Take pretty much any sport, and my preference is for the longer events: marathon over 100 metres; Test match over Twenty20; Grand National over King's Stand.

I have also come to see 1919 as an extremely interesting year, not exclusively, but not least, for sport.

Having established itself as one of the growth sectors of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, organised sport was now having to begin again in a world that had just experienced a most profound, disillusioning shock.

I have been taking advantage of the centenary to learn more about how sport set off again in the shattered, re-ordered continent that had spawned it.

So I was intrigued to read about a new book telling the story of an utterly extraordinary - mad, even - endurance event that I was totally unfamiliar with, which was held in north-eastern France, Luxembourg and Belgium in April and May 1919.

As will doubtless have occurred to you, this was the area that until November 11, 1918, less than six months earlier, had formed the First Great War's western front.

And indeed, the event was a seven-stage, 2,000 kilometre bicycle race called the Circuit des Champs de Bataille, or Tour of the Battlefields.

You can understand, just about, what might have prompted the powers-that-be at the Paris-based Le Petit Journal newspaper to think that a race honouring those who had sacrificed so much and suffered so appallingly to defend the motherland might be a good idea and an effective way of boosting circulation.

But the slightest reflection on the practicalities ought to have convinced them otherwise.

In spring 1919, this was an utterly devastated landscape replete with mud, ruins, unexploded ordnance in mind-boggling quantities, rotting body parts, millions of tree-stumps and not much else.

What roads that had survived were in appalling condition.

Outside the main population centres, the only inhabitants were filthy, half-starved wretches - the sinistrés - who had returned to scratch out a living and start again in their obliterated farmsteads and villages.

The devastation in the very worst affected areas was so total they remain off-limits today.

Incredibly, common sense did not prevail; the race - which having read Tom Isitt's fascinating book, Riding in the Zone Rouge, I am happy to label the most gruelling one-off sports event I have ever encountered - duly got underway in Strasbourg on  April 28, 1919 when 87 riders pedalled off into the gloom from Place Broglie at 6am sharp.

If you are wondering how a mere seven-stage road race can be regarded as tougher than, say, the Tour de France, even allowing for the uniquely ghastly conditions prevailing in 1919, consider that Belgian Charles Deruyter's winning time of 85 hours 1min is about 104 minutes longer than Geraint Thomas took to win last year's Tour. 

 The estimated time of the 21st and last man home in 1919, Louis Ellner, the lanterne rouge, was a staggering 166 hours, fractionally under a full 24 hours per stage on average.

Some of these men had served in the trenches, and while the shelling and murderous machine-gun fire had of course stopped, in terms of day-to-day suffering, I tend to doubt that these two weeks in the saddle on the Tour of the Battlefields were any easier to endure.

As a contributor to Rouleur magazine, Isitt is a cycling expert (and enthusiast), and is good on the shortcomings of early 20th century equipment.

Wheels had maple-wood rims; brake blocks were cork; frames were heavy steel; clothing was cotton and wool; riders rarely had more than two gears at their disposal and had to effect their own roadside repairs after frequent crashes and punctures.

If most obstacles facing the field were eminently foreseeable, the organisers could not be blamed for the foul weather, with riders astonishingly obliged to carry their bikes over the Ballon d'Alsace mountain on the penultimate stage through waist-deep snow.

With documentary sources on the race relatively few and far between, and the dramatis personae long dead, Isitt has interleaved his account of the event with his own experiences retracing the route on his Spin Spitfire. 

While the main perils that he faced came from glass-strewn cycle paths and speeding artics, he still managed to crack three ribs, and his journey through the old battlefields provides a breezy, occasionally poignant, counterpoint to the main story.

The author alludes at one point to a remark by Tour de France originator Henri Desgrange in which he is said to have observed that the perfect Tour would be one in which only one rider made it to the finish-line.

This makes me think that the nature of endurance sport has changed over the past century from something purely attritional to a series of formats in which physical strength and stamina are tested alongside tactical nous and mental fortitude.

On a visit to Andy Schleck’s bike-shop in Luxembourg, Isitt discusses the "lunacy of early bike racing" with the 2010 Tour de France winner.

"Those guys were really hard men," Schleck concludes with a shake of the head.

By rescuing this most deranged endurance event of all from oblivion, this book provides a welcome monument to their hardness.