Paula Soler — An artist, a photographer, and an ultra-distance cyclist

Where she rides out of

Paula was born in the Colombian capital, Bogotá, moved to Spain in 2022, and is now living in the city that has become one of gravel cycling’s centres of gravity, Girona. She started cycling in 2019 with a road bike, twenty-five-millimetre tyres, straight onto dirt roads because she had not yet learned that gravel was a separate category with its own gear. She is an artist and photographer, and, sometimes, a bike tour guide.

Her Catalonia

Her home route, in the version she’d take a friend on if they had a half day and a gravel bike, has two variations depending on which city she was writing from. In Girona: a sixty kilometre loop with four hundred metres of climbing, passing through Rustik, a café run by Albert, who is not just the owner but the reason the ride is worth doing. In Bogotá: a loop through El Chocolatero. Sixty kilometres, thirteen hundred metres of climbing, closer to the Andes, more vertical.

Asked when to come, she picks winter. Not the temperate winter most riders think of when they hear Catalonia — the actual, snow-on-the-Pyrenees winter, which she rides through with a jacket and treats as an adventure rather than a hardship. Coen, from a previous Spotlight, would agree.

A ride that changed something

The bikepacking trip to the Sierra Nevada del Cocuy in Colombia. She says it stayed with her long after it was over. What she doesn’t say directly is what stayed. But reading her other answers — the return home last year after three and a half years in Spain, the moment she started taking herself more seriously as an athlete, the year of learning to believe in her own capacity as an ultra-distance cyclist — the shape of it is legible. The trip left a mountain range in her memory. It also left a permission: to ride further, to ride alone, to structure the week around riding rather than fit riding around the week.

Joy through discipline, in her own summary. A slogan on the page. A fact on the road.

I’ve learned to find joy through discipline.

What riding gives her

What riding gives Paula is solitude. She usually rides alone, and she prefers it that way. The bike is the place, she writes, where she releases her frustration and feels most comfortable. Even on difficult days, especially on difficult days, it is a safe place.

She adds a line most riders leave out, or bury: she sometimes cries on the bike, and finds it liberating. This isn’t framed as a confession. It’s framed as a functional feature of the ride. Several hours where the phone is somewhere else and the emotions have space.

The other thing she gets from it, in the days between rides, is a rhythm. Early morning start, coffee, breakfast, straight out. Thursdays as rest days, which she uses to plan the longer rides for the weekend: five or six hours, usually the biggest ones of the week.

What’s next

Twelve months out, she is looking for a bike sponsor, someone who believes in the journey and can support her with a bicycle. The specific ask, delivered plainly, without hedge. She is, she writes, confident she can make it happen. She rides out of Girona and Bogotá, has two home loops and a category of dreams, and is training for the ultra-distance with the specific discipline of someone who has already decided what her year looks like.