Twenty kilometres through the Shatsk lakeland, and the road does not go up. Not really. From start to finish the route moves within a thirteen-metre band — less vertical range than a six-storey building, spread across the entire ride.

That's the point: no climb to hide behind, no descent to hand back time, nothing to break the rhythm. A gentle drift down in the first kilometre, an almost imperceptible rise through the middle third, and a long easy fade toward the finish. The only pitch worth naming is a four-percent blip at km 7 that lasts about a hundred metres.

This is Polissia — the great sandy lowland where Ukraine, Poland and Belarus meet — and the riding is through tall pine forest, past meadow and peat bog, with the Shatsk lakes scattered through the trees. Svitiaz sits just off your shoulder to the west: nearly sixty metres deep, the deepest natural lake in the country, and the largest of some thirty lakes in the national park. The whole landscape is so level that the trees are the only thing marking distance.