Less than 24 hours after competing at the cycling world championships, Conor White and Kaden Hopkins’s legs were solid enough to be strolling around the streets of Zurich.

Hopkins, who finished 32nd, and White, who finished 39th in the elite men’s time-tiral were on a rest day after taking on the best in the world and happy to reflect on their performances.

“The legs are pretty well recovered after yesterday,” Hopkins said.

“The result was not too far off my predictions and it was a good race but the competition is just crazy out there. The best guys were just so fast.

“Time-trials are always individual efforts so there is not really much influence from the outside as it’s you versus you. You have your targets but every time-trial is about being as close to your limit as possible without going over it. This was by far the longest time-trial I had ever done but it is not so much the influence of other riders but the expectation you put on yourself that you are trying to live up to.”

It could feel daunting racing against Olympic and world champions but Hopkins made sure he took his surroundings in.

“The atmosphere around these events is always special,” Hopkins said.

“It doesn’t feel that much different but you definitely take a lot more care with every step of the preparation. Instead of spending a couple of hours on the bike you spend the whole day working with it to make sure everything is working correctly and minimise the chance of anything going wrong.

“We all race a lot and we have our routines so we just try to stick to them as closely as possible. We know what works for us and we just try to repeat it no matter the race.”

Europe is where most of cycling’s powerhouses are based and White, who won a bronze medal at the Pan American Games last year, understands all too well the advantages riders have on that continent.

“All these riders in Europe have the best equipment and every aerodynamic advantage you can think of, they have it,” White said.

“The Pan Am region is not quite as advanced as the European cycling scene. The guy that won Pan Am Games finished eighteenth yesterday, which is actually a ridiculous ride by him, as he finished among the World Tour riders and he’s not a World Tour rider himself.

“The best equipment, access to training, better coaches makes a huge difference.”

White was happy with his effort and how he executed his pre-race strategy as he came up against the best in the world.

“We saw them at the start and pre-riding and it’s weird to think that you’re racing them but in the time-trial you’re really not racing them, you’re racing yourself,” White said.

“It’s not like we’re sprinting head to head against them, but it’s cool to be racing on the same course and same day as them.

“I have never done a time-trial that long before, usually the time-trials we do are about 30 to 40 minutes, so you want to go all out but if you do that you’ll be cooked at the end.

“I followed exactly the plan that my coach and I made with the power and pacing strategy and pretty happy with how my performance went. It was good to see how I stacked up against the rest of the world.

“I thought I’d be around the top 30 and 40 based on results from past years that I’d seen but we’re nowhere near the best in the world, that’s just a whole different level. If we were at that level we would be racing against them every day.”

In the under-23 time-trial in Zurich on Monday, Nicholas Narraway finished 37th of the 68 riders in the under-23 race.

Narraway finished 3min 37.89sec behind Ivan Romeo, of Spain, who completed the course in 36:42.70.