The Ultra Cycling Packing List You Can Always Find Again
Jun 24, 2026 ·
Article
The Ultra Cycling Packing List You Can Always Find Again
I’ve started more than a few races with a vague sense that I’d forgotten something.
Not because I didn’t pack carefully — I always made an ultra cycling packing list. The problem was where it lived. Sometimes a note on my phone, sometimes a Notion page I’d set up two editions ago and half-updated since. Once it was a screenshot of someone else’s list that I’d meant to adapt but never did. By race week, I’d be hunting through old notes trying to find the “right” version, second-guessing whether what I was looking at was current or some leftover from a trip with different kit.
The list existed. It just didn’t exist anywhere reliable.
That’s why I built the VeloAtlas Packing Checklist. Not because no one had ever published an ultra cycling packing list — plenty exist, scattered across forum posts and old blog articles — but because I wanted one canonical place I could always go back to. Something that would be there at 10pm the Wednesday before a race, the same as it always was, already filled in with everything I’d learned mattered.
What’s in it
A good ultra cycling packing list needs to cover more ground than a weekend bikepacking trip. The checklist includes bike and mechanicals, navigation, clothing layers, sleep kit, nutrition and water, first aid, documents, and a handful of things that are easy to forget until you’re 200km in and wishing you hadn’t.
It’s interactive — tick items off as you pack — with a progress bar so you can see at a glance how far through you are. There’s a reset button when you’re starting fresh for the next race.
The print version
There’s also a download option: a clean PDF of the full ultra cycling packing list, nothing pre-checked, formatted for print. Some people prefer to work through packing with a pen in hand, physically marking things off as they go. Print it, clip it to your kit room wall, work through it the old-fashioned way. Both modes are there because both are useful depending on the week.
Why it’s here and not somewhere else
You could keep your ultra cycling packing list in Notion or Apple Notes or a Google Doc. I did, for years. The problem isn’t that those tools are bad — it’s that the list lives with you, which means it gets neglected, goes out of date, sits next to twelve other things and never quite becomes the definitive version.
This checklist is one place, always there, that I can point people to and point myself to. It gets updated when it needs to be. It doesn’t drift.
If you’re riding your first ultra or your fifteenth, the goal is the same: show up at the start line having forgotten nothing. This is the list I use. I hope it saves you the same midnight scramble it saved me.