146. Dr Hutch: Tears, resilience, beauty and endurance

0:00So fun pub quiz fact. The processor in the Hammerhead Karoo bike computer is about a thousand times faster than the one that put man on the moon. And it also has 64 gigs of storage to store global maps and ride data, which is literally a million times more than the Apollo 11 guidance computer had. And yet it's smaller than a bar of soap and weighs just 118 grams, slightly less than the Apollo system, which I think was 29.5 kilos. To be fair, it took eight days to get to the moon and back as it's about 380 ,000 kilometres, which is only slightly longer than most Audaxes, and the crew is good for up to 35 hours.

0:39But I still reckon Neil and Buzz's minds would have been blown by the crew's detailed but simple mapping. It's all free to download, it's available offline, and it includes base maps, heat maps, popular routes, topography, and even the surface you're riding on. the Karoo can flag up upcoming gravel sections as part of its turn-by-turn navigation. It also does loads more besides. I mean, I don't know if Apollo 11 ran Spotify or could connect to Bluetooth headphones. So check out our full review of the Hammerhead Karoo at cyclist.co.uk and see why we gave it our Cyclist Recommended Award. Then head over to hammerhead.io and use the code cyclist to get a free heart rate strap with every Karoo purchase.

1:21just be sure to add the strap to your cart then apply the code at checkout next year is the 110th anniversary of the battle of the somme so to commemorate our heroes of yesterday and fundraise for the armed forces community today help for heroes will take on a special four-day 250 mile route across belgium and northern france via the poignant scenery of the somme taking place between the 23rd and the 28th of June 2026, the big battlefield bike ride winds its way from Ypres to Amiens. Along the way, you'll visit historical First World War sites, hear stories of the courageous soldiers who fought for our freedom and have the opportunity to participate in the last post ceremony at Meningate.

2:03Wrap up with a ceremony at Europe's largest Commonwealth memorial in Thiepval before receiving your medal at the end of ride dinner. This is more than a ride, it's a journey of remembrance, camaraderie and a chance to support the veterans and their families to live better. Visit helpforheroes.org.uk to find out more about the big battlefield bike ride 2026. Help for Heroes is registered with the fundraising regulator.

2:33Welcome back to the Cyclist Magazine podcast. I'm your host James Bender and joining me from London town, the capital. Anyone been to London? It's really nice. I suggest you go. Especially this time of year. Quite busy though. Is Mr. Will Strixon. Will, how are you doing? It's cold today. You are wearing a Columbia fleece there. Columbia with a U, not an important for all the listeners. Columbia is the thinking man's Patagonia, isn't it? Not a country. That's what they all say, yeah. Yeah, a few rungs up from Mountain Warehouse, maybe. Definitely puts Peter Storm in the shade. Got some peat-nosed storm trousers, aren't we?

3:11Yeah, peat-nosed storm trousers are okay. And Joe, how's your fleece on a bike? Because I was riding in a fleece the other day, which might even be on my chair. I'm not going to try and find it, from a brand called Passenger, which again is a bit like a Patagonia knockoff. It may have been made by AI. I'm never entirely sure, because it's just so on point. It's painful. And then the wind really whistles through that fleece when you're on a bicycle. I don't know if it's that fleece, or if that's fleeces in general, because sheep always look all right. Yeah, they're not on bicycles. I would suggest that's probably a key point.

3:44It's true. And they're not made from recycled fishing nets either, which is the other thing because I guess fleece, it's not really made of fleece, is it? And I guess there's a gap between your skin and the fleece, whereas sheep famously, it's attached. Famously, yeah. So attached, you have to cut it off. Do you remember that sheep that got stuck in a fence in Australia and got really, really hot and was going to die and then someone saved it? Do you remember that? In the Outback. I'm sure that happens all the time. Well, I mean, sadly it does, but it was kind of mad and this poor old sheep. It looked like, you know when you get those really old, like, converted cars into motorhomes where someone's just kind of, like, stuck a caravan on top of, like, an Austin Allegra or something?

4:23They look like that. This poor, poor thing had been walking around with this massive, massive mane of hair. When you started that anecdote and you said, do you know that sheep? I really thought we were going to get onto a cloning conversation. I thought Dolly was going to be brought back in 2025. Maybe Dolly. I mean, we could go there if we want. What happened to cloning? I feel like cloning is, you know, I think AI is probably taken over from cloning. People are more impressed by robots than they are genetics. It'll be back. It's probably happening in secret. I hope so because, you know, that'd be fun.

4:52Imagine if there was Bogacha and Bogacha. Yeah, I've seen something going around in NFL circles that Tom Brady participated in a thing, but I think that might have been one of these fake news things to try and drive that engagement on social media. What, like a genetic study where they sort of extracted some Brady serum? Yeah. Yeah. Okay, well, you know, we'll keep an eye out on that. I thought I'd just draw everyone's attention to the fact that Cyclist Magazine, which I'm holding up to show Will, has just dropped onto my doormat because we've got a new issue out, which you can buy in time for Christmas.

5:24It's lovely. It's lovely. And I just thought I'd read you an excerpt from one piece and an excerpt from another piece, and then we can decide who wrote which. Okay. Important to know that you are on the cover. I am on the cover if you can identify a cyclist that in real terms is basically probably about 1.5 mil high. Yeah. But that is me and that is Mallorca. So that's the main story. I went to Mallorca. It was lovely. No, I won't actually. I'm just going to read out some of Will's jokes because they're the best bits on Pick and Mix. Six out of seven dwarfs aren't happy like that. It's just a fact.

6:00It's just a fact. The problem with tinnitus, I think I rephrased this joke for you actually The problem with the tinnitus helpline Is that it just keeps ringing Very good Don't forget to pay your exorcist Or you'll get repossessed That's very good Will Did you hear about the woman who only counts odd numbers She literally can't even Now that was a joke Did you get this one? I got this one And our editor, Pete Meadows Was like I'm not really sure about that I don't really get it And I was like well I think that's because it's a young person's phrase Pete He literally sent me an email being like is it missing a word?

6:33Yeah, I mean, it is missing a word because it's not a sentence, is it? Literally can't even. Yeah. And then finally... But that's the joke that it's missing the word, right? Yeah, I suppose so. It's hard to trust trains. They have locomotives. Very good. Loco, of course, being the Spanish word for crazy. Anyway, moving on, our guest today, unless you want to add anything to this, Will. No, get on with it. Get on with it. Our guest today is Michael Hutchinson, a.k.a. Dr. Hutch, long time cycling weekly columnist, lots of you all know, author, former national level time trial specialist and track rider, educated at Cambridge, got a PhD, hence the doctor in international human rights.

7:13And he raced for Britain and Ireland and Northern Ireland. He set various records along the way, attempted the hour record, failed in his words, you know, pretty abysmally because he didn't get the hour record, but wrote a really compelling book about his experiences being kind of one man band setting up to try and try and do this um i think it was beating boardman's time of distance of in the region of 49 kilometers on what was effectively a very basic steel bike and that segued into a career in cycling journalism so he has written countless other books also does um various things on eurosport bbc presented the uh cycling show on ITV for a while, God rest its soul.

7:58So yeah, broadcaster, commentator, writer, TV personality, also turns out loves Stranger Things, the TV series, not as just Stranger Objects, and has most recently written a book, which we discuss here, called Further, which is about seeking the distant limits of cycling endurance. So it's a kind of collection of anecdotes, I suppose, experiences that Hutch has had on the bike doing things like 24-hour TTs, hour record attempts, but also talking to people like Fiona Kolblinger who won the Transcon, first women to win Transcon in 2019, I think, and delving into what it is that makes endurance athletes want to get up in the morning and do it, gets them out of a hole when they're having a horrible time, makes them hallucinate and see woolly mammoths, all these sorts of things.

8:50I'd say it's a great yarn as well as having some really good scientific facts in there and some training tips as well. So I really enjoyed that. Definitely would suggest you got someone on your Christmas list and you haven't got a present for them yet and they're a cyclist. Further, got to be. Great book. So yeah, pick your copy up in stores now and I'm sure the internet can probably find you one too and we'll put a little link in our show notes. Right, I think that's everything. He's got a long and illustrious career, lots to chat about. So let's welcome to the show, Dr. Hutch.

9:29I'm sitting here as someone that you may or may not be able to tell has a bit of a cold, just finished a Lemsip. Other medications are available, obviously. And it always makes me think that classic cyclist thing should i go out and ride when i'm ill i mean if one's one is at death's door then the answer is clearly no but do you believe as a man of science training and general all-round knowledge that you can kind of ride off burn out a kind of virus coldy type symptoms good idea bad idea yeah i think probably not okay i'm not that kind of doctor but i think i'm gonna say no i think the well i i once upon a time i would have done because i was kind of obsessed with it and over time i've come to accept that to be honest the training you do when you're like that it's not all that good yeah you're honestly if if if you've got an obsessive exercising disorder then knock yourself out up to a point yeah if you're actually worried about performance i think you can if you back it off if you want to go out for a gentle ride or something i would do that but really over the years i've got much more unenthusiastic about going and trying to train if I'm not feeling great.

10:39I would enjoy your Lemsip. Find a box set of something you like. I mean, at the point where we're recording this, Stranger Things had just come out. I think Lemsip, Stranger Things, that's what I'd be doing. Are you a Stranger Things fan? Do you feel like the cast has moved on too much for it to be kind of endearing? Age-wise, that is. Do you know what? At the minute, I'm cheating. Not cheating, but I'm re-watching season four to get ready for season five, because I'm sort of saving season five to kind of do it over christmas because they're releasing the last ones at new year so i'm going to do the whole lot over christmas and into new year so i'm still in season four oh at point of season four i'd say there's a lot of characters the whole thing is taking place in a lot of different places but that's a review of a show that came out three years ago so no one needs that well i said i'm going to ask the question now because i was just chatting to my partner before uh this morning i said i wouldn't talk about this but um we're watching blue lights which is a fantastic tv series that takes place over in your neck of the woods, although you're not actually...

11:36Where are you based at the moment? I'm assuming. Are you actually in England? I live in Cambridge these days, or I spend most of my time in Cambridge anyway. But for those who aren't aware, Blue Lights, iPlayer, Police Procedural, Belfast-based police station, and then they're kind of dealing with crime in Dublin. Do you ever watch that? I've watched some of it. I want to catch up with it at some point. It's really fascinating the amount of TV that comes out of Northern Ireland now, because a few years ago they created Screen Northern Ireland, which essentially was a government organisation that gave grants to people who wanted to make TV and film in Northern Ireland.

12:07And what's really fascinating is that when they started, they made TV shows that were set in Winterfell, for example, in Game of Thrones. But now they did set them in Belfast. The world seems to be absolutely full of dramas set in Belfast, which is quite weird, actually. Maybe it was too expensive, sir, because I remember doing some gravel riding. Very cheap. Lots of cheap Northern Irish actors, maybe. They put the Titanic Studios in there, so that was like a big boon, wasn't it, to get people there. But I remember doing some gravel riding. I can't remember quite where, but it was in Northern Ireland somewhere and went out into the forest and there were all of these, suddenly, incongruously, all of those kind of plastic fishing, like fish-type crates full of slabs of turf.

12:50And then we realized that someone had at some point been filming part of Game of Thrones there and they'd meticulously had to cut the turf up with a spade into these big chunks, put them to one side so they could run the dolly tracks through. And then clearly they had to then put them back and it was all to do with not disturbing the landscape. And there is some cycling reference in there somewhere. So I have kind of pulled it back to cycling given our slightly tele-dramatic start. Yeah, I mean, I used to make a cycling TV show that was substantially a film in Northern Ireland because we got off-screen Northern Ireland Grant.

13:24So that definitely kind of connects it all up. But it's a TV show that is long since dead because I think our last season was 2018 maybe. Tell me more. It used to be on ITV4. It's called The Cycle Show on ITV4. I was one of them. I remember. About seven dozen slightly random wannabe TV presenters who turned up occasionally and did bits for it, which I quite enjoyed doing. But yeah, it didn't last forever. I think they were struggling to get a sponsor for it. A lot of these things, that whole kind of 2012, for the next four or five years, there was lots and lots of interest in cycling post in the UK, post Olympics, post Wiggins winning the tour.

14:03So you could get a cycling version of Top Gear commissioned, essentially, which is what we were doing. Despite the fact the producer said, we're not making Top Gear, we're not making Top Gear. Did nobody ever say that? We're not making Top Gear. It's like, guys, we're completely making Top Gear here. Yeah, stars on reasonably priced bikes. Oh, yeah, we had a roller challenge at the end of it. Oh, did you? Okay. Yeah, where the two guests would race each other on rollers, with like a roller palooza roller setup that we had. So yeah, it was completely the talk here. So this is going to be an incredibly clunky segue to a question I wanted to ask you.

14:36At what point did you move from? Well, I mean, for those, number one, I'm going to say that most people listening to this podcast know who Dr. Hutch is. Number two, I think they'd also know that Dr. Hutch is Michael Hutchinson and he is time trial specialist, hour record attemptee, kind of, I'd say you take a scientific approach to cycling as well as one that's an emotional approach too. There's something about the way you break it down almost in a kind of polymathematical way. But there was another phase in your life where you went to Cambridge and got a PhD where you got the doctor part of your name.

15:10Then there was this big moment in the middle where you were time trialing. But now I'd suggest most people have found you and know you best through your Cycling Weekly column, Dr. Hutch. you're a journalist i would say i mean would you say that's correct would you kind of say right if somebody i don't know if somebody i don't know asks me what i do for a living i usually say i'm a journalist sort of because i'm not a trained journalist i'm not a reporter i'm not doorstepping people i'm not doing a lot of the things that people think of as classic journalism but mostly i'm known for writing in a magazine so that's that's journalism of some sort yeah but you are doing, I'm sure you know this, and God bless Wikipedia, let's hope it's correct, but you are second only to the great Beryl Burton in the number of time trial championships you've won across distances from 10 to 100 miles.

16:02I think she was on 97, you're on 56. That is pretty damn incredible. And I would suggest sitting here as a journalist, knowing what I get paid every month, no disrespect to my employers, but this is just our industry, that maybe it seems to me that I would want to be a journalist that could become a pro-cyclist as opposed to a pro-cyclist that segues into journalism. Yeah, you know, you get old. You can't ride a bike forever. I mean, I'd started writing the column in 2006. At that point, I was still very much a bike rider by profession. That was my job. The column was a sideline. And it sort of grew from there.

16:43oh, the column got a bit better now and I started doing other bits and pieces. I've done a few books. And all of those kind of, nearly anyone who's a cycling journalist does all sorts of odds and ends of bits and pieces. You know, you do some writing, you do some podcasting, you maybe turn up on the radio the odd time to talk about it. And it was that kind of career that started to pick up, particularly then into the 2013, 2014, as I kind of, I retired from time trialling quite gradually over the course of two or three years. or you could put it another way and say, I just got worse over two or three years until eventually it was embarrassing and I had to stop entirely.

17:17But it was that kind of segue out. And I'd done the same thing. I slid into bike racing for a profession from being a university academic. So it wasn't the first time I've slid very gradually from one career to another. But you did manage to kind of write a book that won the... And I'm just going to look this up quickly so I'll get it right. It was The Hour, but it won the... It won Best New Writer at the British Sportsbook Awards. Although I did particularly enjoy that the presenter who was reading out the list of nominees started by saying what a weak year it had been and how none of these books were really on.

17:55Man. And they are actually, I think, even being a bit unfair. I'm far enough away from it now that occasionally if I go back to look at it, I think, yeah, actually, it's a pretty good account of the R record and my attempt on the R record at that time. I think it's okay. And did you feel that was just like, I've had this experience, I'm compelled to write a book, and then you're just like blown away by, wow, bloody hell, this has got some serious accolades. Or was it like, I feel there's this tie-in between cycling, because I think there is, I think historically, there is a tie-in from cycling and people wanting to tell stories about cycling, unlike other sports.

18:32It feels like stories are just there to be told. There's a romantic history in cycling in the way there isn't as much in tennis or football. Not to say it's not there, but... Yeah, I think that's true. And actually, there's always been quite a cycling literature, even back in the last century, in the 1990s and into the 2000s. There was a disproportionately large amount of writing about cycling, considering how much of a minority sport it was. It was a much smaller sport in the public perception in those days. Really, I had just done this thing that it didn't occur to me while I was doing it to write a book about it.

19:08That didn't, I first thought about it about a week afterwards. I thought, well, kind of, that was quite something. You've been through this whole, and for those people who don't know, it was an attempt, I set it up myself. I found the sponsors. I found the officials. I got a track meeting created. You know, it was the whole thing from zero. And actually, it's not designed to be done that way. It's designed to be done by a professional rider with a professional team and a lot of help. I mean, typically you had 20 or 30 people running an hour record attempt. I did it on my own. And I got out the far end of that and thought, actually, that was quite a thing.

19:41And I found I was telling people about this whole experience and it seemed quite natural to want to write a book about it. So it was just literally, it was the first thing you said, I'd just been through it and thought, well, I'd like to write that down. Yeah, yeah. And I'm just going to quickly switch and say, in case no one listens past this point, Michael has just released a book this year, Further, Seeking the Distant Limits. There is, it's holding up for people on YouTube further. Great cover, by the way. I like that sort of Kraftwerk-esque. Yeah, I actually do. I really like that cover as well.

20:13It's quite a funny experience because you write a book, you send it to the publisher. At some point, they then send you the cover that someone's done for it. And it's an odd... It's like having your book reflected back at you because the cover is designed by someone who read the book and thinks, well, this is what I think this book looks like. And on this one, I think I and the cover kind of agree. There have been one or two of my previous books where I've got the cover and thought, really? Okay. They've usually grown on me. There's no cover in any of my books I don't like, but that was the first one I got.

20:40I thought, yeah, that's it. That's precisely what it is. Yeah. So that's the book everyone should go out and buy this Christmas. Certainly is. Further, Seeking the Distant Limits of Cycling Endurance. We will get to that, but I just wanted to stick with the hour because I've got this memory, and maybe this is some fabricated memory, but I'm sure I saw in our office at Cyclist your hour record giant bike, which was incongruously steel, and you can explain to listeners why. And strangely as well, to my eyes at that point, it only seemed to have the barest of aero concessions. So it had a finned, like a deeper seat post and slightly like deep bladed fork legs.

21:23And everything was narrow, but it wasn't what we see. It couldn't have been more wildly different to Pippo Ganner's bike, for example. I think that was in our office. Maybe it was at a trade show. But explain that bike to me. Yeah, I think it was. I vaguely remember handing that over to somebody to take it to your office for some reason. I can't remember why. Yeah, well, the R-record went through a weird little cul-de-sac between 2000 and 2014. Because in 2000, the UCI decided that the whole thing had become far too much about technology and aerodynamics. and felt that what they wanted actually was an R record that was back to basics.

22:04So the one they wanted you to do is attempt the R record on Eddie Merckx's bike. I think in an absolutely ideal world, they would have lent you Eddie Merckx's bike from 1972, but it wasn't theirs to lend. So they specified a bike that was a set of dimensions that were clearly designed to push you towards a steel bike because all the dimensions were based around steel tubing sizes. There was going to be no aerodynamics about it. You had to have spoked wheels with properly low rims. You couldn't have anything approaching a deep rim. I can't remember. I think the box the rim had to fit in was probably 20 mil by 20 mil, something like that.

22:38You had to have spokes, dropped handlebars, obviously, which had to be a minimum width of, I think, 35 centimeters. It's just kind of another nice contemporary reference. And yeah, it was an old-fashioned steel track bike that wouldn't have looked out of place in 1956. The only concession to mine, it was weirdly long because I would normally ride like a 56-centimeter-sized frame, medium-sized frame. The top tube in this bike, I think, was 62 centimeters long. So it was about six centimeters longer than usual just to try to create space to get really low. What I was trying to do was recreate a tri-bar position, but with my arms wider and holding my weight on it, which, in retrospect, maybe wasn't the smartest way to do it.

23:25But yeah, that was the R record. It was called The Athletes R, and that was what the record was from... Chris Bourbon broke the record in 2000 in that setup. I tried to break it in 2003, and again in 2004, didn't. And then the Russian rider called Andrei Sosenko broke it, I think, later in 2004, and that was where it sat until they changed the regs back to normal in 2014, where they said it would be a pursuit bike. So that was the weird little cul-de-sac the R record went off on and that was why my R Record bike, you can Google it. If you type Michael Hutchinson R Record into a search engine, you'll find pictures of it.

24:03But that's why it was such an odd bike and such an odd event. And it was built really late in the day by Roberts, is that right? Because it's a giant branded bike as opposed to a giant made bike. It's a giant branded bike. Yeah, we did one that was built by Argos in Bristol. And we didn't quite get the geometry right because it was a weird long bike and they built the prototype and then giant were going to build the build bikes for the event that all went wrong because somewhere along the line they got the rules wrong essentially they produced a bike that was outside the rules so about a week before the event i didn't have a working a suitable bike and roberts in croydon built it and painted it in three days flat uh the first time i rode it was at the record attempt so wow this is why i say there was a story here You know, this is a story of breaking the R record that included my partner running three miles across Croydon carrying this bike in order to get it back up to me in time.

25:01Man alive, wow. So what do you think went wrong in that attempt? Was it just the bike? Oh, I say that's unfair, not went wrong, but what did you learn from it? Well, it did go wrong. It's an R record, it's been a lovely binary thing, you break it or you don't, and I didn't. So I think saying it went wrong is fair. So what bits would you change if you could go back? The problems had to do with the fact I was doing it on my own. And I didn't appreciate then. This was a learning experience because it was the point where I really came to understand how physical stress has a, any kind of mental stress has a physical effect.

25:39And I've coached riders since. And one of the things I say that drives them nuts is that there's no such thing as a non-physical stress. The hormones and the stress hormones you get have physical effects. And what really ground me down was that I was having to, I don't know, imagine the stress of being four days out from a world R record attempt that has cost tens of thousands of your and everybody else's money that you've sold three and a half thousand tickets for. And you're four days out and you haven't got a bike to ride. It's not a relaxing experience. And the whole thing was kind of like that.

26:10And physically, when I set out onto it, I was probably only just about capable of breaking it. It was kind of a knife edge physical thing. It felt worth taking the chance. But you go through 12 weeks of these problems and days when I couldn't train because literally I would be in my flat in London waiting for something to be delivered and the courier would be late. And in the days before kind of huge amounts of internet shopping, couriers didn't give you an hour slot. They said, we'll be there on Thursday and maybe they would and maybe they wouldn't. So you get to the point where you're doing a turbo session at eight o 'clock at night because that's the first point of which you're not literally sitting around waiting for a courier.

26:45things like that you can't you can't expect to perform physically if you're also doing that and that wasn't firstly i didn't anticipate the stress as being what they were then secondly i didn't appreciate those stresses would have such a physical effect and that's how we ended up and it sounds whingy it sounds like a complaint which it's it's not particularly i was well i was in charge of it i made all the mistakes involved in it but but that is kind of the why um because when When I set out, I had an FTP of something over 400 watts on a time trial bike. By the time I'd finished, it was about 370.

27:22So through that 12 weeks when I should have been getting fitter, I'm getting less fit. And that's why. I could have written a management book about it instead of a cycling book, to be honest. Would you feel there's something, or I'm projecting, I feel there's something in the hour record that has made it, well, historically made it beautiful because it was a little bit wacky races. It was often self-starters. It was people pioneering. He had people like Moser with his massive back wheel, which I think, did they even trial one or use one that had kind of shafts of oil with ball bearings in it so that then as the wheels span up and they were kind of slightly magnetized to the middle of the hub and as the wheels span up, the centripetal force pulled them out and then made the, the theory being, it made the rotating mass of the rim heavier, give it more inertia.

28:12Yeah, I'm not sure. They certainly had a wheel like that. I'm not sure whether they used it. It was the theory behind the big wheel. Moser had a disc wheel that was so large, it only just cleared below the saddle. Yeah, yeah. So the top of the wheel was higher than the... And the idea of that was just trying to get rotating mass up, which the physics of it doesn't really work. Yeah, because you're just moving a heavier thing overall anyway. Yeah, well, particularly when you look at so much of the mass involved in it, There's 80 kilos of Francesco Moser sitting on top of all this. You can make the wheel big, you can make the wheel small, but the inertia is not coming from the wheel.

28:46Yeah, yeah, yeah. But there is something kind of beautiful in something like the hour that in a way I feel is, you know, with someone like O 'Brice, there's another person, right? So real eccentric, did it all himself, built his bike out of, you know, bearings from his washing machine and it looked crazy. What was it called? The Beastie? No, that was, he called it, The one you were thinking of, he called Old Faithful. Old Faithful, yeah. Yeah. And an incredible position, which he adopted. You know, you look at it, you're like, blimey, mate. You're basically lying down. It's like a recumbent in upside down.

29:20Just incredible. Yeah, as Michael's doing, actually. His hands right underneath his chin. It's kind of rabbit in the headlights, lying down. And there's something beautiful in that, versus the modern take, which is aero-optimized everything. Loads of time spent, you know, channeling you're working this through through with computers and in a way you sort of feel if someone's attempting the hour record now they almost will you know 99 nailed on break it because they've run the numbers and they know what they can produce and they've trained to it and they've done everything right down to analyze air pressure and work out how that's going to affect their their um our numbers and stuff so do you feel there's something lost in the modern tech approach I'm going to say no, because I think the first thing you need to reflect back to is that when someone like Eddie Merckx did the record, he was, in 1972, he was using all the technology available to him at the time.

30:15True, yeah. It was cutting edge for 1972. It's not cutting edge for now, but that's what the passage of time does for you. I've got photographs of Maurice Richard, who did the record in the 1930s. I've got a photograph somewhere of him and him in a wind tunnel in Paris in the mid-1930s. Really? So the riders who've had the funding and the pros with the teams behind them and the sponsors have always brought everything to bear that they can on it. So you can draw a line through those guys all the way to Filippo Ganna. But they've also been people who've had the opportunity to do it another way. And it's one of the strengths of the R record is that you don't have to qualify.

30:51You don't have to be a world tour pro to have a go at it. If you want to win Paris-Roubaix, well, the first thing you have to be is in the race. And that's not straightforward. for the R record, you can do what I did. You can do what my friend Alex Dowsett did in Mexico a couple of years ago. You can do what Graham Abrie did. You can do what Chris Borman did for his first record attempt, which is just set the thing up on your own and have a go. So you get these kind of two lanes. And you even get riders, you know, slightly more mid-level pro riders. Gustav Larsson attempted the R record. Thomas Decker attempted the R record in 2016, 2014, 2015, somewhere.

31:29So there's that kind of, you can come out of it a lot of ways. You can come out of super high tech with massive amounts of funding, or you can do what Graeme Abreed did and just be a genius. Somebody like Dan Biggum, he broke the R record working for Ineos. I think Dan could have put together an amazing R record project entirely on his own. And he would have been like the modern Graeme Abreed. So there's lots of different ways of doing it. I think one of the great strengths of it is because it's a standalone event that you organize anyone who's got the patience and the funding, because you do need to get some money together to do it, but it's not millions.

32:04Anyone in that position can have a go at it. And every so often, somebody like that breaks the record. And I think that's a strength of it. So I don't think it's all that different. I think the technology has changed, but the people who are going to have a go at the record, they understand the technology of their time. next year is the 110th anniversary of the battle of the somme so to commemorate our heroes of yesterday and fundraise for the armed forces community today help for heroes will take on a special four-day 250 mile route across belgium and northern france via the poignant scenery of the somme taking place between the 23rd and the 28th of june 2026 the big battlefield bike ride winds its way from Ypres to Amiens.

32:49Along the way, you'll visit historical First World War sites, hear stories of the courageous soldiers who fought for our freedom and have the opportunity to participate in the last poster ceremony at Meningate. Wrap up with a ceremony at Europe's largest Commonwealth Memorial in Tietval before receiving your medal at the end of ride dinner. This is more than a ride. It's a journey of remembrance, camaraderie, and a chance to support the veterans and their families to live better. Visit helpforheroes.org.uk to find out more about the big Battlefield bike ride 2026. Help for Heroes is registered with the fundraising regulator.

33:29So fun pub quiz fact. The processor in the Hammerhead Karoo bike computer is about a thousand times faster than the one that put man on the moon. and it also has 64 gigs of storage to store global maps and ride data, which is literally a million times more than the Apollo 11 guidance computer had. And yet, it's smaller than a bar of soap and weighs just 118 grams, slightly less than the Apollo system, which I think was 29.5 kilos. To be fair, it took eight days to get to the moon and back, as it's about 380 ,000 kilometers, which is only slightly longer than most Audaxes, and the crew is good for up to 35 hours.

34:08But I still reckon Neil and Buzz's minds would have been blown by the crew's detailed but simple mapping. It's all free to download, it's available offline and it includes base maps, heat maps, popular routes, topography and even the surface you're riding on. The crew can flag up upcoming gravel sections as part of its turn-by-turn navigation. It also does loads more besides, I mean I don't know if Apollo 11 ran Spotify or could connect to Bluetooth headphones. So check out our full review of the Hammerhead Karoo at cyclist.co.uk and see why we gave it our cyclist recommended award. Then head over to hammerhead.io and use the code cyclist to get a free heart rate strap with every Karoo purchase.

34:51Just be sure to add the strap to your cart, then apply the code at checkout.

34:59out. Switching lanes a little bit, on to further. I love the fact that your opening chapter is effectively about how horrible it is in certain situations to ride a bike. You call it your half day from hell and there is just the wonderful sentence, I cried for seven hours. Now this is for a 12-hour time trial, so one can do the numbers and so for five hours things weren't so bad, but So unpack that day for us. So set the scene. It's year 2000, right? Long time ago, year 2000. I'd had a terrific season. I'd won pretty much everything that was available to win in the UK. And the last national championship of the year was the 12-hour championships.

35:43And particularly in that era, a 12-hour was a bit more normal than it sounds now. Quite a lot of club riders would do a 12-hour as part of their season. So I thought, oh, let's have a go at the 12 hour. I've been brilliant at everything else. I'm sure I'll be good at this. So I had a go at a 12 hour. And yeah, turns out quite hard. I had a friend who is a statistician and he got lots of statistics about all the winning rides at the national championships for the last 20 years. And he created this spreadsheet of a pacing strategy, which actually I look back at and think what he'd done there was distilled down the conventional wisdom and the conventional wisdom for 12-er was you start really hard because you are eventually going to explode.

36:27And the more miles you've done before you explode, the better. I love that. This was, we were saying people, we believed this. And what my friend had done was kind of distill down, okay, what he produced was a manual of how not to do it in retrospect. Because these days you would do it by trying to pace it fairly evenly. You might even try to pace it so you're picking it up a little towards the end. You certainly wouldn't set out because I rode the first 100 miles of this 12R in just under three and three-quarter hours. Wow. Which is only two or a few minutes more slowly than I'd ridden when I won the National 100 Championships a few weeks before.

37:04So you ride a 100-championship-level effort, and then you try to keep going for another 200 miles. So by five hours, I was in absolute bloody bits. Man, yeah. And it was a case of, I mean, all that really kept me going was a kind of pride. I thought, I've got this horribly wrong, but I'm not letting go of it. It wasn't a terribly positive kind of motivation but it worked. But what I found I was doing was I was playing that game and you say, well, let's just, I'll concentrate and let's get to the next round of it. Let's get to the next junction and then the junction after that. And then when I couldn't do that anymore, I'd say, well, let's get to the next junction and then I'll stop.

37:37I'm not going to just climb off now because that feels like defeat. I'm going to ride another mile and a half. Then I can stop. Then I'll let myself stop and I'd get to the mile and a half and I'd keep going. And I basically did that for seven hours. it was horrible um ultra riding is a wonderful thing in many respects but if you get it wrong it can be difficult but then you still you broke the record and yet you say in the book at the time uh i didn't think the result was worth it so unpack that as well was that yeah well it wasn't a record i won the championship the championship sorry yeah yeah yeah at the time i got to the end of it and you kind of you stand on the podium and they give you a medal and i remember kind of going somebody driving me back to their house because i was staying with a friend near the course and the like after driver that just wasn't worth seven hours of suffering to win that it's worth it now but only because of the anecdote yeah um the anecdote in some ways is much more valuable than the actual championships but i think i think that's true of a lot of sport to be honest must be true lots of stuff in life yeah do you think so if you had to kind of arrange the you know the kind of characteristics attributes of a pro athlete pro cyclist in some kind of hierarchy where would that mental fortitude sit?

38:50Depends a bit what event you're sending them off to do. Okay. It depends almost entirely what event you're sending them off to do. If you're sending someone out to play snooker, then it's all mental. It's mental and skill if you want to play snooker. For cycling, if it's shortish, if it's anything under four or five hours, if it's World Tour Cycling or it's a time trial championships or something, it's physical first and foremost because you know you are never going to win the tour de france or you're never going to win the world time trial championships unless you are a genuinely extraordinary physiological specimen so that is always your first filter for those events when you get up to ultra events which might last 24 hours or might last you know the transcontinental race is an unsupported race that for a lot of riders lasts a fortnight yeah at that point physical matters a lot less because you are actually going pretty slowly in any other objective bike racing terms you may be racing at 12 or 13 miles an hour a lot of the time and there the key skill is just just keeping going keeping it consistent when i did further one of the things i did was all of the kind of the really good ultra riders i talked to i'd say why why do you think you're good at this yeah um if you do that with short distance riders you get a very limited number of ounces but it'll be physical or it'll be mental.

40:10So I'd say, oh, I'm really strong on that, or I'm really strong physically. With ultra riders, it was broader. But one of my favorites, a guy, a man called Ian Walker, who's actually a psychologist by profession. He's an academic psychologist, but he holds the record for the European north to south from kind of the top of Norway down to Gibraltar. And he said his great strength was an ability to always believe that things will get better. Okay. Which meant that when he was having like the seven hours where I cried into 12 hours, he's having an episode like that, he knows that this will pass. It'll get better.

40:41He'll be okay at some point. And that's actually a really incredible strength. I think that kind of is the key to it. Because when I did the National, sorry, jumping ahead, I may be interfering with your notes here. When I did the, I've done the National 24-hour Championships a couple of times. And the second time I did it, in the middle of the night, I was suddenly being sick. I vomited over myself. I was sick over the bike. And I suddenly just felt completely empty. And I rode back to my support crew very slowly to quit. And I got off the bike and said, that's it. I'm sorry. I'm done physically.

41:17I'm in bits. There's no point. Thank you all very much for helping, but I'm sorry we're done here. And they said, okay, come and sit in the van. Come and warm up a little bit. Have a little sleep. And I sat in the van and I went to sleep. And they woke me up after three minutes because they said as soon as I'd gone to sleep, they just woke me up again. They said they'd let me sleep for half an hour, but they lied. And they gave me some Haribo jelly snakes and said, get a little bit of glucose in. And then they very gently led me back to the bike and said, just get on the bike and head off down the course and we'll come after you.

41:46And if you want to stop, just pull over in one of the lay-bys in the course and we'll pick you up one. But just for us, just try it. And 15 minutes later, I was racing again, like I had been a couple of hours before. And I would not have believed you could get back from where I was. Never mind get back from where I was in half an hour. but experience helps with that, I guess. But I think there's an intrinsic kind of optimism that some of the game Walker has. We think, yeah, this isn't the end of everything. It's okay. This is difficult. It'll get better. And that for an ultra rider is a huge strength.

42:19You don't really need that if you're trying to win the Tour de France. The Tour de France is physical. Yeah. So are you somebody who can allow somebody else to take on the optimistic role and you can believe them then? Because Ian Walker is his own incredible optimist. right he hasn't got a support crew whereas in that instance you do you've presumably got to really trust those guys yeah when they say you can do this michael and you're like i don't think i can but now you've said i do think i can yeah you do i mean there's there's two kinds of ultra racing as you say there's a in walker who's unsupported um he's just on his own the races i was doing i had a team um which is actually my kind of team captain was um mike broadwith who holds the Land's End to John O 'Groats record.

43:01So I have a huge amount of respect for Mike as an ultra racer. And yeah, you have to trust them. And it really helps if the person you're trusting is Mike. Christina Murray, who's also a former National 24-hour champion, she was helping me as well. So if these guys say, just get on the bike, just try it, you do. And they were so non-confrontational about it that it would have been kind of weird to argue. It would have felt It's very aggressive to say, no, I won't, because they weren't being pushy. They were just saying, just get on the bike. Just try. And stop. If it's not working out, just stop.

43:38So yeah, if you're doing a race where you've got a support crew, you need to have 100 % faith in them, particularly in longer events. Race Across America is a supported race, as I'm sure you know. And by the time riders get to day four, day five, day six of that, they're zombies. Yeah. At that point, all of their thinking is being done by the support crew, so the trust has to be total. Because I always wonder if, sort of parallel this with boxing, when you see you've got somebody in the ring and they're getting seven bells knocked out of them, ten bells, whatever the expression is, lots of bells, and you've got their guy in the corner screaming at them, and you're like, there is no way, plus the crowd, you can surely even hear what your guy's saying, your trainer's saying, let alone think, good point i'll try and execute that because that's going to win me the fight and actually the role is when they sit down in the corner in between rounds it's just a stare them in the eye and be like you've got this you can still do this because at that point yeah they're in this own this days of like don't know which way's up i interviewed i interviewed steve peters years ago the chimp paradox the the chimp paradox the the psychiatrist who worked with with teen gb and ronio solomon and all sorts of people and one of the questions i asked him was that if if if you'd never met somebody before you know could you help someone that you didn't previously work with because obviously he talks a lot about how he gets writers through thinking about things a certain way and he said i probably couldn't do much for somebody i didn't know he said the thing i would say is you're not alone i'm here we're with you because he said that's very powerful and i think that's you know you're exactly you're exactly right having people who are on your side and and it's a motivation and it's also there are points where you think well i want to keep going because i don't want to let these people down at a really basic level you can think oh these people have given up a weekend to help me ride this 24-hour event i don't want to be the sort of person who after 13 or 14 hours says actually no um yeah so there are kind of all sorts of different motivations you get from other people being in your corner literally yeah yeah do you think is there a sort of national well not maybe not national but at the moment there's a big groundswell i'd say well not more than the groundswell there is a huge take-up in ultra distance events you know the things that seem to capture the imagination are those transcontinental racing you know the idea of dot watching ever being a thing that you would sit at a computer and watch somebody's gps tracker as they take on the silk road that seems mental but people not only do that, I was speaking to a guy that had, he's called Ian McBride, another Ian, and he won, in inverted commas, the cancelled London, Edinburgh, London this year.

46:24So it was cancelled due to... That was astonishing. Yeah, he's the only finisher. The only finisher, exactly. Yeah, he managed to be so ahead of everybody else that by the time they said, look, you've got to turn around, he was like, well, I'm basically on my way back anyway. And Ian's in a situation where you kind of wonder like why are you even wanting to do this what is what is driving people to do something like audax what is driving people to want to do the racing and what is driving those people who were popping out on the road he was saying from the dot watching computers just to say hey go in you know in the middle of middle of the night or just like finding out he was going past their house and running out with a camera trying to take a picture like at all levels people seem really invested in ultra racing in a way that I don't think, you know, my very potted history has been a thing since, I don't know, the Victorian times, like races like Bordeaux-Paris, Paris-Best Paris, which once by the time was a race and now it's just an odd action.

47:25These Herculean distances now seem to be back in vogue from fans as well as athletes. Why is that? Yeah, I mean, I think, and I couldn't prove it, It's what I concluded having sort of interviewed a lot of people who have written a book about it. So it doesn't come from nowhere, but it's not definitive. I think social media and ultra racing go together very nicely. Dot watching, if you've never done it, it's kind of captivating. But because along with watching the dot, you've also got riders' social media. So if you want to watch Transcontinental, you follow your favorite racers on Instagram and they'll update to that.

48:02So you've got their story, what they're going through, some pictures of where they are. You can see their location. If you want to, you can even then use Street View or something to see, well, what road are they on? What does it look like? What are they looking at? Then you get the bit where somebody stops and thinking, are they asleep? Are they having a mechanical? Are they having an existential crisis? So there's either things, the things you know and the things you don't know. And the thing that reminds me of is sort of the early days of things like the Tour de France, which when it started was reported by newspapers.

48:34so you didn't have TV coverage of it. You had these rather partial updates that arrived by newspaper and there were a lot of things you didn't know and the things that happened on the road you never heard about and some things you did hear about and the rather periodic updates and the thing happening over several weeks and it being a real struggle or at least perceived as a struggle as a kind of a Herculean thing to do. The Tour de France now is a very sanitized short event. It's four or five hours racing every day with some rest days. When the Tour de France started, it was almost non-stop. There were stages that were 450 kilometers long and it took nearly 24 hours to ride.

49:10So the early tours to France were, it was an ultra event is what it was. If you ran it now, that's what it would be. But those kind of partial updates you got from newspapers and the kind of the rumor and the races happening in the middle of the night and all of this, that kind of transferred straight across to what social media is if you want to follow an ultra event. And I think that certainly it's behind the rise of the fan experience in ultra racing i think things like odax have have always been happening but i think ultra racing is is much more prominent because of what social media has done to it and what the ability to follow a race in real time um on a big map of europe you can watch the little dots it's particularly if you've got a few friends in the race you can just waste our staring at the dots and working out who's going to go where who's going to take this route what's going on with this guy.

49:58So that's my theory. Yeah. Have you detected a psyche, a common psyche, amongst the likes of Fiona Kolbinger, who's the first woman to win Transcon, or Emily Chappell, or an Ian Walker type? Is there something, all they will share, that drives them? It's more diverse than it is in shorter distance racing, certainly. Fiona Kolbinger, I've interviewed, and Fiona talks about just a kind of love of covering distance by bicycle. And she talks about, you know, you ride through the mountains, through the valleys, you ride across the border, you ride to another landscape, and it's just fueled by you. And I think there's a romanticism that she loves about that.

50:39I think Emily's a little bit the same. Christoph Strasser is kind of the contrast, who I also talked to, who won race. He won a race across America several times, five, six maybe, and then transferred to doing unsupported racing at Transcontinental. And he's much more analytical about it. he is like a short distance rider doing a very long event. And in some respects, the main difference to him between doing a 40K time trial and a 4 ,000K time trial, it's, well, it's just longer. The physiology and the technique are different, but the psychology to him, I think, is just the same. I think there is quite a wide range of motivations.

51:13I know some people who've done ultra races who are recovering drug addicts or getting over a bereavement, or it's something that is a healthy, a more positive, all-encompassing thing that they go to do to try and escape from something else. There are riders who have moved up from short distance racing and treated exactly the same way. There are riders who've come in sideways from something slightly different, like Fiona or maybe Emily. So I think there are a lot of different motivations and a lot of different reasons for doing it. And I think it ties in with the fact that it's not so purely physical a thing.

51:48Yeah. one of your great pieces of advice in further is the never exceed speed and this is you know this is not something that telepagatia is in any way applying it's the absolute inverse you do not go inside yourself you maintain and you don't cross the threshold basically but i'm ashamed to say the threshold that you describe is lactate threshold lt1 i'm not entirely sure when i come to try and explain this to myself or anyone else what that really means i think a lot of people might also sympathize with me what is one's lactate threshold what are you trying to avoid and why is it good to avoid it well there are kind of two if you imagine doing a ramp test so you start off maybe at 100 watts maybe even lower and you just gradually increase the effort level by maybe 20 30 watts a minute and you just keep going until you fail so you're going harder and harder and harder gradually.

52:46There are really two significant physiological landmarks which both have to do with lactate production and metabolization. Generally, we call them lots of things down the years, but these days they tend to be called LT1 and LT2. LT1 is the point where a little bit more lactate starts accumulating. it's probably about the point from a non-physiological point of view it's probably around about the stage where you you can't quite have a conversation when you're riding so anything below lt1 you can probably just about talk as you get towards lt1 it might start to be a little bit snatched here and there but you can still so then you get beyond lt1 and the lactate content of your blood goes up a bit not hugely not exponentially it just starts to increase a bit you keep getting harder and then you get to lt2 which is what most people think of as threshold that's the point where suddenly it just got really it is quite hard at that point you're breathing hard your pulse is relatively high and lt2 is also that's about what you can do for maybe an hour if you're absolutely on racing really hard you get all everything out of yourself you're going to be around about that LT2 point.

54:05LT1 is harder, unfortunately, to pin down that way. But for an ultra-ish, your whenever exceed speed will be a little bit below LT1. So it's really pretty modest. It's not quick. But you don't want to go past LT1 because two things happen when you do. Firstly, you start to burn more carbohydrate than fat. And that's going to give you a fueling problem if you're trying to ride for a very long effort because you can't replace the carbohydrate fast enough. You need to keep below LT1 so that you're burning a bit more fat. You're not burning through your carbohydrates so fast. And also beyond LT1, your body temperature starts to go up and that makes everything a bit less efficient.

54:44The enzymes and things that are responsible for aerobic metabolism don't work so well when you're warm. So you want to keep your body temperature done. So you have to find this LT1 figure. You can do it in a lab. The other way you can maybe do it is it's related to breathing patterns. So if you do this ramp test, you'll find that your breathing changes. Somewhere around about this point where I'm saying, and that's why you can't have a conversation if you're above LT1, is your breathing will probably get a bit quicker. Runners are really good at spotting it because runners breathe in rhythm with their stride pattern.

55:16So there'd be a point at LT1 where a runner will start breathing every stride, not every other stride. So it's that point you're looking for. Yeah. And why is lactate acid sort of bad in inverted commas? Is it kind of just taking up room in the blood that could be better used by other stuff? Lactate isn't bad at all. It's just part of the metabolization of glycogen to make energy. Lactate comes out of the muscles and it's recycled in the liver and the energy re-enters the system. So it's not bad per se. The reason you're trying to stay below LT1 for a long event has to do, as I say, with what your fuel is and with body temperature.

55:57If you get out beyond LT2 in sort of shorter, harder events, your lactic level goes up, but it's probably not high lactic levels that are actually stopping you as such. It's just going to have to do with the ability of the blood to shift oxygen and the fact then that you can't endlessly recycle into anaerobic metabolism. which makes me think about the kind of the new perceived or you know an in sort of conventional wisdom has changed it seems around fueling in trying to avoid that burning through your carbs still using some of your fats how that has a nice connection to your lt1 threshold or lt1 lactate threshold one we've also seen or so we hear pro cyclists so tally pogaccia vinegar, whoever.

56:46Now moving from 90 grams of carbohydrates an hour, which used to be on the back of sort of all like early SIS gels, you need three of these gels, well, probably more per hour, to 120, I think there's a Victor Campenarts. And this is obviously in tandem with his sponsor, which has a vested interest in this, Precision Fuel and Hydration, to release data. But it sounds sounds compelling enough that they said after his uh stage i'm gonna say 18 the the the great stage of victor camp nuts one a few years ago at the tour he was on 132 grams of carbs per hour on average wildly in excess of what previously we were sort of told your body could handle and people go and this is why everyone's getting so much faster this is why pogaccia can slay Eban Mayo's two decades old Vontu record by minutes despite it also coming in the middle of a difficult stage and it not being a particularly you know good day for it because the fueling is that much better what do you reckon to that?

57:51The fueling certainly changed really dramatically because you're absolutely right the standard advice used to be 80-85 grams of carbohydrate and that that was as much as your gut could tolerate I mean back in 2009-2010 Then we started mucking about with putting fructose in maltodextrin drinks because fructose uses a different mechanism across the gut membrane than maltodextrin does. So you could then get to sort of 100 or 110 grams of carbohydrate an hour by using maltodextrin and fructose in the same drink. So we literally just bought jam-making fructose in the supermarket and put it into SIS sports drink.

58:32It was really basic. It was almost unbearably sweet. You couldn't have drunk it for very long, but I used that in things like 100-mile time trials, long-ish road races, that sort of thing. And that worked perfectly well. And what's going on now is really, it's an extension of that. It's an improvement in the nutrition technology because there are different ways of getting carbohydrate out of the gut and into the bloodstream. And if you use all of those ways, you can get more carbohydrate through the system. You can also train the gut in a way that, honestly, we never really did because a lot of riders will be going out and consuming you know 120 130 grams of carbohydrate in training which helps to to habituate it i mean you could in theory you could train that sitting on your sofa you could just sit on your sofa and eat 140 grams of carbohydrate an hour you'd probably put on a little bit of weight you probably wouldn't feel great but it's it's a discreet thing that you can train and yeah i mean i'm aware some of the some of the ironman triathletes reckon they're getting up to around about up to nearly 200 grams of carbohydrate an hour on a bike leg obviously they're coming out of the swim hitting the bike leg and one of you fuel very hard on the bike leg because it's then harder to fuel again on the run but it's it's and the thing about that is that if you are riding something like a tour de france stage where you're maybe already burning through 3 000 calories of energy before you get to the hard bed this is the key thing these difficult climbs they're all at the end of stages so you maybe already burn through a lot of energy before you get there.

1:00:02If instead of replacing that energy at the rate of 90 or 80 grams an hour, you're replacing it at maybe getting on towards double the rate, you've obviously got a lot more carbohydrate left for the effort at the end of the stage. So you'd be quite hard to quantify how much of the speed some of the modern riders are getting in those stages, how much of it is carbohydrate, how much of it is aero, how much of it is all sorts of other tech. But nutrition is a very large part of it. The downside to it is that it's quite hard in the gut, which is why if you're riding something like a 24-hour time trial, realistically, you can't do 150 or 160 grams of carbohydrate an hour for 24 hours.

1:00:39If you could, you would be very, very good at it, but almost nobody... I'm not aware of anyone who can literally do that. I think Christoph Strasser, when he did the world 24-hour record, I think he was doing 110 or 120 grams an hour and sustained that with some discomfort, I think, but he sustained that for most of the record attempt. So it can be better, but certainly nobody who's doing race across America is going to do it. And very few people doing even a 24-hour time trial are going to be up into 150s, 160s territory. Yeah. And when you look at the modern pro peloton and kind of, you know, you've been in this game for an awfully long time, cycling fan, cyclist, journalist.

1:01:18You've got that breadth of knowledge, I think. How do you see the riders comparing across the decades? is there something that is unique in Pogacar that means that he's unassailable and we've just, you know, humanity is just so lucky, you know, lucky enough right now that everyone that's alive is getting to see him. Or is he less of a specimen than people think? Or are there people as good? You know, there's the Ivanapols and there's the Vinaigars. And then supplementary question is, how much is their talent worth versus how much is the science making them faster? and that's not to i don't want to take anything away from them because they are clearly exceptional human beings in so many ways but things i have changed you know look at the bikes now compared to 15 20 years ago yeah i think i think pagachar clearly is he produces some performances which are genuinely exceptional because the riders he's racing i don't i don't think he's racing a weak generation i think if pagachar wasn't riding i think there are riders like Matthew van der Poel and Jonas Vinigo that we would be talking about being kind of amazing epoch-defining riders in their own right.

1:02:27Yeah. So I don't think the guys that he's beating are in any way mediocre. It's very hard to compare across generations because the racing's different. I mean, the comparison you get with Pogacar is with Eddie Merckx, because Eddie Merckx for years has been the standard issue. Our standard answer to the question, who's the greatest cyclist of all time? It's Eddie Merckx. It's his job as being that guy. he was racing in an era when they did a lot more race days but they also very often didn't race all of the day you know they were kind of you talk talk to someone like barry hoban who who died not that long ago i remember chatting with him and he said yeah we used to start racing when the helicopter arrived because that was the tv coverage the tv cover didn't start to the last two hours of the stage if they had a five-hour stage they just rode along with the sunshine chatting for three hours they heard the helicopter come over the hill they go all right yeah off we You go, let's get going.

1:03:17So the racing's different. It's not harder and it's not easier. It's different. And it's very difficult then to sort of say, well, if you win five tours to France in the 1970s, is that more or less good than winning five tours to France in the 90s or winning five tours to France in the 2020s? That as a marker is quite difficult. You could try and do it on physiology, but nobody ever put Faust a copy in a lab. We can estimate what Eddie Merckx's R record numbers were. reasonably accurately. But on the other hand, that doesn't tell you how different he might have been in a more modern era with better support, better nutrition, better recovery, knowing a lot of things now that we didn't know then.

1:03:59And it doesn't tell you how good Pogacar is going to be in 30 years' time. Is somebody going to look back at Tadje Pogacar and say, well, how good would he have been with modern training from the perspective of 2050? It's a lot of fun trying to decide who the greatest sexist of all time is. And is Pogacar better than Merckx. Is Matthew van der Poel better than Francesca Moser of the early season classics? But it's very hard to produce any kind of a definitive answer because if Pogacar raced Merckx, well, if the Pogacar of today raced a Merckx that you put in the time machine from 1972, Pogacar would win.

1:04:32That's not really the question. But I'm going to ask you, who is the greatest? That is the question. That's a question. What do you reckon? For that, I'm going to say eye on Keith Falconer just to annoy you. I have no idea who that is. so successfully, or at least not annoyed, humbled. Who's that? I mean, I think for the moment, well, Ion Keith Falconer was the world's fastest cyclist in the early 1870s because he was the tallest person anyone had ever seen and he was riding a petty farthing and if you're really tall, you could ride a bigger petty farthing wheel so you could have bigger gear. And Ion Keith Falconer was 6 '5", which was huge in 1874.

1:05:06But that's my smart-ass answer. Between Pogacar and Eddie Merckx, I don't know. I genuinely don't. I'm tempted to say Merckx simply because he's finished his career. We can see the totality of everything he did. Pogacar may well get to be clearly the better or the more successful pro, but it's incredibly hard. It's incredibly hard, and I'm not sure how meaningful it is. It's an entertaining pub conversation, but I'm not sure that it's a question you can actually answer. I'll raise your 6 foot 5 Keith, give me his name again Ion Keith Falconer Ion Ion, I-O-N Ah, okay, great name I'll raise Mr. Falconer with George Pilkington Mills Have you heard of him?

1:05:57Yep I came across him recently So Bordeaux Paris used to be a 560k They paced it the entire So it started in the 1890s Early 1890s And it was always paced in some form because it was other riders on bikes or tandems. But then in the 30s, it became Derny Paced. But George Pilkington Mills, fantastic name, was the first person to win it, an English guy. But he also, curiously, and probably for reasons, held the Land's End John O 'Groats or some end-to-end record on a penny farthing until 2014 or something when somebody else thought I might try and break it. Yeah, I just think that cycling, in those days, on those roads, a bike like that how on earth do you ride a penny farthing from top to bottom Britain insane yeah it's I mean I and Keith Falkner rode from Lansdowne to John O 'Groats as well but just as a tour just as a recreation just as a genteel but he wrote he didn't write a book about it he wrote an essay about it and he recorded somewhere north of Darlington having to walk for 20 miles because the road had been so torn up by a traction engine someone had driven along it so he walked for a day and then somewhere in the highlands there was a headwind and it's very hard to ride a penny farthing into a headwind so he walked for another day a day, yeah, a walk for 14 hours pushing his bicycle no, it's a very different sport in some ways I think a very romantic sport in that era because the roads were empty because since the railways had arrived 30 or 40 years earlier all of the old roads were kind of abandoned so the riders in that era would write about riding 40 or 50 miles with a couple of friends in Surrey, on the roads in Surrey, and not seeing anybody.

1:07:41They'd pass through a few, a few people may be passing through the villages, but there'd be no other traffic on the road. There'd be no horses, there'd be no carts, there'd be no nothing. And this wonderful bucolic landscape. I sometimes think if I had a time machine in an era that I could go back to riding, I'd be quite tempted to pick the 1870s or the early 1880s and go riding a penny farthing through the British countryside. I think it'd be amazing. And then at the point where they banned mass start races in the UK, you would have jumped on the time trial scene and dominated. I'd have had it absolutely made, yeah.

1:08:13I don't know if you've come across this, but there's a book by an anthropologist, also top caliber runner, called Dr. Michael Crawley, called To The Limit, which came out a couple of years ago. And I chatted to him. And it's about him kind of exploring the whys and wherefores of endurance sports from an anthropologist perspective. Why do we do these sorts of things? And early in the book, he talks about the sport of pedestrianism in the 1860s, 1870s, particularly in America, where people were just utterly beguiled by walking races, which would take place and were the precursors to the six-day cycling races in places like Madison Square Garden.

1:08:57And you'd be like, right, by any means possible, cover as much distance as you can within this stadium over six days. and people would go for 400 miles and they'd collapse and there'd be people having to be taken off to hospital. I just can't imagine that world. Can you? The high-octane nature of sport now versus watching guys in bowler hats. I'm just going to imagine they're in bowler hats and tweed suits. Yeah, they probably weren't, but on you go.

1:09:25Yeah, I swear six-day cycling racing came from the same thing because six-day pedestrian races preceded them. I think there's still a six-day foot race in Australia. It wasn't until fairly recently there was an Australian six-day race. But yeah, and it was walking. It was called heel and toe walking. So you had the heel of one foot had to hit the ground before the toe of the other foot had left the ground. It's like you get race walking in Olympic athletics these days. A lot of this was sort of fueled by wagering, by betting. Because what would vary... When pedestrianism, I think, started with aristocrats betting on each other's footman.

1:10:02So one of them would bet that my footman can walk 100 miles in 10 hours. I bet your footman can't. And then the challenges got more and more peculiar, which I'm pretty sure that's how six-day racing started, was a bet to see how far somebody could walk in six days. Certainly that's how six-day cycling started, was a man called David Stanton in the 1870s bet that he could bet some friends that he could cycle 1 ,000 miles in six days. And his friends took the bet and he built a track in the Agricultural Hall in Islington, rattled off his 1 ,000 miles in three and a half days and won the bet. But that was the first six-day cycling event.

1:10:41And the early six-day cycling events were just like the pedestrian events. They were just, how far can you ride in six days? Nobody was sleeping. It was a pure endurance event. And they got absolutely huge, huge spectator crowds to come and watch these things. yeah I just think it's incredible if you sort of try to explain it to um gen z or whatever that people used to gather in stadia to watch people walking about over over days it just it blows my mind people pay to watch cricket hey there we go um one of the themes in that book is to try and find out you know what is it that drives us so I think it's probably a good note to end on and I've actually got an answer for you by you from the book but I'm going to ask you what drives people to do endurance type sports or just to just to do endurance cycling what's the driver i'm yeah doubtless you're going to quote something from the book where i felt i'd sitting here right now and said lots of people have lots of people have lots of different drivers to me one of the things that that is amazing about it is actually is the kind of small scale it's the amateurism of it it's the fact that you're doing something very often for yourself and a lot of the time it's about saying this is something i think i can do i'd like to see if i can do it it's it's it's small and that's one of the things i like about it presumably there's a much more grandioliquid quote that you're about to give me so yeah absolutely uh so brace yourself and this is the close of the book spoiler alert the hard bits are how you earn the good bits and the hard miles are what makes the good miles sing or what make the good miles sing i should say and And it's a more beautiful, it's a bit tenuous as an answer to my question, but I really resonate with that.

1:12:22It's that type two fun. It's the Jerry Seinfeld, the reason you're watching me in this stadium on this comedy gig is because you just want to go home afterwards. People only go out to go home again. You have that feeling on a bike. You have that feeling on a bike where there's nothing sweeter than dying out there and knowing you're only 10 minutes from home and a hot bath and a cup of tea. or you're five minutes from the pub or all things shall pass. And in cycling, invariably, they do. And just lost you there a bit, Michael, in my eloquent soliloquy at the end. Am I back with you? I think you're back.

1:13:00And that's probably a fantastically clunky way to end this. Yeah, well done. Michael, it's been an absolute pleasure to talk to you. Love the chat. I've enjoyed it. Guys, girls, men, women, children, anyone listening, Further is out. there is plenty of time to pick it up before Christmas. It's a really great read. I haven't done it justice at all. There's loads more in it than that. And there's loads of stuff to dig into that Michael's written. And my last question, which I should have started with, is should I have been addressing you as Dr. Hutch all this time or Mr. Hutchinson or Mike? I don't know.

1:13:30I messed that one up. I'm not fussy about it. A lot of people call me Dr. Hutch. Most of my friends call me Michael. Yeah, it doesn't matter. There we go. Dr. Hutch. Let's say Dr. Hutch. It's my brand. Exactly. Exactly, on message. So Dr. Hutch, thank you so much for joining us on the Cyclist Magazine podcast. Have a wicked Christmas and enjoy those hard miles because that's when the life really sings. Thank you very much, Jims. Dr. Hutch, ladies and gents, well, it's just you, Will. I'm sure there's somebody else listening, but right now it's just you listening to me. Great. I love talking to other journalists, basically, because they're just chatty.

1:14:10They know that you're here to entertain. you're not trying to draw information out of them i'm sure you've probably done some interviews with pros will where it's just like pulling teeth and you're like i just need a soundbite or a story and then if you talk to someone who has experienced that i another journalist then they're generally really generous so i want to thank michael again for yeah just being really really generous and chatty really thoroughly lovely guy absolute beast on a bike um i've seen him ride i did some aero testing stuff with, you know, he just turned up at this aero testing day for a company called Body Rocket that kind of works out your CDA as you ride on the bike.

1:14:51Anyway, context doesn't really matter. Seen him pedal around a track in Reading and man, the guy is fast. And I'm pretty sure as we chatted about, he could have been a top ranking pro if he'd wanted to make a career in that. But luckily he chose journalism because he's also a great writer. But anyway, we'll just leave that there because well you know it's been long enough that you and i have been chatting on this here podcast and i just wanted to ask you because i got this popping up today and i know you're a music man a man who has even recorded his own music and been paid to do so and once again i'm going to ask you how people can find that on spotify and once again you're probably going to tell me to do one who are you on spotify they can find it if they want to find it ah okay it's easy it's easy enough but anyway i've got my um spotify uh your songs 2025 wrapped and um i just thought we could maybe compare some notes bill because that's fun isn't it that's vaguely seasonal yeah go for it well apparently my number one song son of a preacher man by dusty springfield well really so so immediately my thoughts from that because obviously i've been through this wrapped when it came out.

1:16:02And you go through the thing and it tells you what your listening age is. Does it? Where does it tell you that? When you have the little scroll through thing, because you're on the playlist, but if you go through the little scroll through thing, one of the bits is listening age. And if that's your top song, I'd be intrigued to know where it's placed you. I mean, my listening age is... My ability to use a mobile phone and an app age is through the roof because I can't find what you're talking about. But it's got to make me pretty old. Where am I finding my listening age? When it says the actual your rap thing, when it comes up with your little animated part.

1:16:40Oh, that, yeah. Okay. Yeah, I mean, yeah. I've just got that. What do I do with that? Yeah, click on it. What, the bit that says let's go? Yeah. Okay. All right, okay. Minutes listened. Oh, listening age. There we go. I mean, this is tedious for anyone that's still tuning into us. Age is just a number, so don't take this personally. Swipe up for more. That's all it is. What is it? I mean, I've taken 82. 82, oh, you beat me. That's very old. I got 80. Wow. Okay. But my 80 is exclusively thanks to, well, pretty much exclusively thanks to the Bob Dylan biopic with Timothy Chalamet because following that, I was listening to a lot of Johnny Cash.

1:17:29And Johnny Cash's was ancient. Apparently Johnny Cash was like six foot four. Do you know that? Comes across as a tall man. Yeah, I suppose he does. But he's a very imposing figure. Yeah, booming voice. Booming voice. Yeah, good singer, turned out. He was all right, wasn't he? Turned out. Turned out. He's got good pipes. What was it? Great pipes. What was your top song? What was your top five? So the first four out of my five top songs, and in fact five out of my top six, were from the same album. So they were from Drive to Golden Hammer by Divorce, Nottingham's latest, best band. Top one being Lord, but actually most of the time I'm just listening to the album.

1:18:11So they're all on quite a similar amount of listens. The one in my top five that's not them is The Place Where He Inserted The Blade by Black Country New Road. And here's where it gets interesting because they're my top artists of the year. because the way that it ranks your top songs and artists and albums is different because the Black Country New Road songs are longer. So I spent more time listening to them but didn't press play as many times. I see. Oh, there we go. I get you. Go on then. What's the rest of your top five, James? I mean, because everyone does want to know. Take us home. Blackbird, but the Brad Maldau version, which is a jazzy version, although I do love the Beatles version more, but I just listen to Blackbird a lot.

1:18:53Moaning by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers weirdly because I can't remember listening to this that much My Baby Just Cares For Me by Nina Simone and then somewhere in here yeah it's not as far up as I thought is Joe Harmonia you ever heard of them? Supergroup concert I have a Kraut Rock supergroup sort of out of the in the lee or well in the wake of Kraftwerk and I've got this one album called Harmonia that I kind of almost treat it's a really good album but I treat it as like white noise so when I'm trying to work at home and it's noisy I stick my headphones on and I listen to this album on repeat Is that what's playing when I sometimes join the podcast call and obviously there's a lot of music playing in the background It could well be It sort of sounds like you're on a trippy space mission in the 70s With a listening age 82 I bet most people's listening age is really old or not, I bet it's really polarised It's probably the second or the joint highest that I've seen across the internet.

1:19:58Even, and this is a slight semi-company plug, so we're owned by the same company that own and publish Record Collector magazine. This is right. Which is for people who you probably imagine would have a listening age of 82. Or even be 82 themselves. Yeah, well, exactly. And a couple of them were talking about in the office this week. Nowhere near 82. I think they were in the 50s. Wow. I mean, you're basically, it's just averaging the dates of the releases that you're listening to. Can't be an average. I don't know what it is. The only thing I've listened to that's that old is Johnny Cash. But if it's heavily weighted and it's a very poorly constructed algorithm and they're taking just like the median average, it could well be Cash.

1:20:46I would suggest the most, the highest up just by scanning, I'm not going to count, The highest Johnny Cash song on my top songs is probably about 20th, maybe pushing 25th. But then have you got a lot in there from him, just not necessarily right up the charts? The next one down is maybe another 20 down. I think what you've stumbled upon there is the revelation that actually the algorithm isn't very good, but people love it anyway. I mean, they've made us talk about them. Yeah. Damn you, Spotify. And you like getting your stats. and it's like, wow, that's amazing. I've only listened to that five times.

1:21:23I'm sure I've played more than that. Are there any music studio platforms that can't be criticised for certain practices? I don't want to bring anyone into disrepute here. Is there like a progressive one where everyone's like, no, that's a really good one, sign up to that one? It's an interesting conversation. I would say your best bet is probably physically buying music. Okay, fair enough. I mean, yeah, records. Go and get some records. And I think the highest paying one for artists might be Tidal. Tidal. Okay. Well, you know, on that note, I'm just going to ask you, and then we're going to go, what's your favorite Johnny Cash song?

1:22:03Well, this year it's been Big River. Oh, okay. Nice. Okay, right. I'm going to go and listen to Big River. I'll see you next time, Will. This has been another since-lating outro from the Cyclist Magazine Codcast. Codcast, I called it then. Codcast. Codcast. It's the fish issue. Exactly. On Smuggler FM, Codcast on Smuggler FM. Right. Yeah. See you later. Bye. Bye.

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