Remembering through motion: sensory nostalgia and lost futures in ultracycling

This paper examines how the datafied practice of ultracycling mobilizes nostalgia as a sensory and temporal frame of reference. Focusing on two recent editions of the Transcontinental Race, an unsupported, free route ultracycling event with mandatory checkpoints across Europe, and drawing on autoethnographic reflections and discourse analysis of race reports and media coverage, I argue that riders inhabit a reflective nostalgia (Boym 2001) for pre-digital adventure, corporeal temporality, and tactile engagement with landscapes, bikes and infrastructures. Sensory cues such as the smell of fresh tarmac, the excitement of border crossings, or the changing textures of terrain form a memory archive through which participants feel the past in motion. These multisensory registers expand the nostalgic archive, allowing cyclists to perceive memory through smell, sound, touch, and proprioception. Yet this nostalgia is not restorative but speculative (Cowe 2022): it gestures toward lost futures of mobility, endurance, and European coherence now eroded by algorithmic mediation and ecological rupture. Ultracycling emerges here as a practice of remembering-through-motion. A counter-temporal practice of slowness and embodiment that allows participants to reimagine modernity, movement, and affect in the context of benign surveillance technologies, physical and mental exertion, and small creature comforts.