic about island-hopping by bike, right up until you’re standing on a dock doing ferry-timetable math with legs that don’t want to do math.

The Volcanoes path skips the boats entirely and goes straight at Italy’s volcanic terrain — nearly 2,100km and 27,000m of elevation over 8 days, with no ferry breaks to force a rest. It’s the more relentless of the two: less logistical puzzle, more sustained physical confrontation with climb after climb.

Neither route is the easy option. Tiramisu Express ultra cycling just lets you choose which flavour of hard suits you — technical and logistically complex, or brutal and uninterrupted.

The Tone Underneath the Brutality

What I like about this event is that it doesn’t take itself entirely seriously while asking something genuinely demanding of you. The whole thing is built around a tongue-in-cheek legend — prehistoric creatures once migrating from Ventoux to Sicily for tiramisu — and that playfulness runs through the branding without ever softening the actual demands of the route. It’s a nice trick: keep the mood light, keep the challenge completely real.

That contrast is honestly what makes Tiramisu Express ultra cycling worth flagging here. Plenty of unsupported ultra events lean fully into grimness as the whole identity. This one lets you laugh at the premise while still respecting exactly how hard 2,100km of self-navigated volcano terrain actually is.

You’ll see the same spirit in their little Tirex mascot — a simple white line-drawing of a dinosaur in a cap, showing up across the website and their Instagram posts, usually lounging in a deckchair or paddling through water with a drink in hand. It’s a small, genuinely charming touch, and it sums up the whole event better than any stat sheet could: serious challenge, delivered with a wink.

A First Edition, With No Precedent to Lean On

Here’s the part that raises the stakes even further: this is the inaugural edition. There’s no previous finisher’s route notes to study, no forum thread telling you which Corsican canyon actually eats the most time, no established wisdom on whether islands or volcanoes is the smarter pick for a given rider. Every navigation choice on Tiramisu Express ultra cycling this year gets made blind, by everyone, at the same time.

That’s a different kind of pressure than showing up to an event with ten years of shared knowledge behind it. It also means whoever finishes this first edition gets to define what “doing it right” even looks like, for every rider who attempts it afterward.

Who Should Actually Consider This

This isn’t a first-ultra event. Total self-sufficiency plus self-navigation plus a fixed group cutoff means you need to already be comfortable planning your own route, managing your own logistics under time pressure, and making real-time decisions when a ferry schedule or a mountain pass doesn’t cooperate. If you’ve done a supported or lightly-marked ultra before and you’re looking for the next step up in autonomy, this is exactly that step.

If ferries and coastline appeal more than nonstop climbing, the Islands path is the one to register for. If you’d rather face one continuous physical fight without the logistics layer, Volcanoes is the harder, more singular test.

Either way, registration goes through Miles Republic, and the deadline doesn’t move for anyone — islands or volcanoes, everyone’s racing the same Sunday evening cutoff.

Tiramisu Express – Volcano Path

2100 KMS 27000M