156. Guy Martin: Getting kidnapped, land speed records and defying death on two wheels

0:00It kind of pains me to admit this as a cyclist, but I rather like cars. And I think I've just been driving around in the nicest car I will ever, ever drive. And that's the Maserati Gricali, which it turns out is what happens if an Italian supercar company designed an SUV for people like me, for cyclists. Now, the Gricali is fast, like 0-60 in 4.1 seconds fast, but it is also, it's just delightful to sit in. It has the legroom of a first-class flight to Singapore. it's arguably more luxurious inside than my own house. And yet, I kind of can't believe I'm saying it because of what it is. It's a genuinely practical car.

0:36I could happily chuck a dirty bike in the back of it, then do the shopping, and then go and pick up the rest of the family. Now, I've been driving the electric Fulgori version, which has the equivalent of a 557 brake horsepower dual electric motor with a 360 mile range, which sounds incredibly impressive, I know. But let's just put that in cycling terms, which we actually understand. That is the same power output as a thousand Tadej Pogacchas all racing Milan San Remo at once and then racing back again. Now, as well as the electric version, there are multiple engine options too, and prices start from£59 ,990, which, when you think about it, is something of a bargain, given Pogaccha's Tour de France-winning Colnago from last year sold at auction for£143 ,000.

1:23You could have bought two brand new Maserati Gricalis for that. Now you can find out more and also find out where your local Maserati dealer is at maserati.com where else. So that's maserati.com and check out the Maserati Gricali. So 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 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.

2:06To 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. But 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 crew at cyclist.co.uk and see why we gave it our cyclist recommended award.

2:51Then head over to hammerhead.io and use the code cyclist to get a free heart rate strap with every Karoo purchase. Just be sure to add the strap to your cart then apply the code at checkout.

3:12Hello and welcome back to the Cyclist Magazine podcast. I'm your host James Spender. And this week, it is but me once again. I am on my own for various logistical reasons and also in today's chat. So I do hope you don't mind the sound of just my voice and not Will or Robbins. But I do think you're going to like this one because today I'm joined by TV's Guy Martin. Now Guy is a former British motorcycle racer and truck mechanic. He's also a high-speed record setter and reluctant, in his words, TV presenter. That is, he says he'd prefer to be known for his day job fixing those long haul haulage trucks.

3:48Now, many of you will know Guy from those TV shows, which include the Our Guy In series, where he travels across the globe to places like Russia and China, doing things like visiting the Chernobyl reactor meltdown site and riding a bicycle across the desert. And there's also one-off shows, which sees Guy restoring things like First World War tanks and breaking records, like driving the fastest tractor, which, spoiler alert was 135 miles per hour. Now, Guy is also a keen cyclist that obviously had to be a hook in there somewhere from a 24-hour enduro mountain biking, I think, podium champion to breaking the British land speed record on a special steel racer built by Brian Rourke, easy for me to say, and Hope, to his self-styled ultra cycling challenges.

4:36Although he just called them Long Rise to Get Me Head Straight. And he's also an author. So Guy's new book, All the Medals Have Been Handed Out, will be released next week on the 7th of May. And along with charting his adventures and misadventures on two wheels, recounts Guy being kidnapped in Colombia and waterboarded, his soul-crushing, death-defying bicycle ride to Azerbaijan, and his continued 300 mile an hour job, which is an ongoing project to turn a street bike he bought for£5 ,000 into a record-breaking motorcycle that he'll ride at over 300 miles per hour. And he's tightened all those nuts and bolts himself.

5:14Now, honestly, I think I have never enjoyed talking to a guest on this show as much as Guy. So I really hope you enjoy listening to it too. I'll give you some more show notes about Guy's book. That's All the Medals Have Been Handed Out, which is coming out next week. But in the meantime, I do hope you enjoy this episode and I'd like to welcome to the show, Guy Martin.

5:39I don't know if you remember this. I mean, why would you? You're a busy guy. But we chatted in 2014. So back then, I was junior for Cyclist Magazine, and you broke the British land speed push bike record, riding a bike built by the Rourke guys, Brian and Jason. And we had it in the office, and we did a piece on it, and I chatted to you. And that bike, just off the bat, was mental. I remember standing on the pedal. I weighed 80 kilos, and it didn't budge. Like, the gearing on that thing was insane and one of the questions to you was like how the hell do you pedal something like that to begin with obviously not from a standing start but man you must be a strong rider yeah well i think we've done a fair bit of training on the run up to that off the back of the i mean i've always been a cyclist but i think that we've done sort of some quite specific training on the run up to that you know i mean it's a bloody it's a real gray area that land speed push by because actually as long as you're not because that record's been broken loads of time since then.

6:37I think that record's like 190 mile an hour or something's now. Yeah, that's right. Is it 190? Yeah, but as long as you're not being towed through the timing gates, it counts, which I suppose, that was the same rules when we did the record, but I think we just wanted to do it a bit more honest. So I pedaled from 60 and that was the only time I could get on top of that gear really. Like whatever RPM I've paid at, say I don't know, 60 mile an hour, that allowed me to get on top of the gear but i i remember that i've been asked that question loads that is genuine the most scared i've ever been on that pushback yeah i'm 12.94 mile an hour i'll never forget it right and then just the sort of oscillation of getting in the draft of the truck and then for whatever reason i get on the back and then i'd relax maybe and then i'd drop off it and then i thought shit he's good he's good he's good and i have never because i was obviously i was clipped in i genuinely when I thought I was going to pull the muscles off my legs.

7:33I have never pedaled so hard to get back on the draft. And once I got back on the draft, I was there again. And it sort of, but I knew, do not relax. Do not relax. Just keep pounding in. Yeah. Because if you kind of come out of the slipstream at that speed, it's almost like you're getting hit by something, isn't it? Because you've gone from having this thing breaking the air in front of you to then suddenly breaking the air yourself. and you're not aero enough to be doing what you're doing without sitting in the slipstream. So it's almost like an abrupt breaking force in its own right. There's a sweet spot where you get the recirculating air that's actually helping you at a point.

8:14It's when you get off that. Because I never got to the point where I had 100 miles an hour of headwinds. I was never that far out. It's just you got that bit of turbulence when you got that little bit further back and there was just that sweet spot. And that's where it was just keeping it in that sweet spot. And then the morning of that, James Woodruff was the producer at the time. I still work with him now. He is the man. He is the man. And he knows that I'll get stuck into it. Let's have a go. Shit or bust, right? But that morning, the plan was we got up there at first light. I kicked down at Pendai in my van.

8:44We got up at first light. So I was there for hour five or so. As soon as the sun came up, right, let's get cracking. And they had a structured day for then where we built up to speed and then check this, check that, and then go and they had an helicopter that was coming and you know what I mean? It was like a structure. So we were going to do, I don't know, say we were going to do 20 runs in that day and the final run being the fastest. But yeah, I'll never forget it. I did one run and James knows that I don't, you know, if I'm saying this is dodgy, he believes because I'll do it. You know what I mean?

9:11I'll get stuck into it. And I said, James, this is fucking scary. This is, the truck was, we'd wait for the tide to go out, and then we was just on slightly damp sound. And then the truck was leaving these tram lines. there was like a bloody tractor beam pulling me into the trucks like the tram lines that the truck was leaving and once I got in them I got into all sorts of state so this was the first run of the morning just getting her eye in seeing what it was going to be like and I just says this is proper dodgy this I said to James right I said look and he knows if I'm saying this he says right he's restless right I said we're doing this once and we're doing it once and we'll do it properly that's all we can do because this is going to get messy right so when that's right yeah because if we just kept it was going to get more tram lines and it was going to make it worse.

9:53It was going to be messy. So yeah, that record has been broken a load of time since. But that, from my understanding, is still the fastest push bike on a beach. Yeah, I think it is. And I think you're right. And there was a guy who, I think he's called Neil Campbell, and he tried it recently, and he tried to do 200 miles an hour, and he came up short. But there's a brilliant video of him doing it a few years ago and ending up holding on to the rigging behind this Porsche Cayenne or whatever it was he was drafting. Because the guy who's driving it sort of gets the calculations wrong. And he ends up having just to hold on to the car for dear life and the bike sort of disappears.

10:34And he can't tell the guy, for some reason he can't get the guy to slow, the guy doesn't realise he's driving for like a good, probably at that speed, half a K until he eventually slows down. But it's all, it's one of those Red Bull things that's got like the cameras inside. so you can see everything panning out on this video brilliantly as he's like balled up. And you just think like, bloody hell, what possesses people to do this? Yeah, well, it's the balls, isn't it? It's the balls. Yeah. It's the balls. And that's, like I said, that's the scariest thing I've ever done. And given chance, if we had the opportunity again, I think, yeah, with a long enough runway, not on a beach, I'd have a go at 200 miles an hour.

11:07Now, whether, I don't know, that was, what was that? That's probably 15 years ago, isn't it? Well, no, 12 years ago, isn't it? If you said 2014, yeah. whether I'll be fit enough. I'm sure I could train for it. I could train for it. I'd have a go. I'd definitely have another go. You did say that. I reread the transcript of our chat and you do say that in the chat back then. You're like, we could do 200 miles an hour. So, I mean, but I think you've got other things on your plate at the moment. Obviously, your book, which we'll chat about. But I know that you were like dead keen. I mean, have you done it yet?

11:36So you've got this turbocharged Suzuki Hayabusa, which is, I don't know if it's still the case, but was the fastest street legal bike when it kind of came out however long ago, which you've been modding yourself. So it's not like one of these mad, long Bonneville flats, sort of Uber Aero streamliner type motorbikes. It just looks like a motorbike with some cool carbon fairings on it. And you want to do 300 miles an hour over a mile, and you've done 282, which just to me sounds absurd, and I don't know how you keep the whole thing balanced. But are you still pushing for that 300, or is that now just, you know, the family sort of say, Guy, can you maybe just park that one for a bit?

12:18No, no, no, no. That is still my main focus. Okay. As it has been for the past six years. Yeah, I'm six years into it. Unofficially I've done 282. Officially I've done 276. Officially last year. Yeah, that bike's gone through a massive change over the past two years. we've rejigged a lot of stuff rejigged the whole geometry which doesn't really make sense but it's achieved the goal what i what i needed to be able to get the center of gravity of the bike down which but to do that i had to compromise a lot with the geometry on the bike so to understand whether this would work i ran the bike for the first time at the start of last year about a year is now in just a pure naked state so engine fraying forks swinging out no fairing no mud guard just a set of wheels and an engine in a frame for no reason other than to understand the geometry of the motorbike to make sure it would deal with the amount of torque we're trying to push through the chassis to propel the thing forward at this point in time 282 mile an hour is massive and it's just how the chassis deals with that level of torque.

13:29So the goal, yeah, was just to understand. So I've rejigged the geometry, which didn't make sense to anyone that knows what they're talking about, which it was my ignorance, really. I rejigged all the geometry to achieve the goal of getting the bike 120 mil. Well, the goal was 100 mil lower. It actually ended up with 120 mil lower. So I just needed to get back to the old, like a boy to death with it. The old coefficient of drag was like 0.36, which was great, but the bike was in standard state with a coefficient of drag really low, but the bikes are really unpredictable in that state. And then anyone that's been fast in this discipline is generally dead.

14:00Like the sort of record holder, or not a record, he doesn't hold an official record. He's a bloke called Bill Warner. He got killed nearly 10 years ago. Dude, you're all trying to do this standing mile, 300 mile an hour. He unofficially has done 300 mile an hour. He's done 311 mile an hour in a mile and a half. Sort of unofficial, sort of official. And then he tried to do that in a mile and that's when he got killed, which is what I'm after now. To be honest, it's not about... Me standing at the event, holding my hands up, I've done 300 mile an hour. It's not about that. It's just about the journey to get there.

14:30To be honest, I'm not asked if someone has already done it. I'm not that bothered. I just love the amount of learning to get to that point. I mean, I'm six years in. I've done some massive amounts of learning. So, yeah, last year, ran the bike in its naked form with no goal other than really to understand the geometry. And in the process of understanding this, we made a lot of knack of gearboxes, bent a lot of stuff, melted a lot of stuff. but yeah and I just went out the last sort of run last year just to test the new gearbox configuration that we had in it because we're just putting a massive amount of torque through it and it just yeah you find the fuse in a lot of places you'd never think so we had a spline issue in a gearbox I went to a new type of gearbox and just ran it at Eldington not on a perfect day with like 6 metres a second to win on a day where you wouldn't have gone fast really and the bike did 260.658 in just over a mile which is an official world record for a naked motorbike so to me that's great that's never the goal was to break the naked one speed record that wasn't the goal but it just happens that me proving that the geometry will work as yeah and then we've just done 260 so now the bikes are way in took it to a very clever man it was making some sort of bespoke fair and sprint and then hopefully we can get the coefficient to drag back to where it was now with the center of gravity 120 mil lower and then hopefully that'll allow me to go the next step whether that's 300 I doubt it there'll be a lot of hurdles between 282 and 300 that I don't even know about but I love the journey I love learning I love just it's yeah mistakes I'm just making loads of mistakes but you will never know until I've gone down that road but yeah that's the point I'm at at the moment so the bikes we're getting a ferry's made hopefully in a month's time we'll get a run out and yeah and see what it does so is that journey and this is going to be a wonderfully clunky segue, right, into chatting about your book and cycling.

16:21Is that the sort of thing that appeals in your long distance cycling rides, right? So you've done a tour divide, you race mountain bikes, Arizona trail race, these are really long things to divide something like four and a half thousand kilometers or 2007 room 65. Yeah. And it's like, it's like the equivalent climbing of nearly seven Everest from sea level. So it's like 60 ,000 meters across the Rockies. those are things that in your new book all the medals have been handed out you talk about as being necessary trips for your brain for your mind so i'd like you to kind of unpack that a little bit but also what i kind of both chime with and find brilliantly strange is how you basically say and i always hate them but yet i go back and do them anyway i don't know i don't i've raced 24 hour mountain bike racing years i've done it for years and i've got a sort of semi all right you know i never won one i got on podium a few times i sort of i was all right but then as far as i did that for years but probably the reason for it was keep a bit fit for the motorbikes but i'd always bike to work so i sort of meant i was i was all right for doing distance because i just i was always doing my two or three hundred mile a week just pedaling back as and forth to work you know what i mean so so i could go and do these 24 hour races and i'm sort of semi-competitive just without really doing anything you know what i mean and I've got my head I'm not that quick but I've got my head I can just I do like a bit of suffering so yeah if you want to suffer that's the place to go so it's I sort of got a bit bored of 24 hours because it was only 24 hours wasn't it and then I read about this I can't remember the name of the book John oh here we go there we go Cycling the Great Divide yeah that this to be honest this wasn't the book that gave me the inspiration there was a book written by an English bloke this is a bloke an American fella and I used this to take with me just to sort of look and I wrote every day I wrote notes in the book oh wow yeah look like here if you can see that just every day just because I had a GPX file yeah mega ice cream shot I've wrote that's yeah that's not like 12 mile that was going into Salida I think I'll be clearly good but I swear I was slept camped loo just above didn't get up till 4.30 oh that was a late start tea and coffee with family yeah just it brings back loads of memories tough climb what a place I've wrote here cool shop ice cream two ice creams coffee last shop before done 23 knackered that was pining just all my notes in there so yeah so that book yeah that was what I used to get me through the coffee it was a bit of a a map book anyway this Todd of I book someone got me years ago an a leg called John British lad did it with his mate and just wrote me this book and I thought oh my god that's what I want to do that's what I want to do yeah I want to do the Tour de Valle and then I did a bit of research and then I learnt that it was it was a race that took place every year was it like last week of May and I thought oh right that'll be alright but I'm always racing I do the same set of races every year as I have done for years and last week of May first week of June is always at the same time as the TT the Isle of Man TT which is a road race and there's loads of road racing that goes on not loads it's a good few but yeah there's always week of May 1st week.

19:41And I thought, oh, I can't do that because it's a TT. And then I just thought, oh, one day, one day I'll do that. And at the time, still racing 24-hour stuff, still racing motorbikes, never professionally, but at a professional level. I rode for Suzuki, for Honda, for BMW. But I always worked. I never did it as a profession. And then I had a big crash, 2015, and ended up, this was after the TT, the Ulster Grand Prix. Me and Bruce, I was leading a race. I was like, first or second, last lap, halfway around my lap, big crash in hospital for a bit most bones I'd ever broken in one sitting so this would have been August time I don't know I had my bones but I broke they had to put rods in my back plating my hand screw in my leg they had loads of breaks loads of breaks I think I maybe punctured a lung or something you know what I mean I was sort of alright but I'm late in hospital thinking can I swear yeah fuck the metal heist I'm going to go do that race in America yeah because I've been spiked for years you know what I mean and I was sort of getting a bit bored of it because it was just the same, great events, but just the same every year.

20:46And I just thought, and I was riding around these really extreme places, whether that's Dundro's, Australopithecus, or the Isle of Man, TT, or the Northwest. I was riding around there thinking, oh, I'm having for tea. You know what I mean? Should I be thinking about things like that, doing events like that? Probably not, right? And that lack of concentration, that wasn't due to the crash that put me in hospital that was just down to really trying and yeah and an unpredictable bite that took me over the hammer bars and yeah my fault but i think that made me realize you know what i've been lucky here because i'm still here right generally you get it wrong you're coming back with a wooden top you know what i mean generally that's what happens and i'm just thinking i sort of found a thing to know i have been lucky here and really i was bored with it just doing these same things i'd done for years you know i mean 15 years just on the same set of meetings going around the same tracks and it was just boring you know yeah all right you're going and doing 190 miles an hour riding these super bikes which boring they're just the pull of going to ride my push by for 2765 mile or four oh my god i just love and then that original book, just the misery that that put across.

22:04Anyway, so there's me, lady in hospital. Most bones had ever broken in one second and I thought, right, that's the drive. I'm going to get me sent out of hospital. I'm going to stay out, push biking, and I'm going to go and do that race in America. And that's what I did. Nice. And that was 18 odd days and you had a target of 20. So even then you can't help but sort of be competitive against yourself. But I do love in the book, this is like one of the most cycling it's a really this is a wonderful piece of philosophy and you can tell me as well I'd love to know like do you sit down and write all of this do you write it with a ghost writer do you I don't know how it sort of works but part that question for a sec one of the greatest pieces of little one-liners that's so cycling it's unbelievable you say I've probably got 30 seconds of memories that I'll never ever forget but I've paid for it with two weeks of misery and I wasn't enjoying the ride but that was okay because I wanted to suffer and that right there is just somehow the core of cycling which is cyclists just revel in that type 2 misery that thing where that beer or that ice cream or that coffee never tastes as sweet as at the end of a ride but something about the process of suffering is actually the thing that draws you in and it puts you out of your head it makes you forget maybe anything else that's going on and perhaps you're not maybe your mind does wander as to what you're having for tea but less so I think if you're just chewing a stem trying to get to your next checkpoint and knowing that you're going to have to bed down in a bush for a couple of hours of crap sleep i don't know what it is but it draws a certain type of mindset in yeah i thought that was just me just having this is a cyclist thing yeah that's it like i'm alone away come all the biking i do is by myself right yeah and there's a mate of mine simon perry works at hope i've known him forever right he really wanted to come on one of these rides i said you sure i said they're bloody miserable and i'm a loner i like doing things by myself but he's a good lad and i get on with him the best and i thought i said look you can come on this if you want right but i said it's miserable oh yeah i love it be mint be mint be mint all right and then this was like maybe a month before i was gonna go i said right you're getting around i said you do know and i just want to repeat what you just said then with a tour of eyes right i said this is going to be two weeks of absolute misery right he said oh but it'd be mean it'd be fun it'd be i said well i said there'll be there'll be little 10 seconds windows right that you you can drag out of that two weeks that you will never forget that 10 seconds for for as long as you live right but the price to pay for that is two weeks of misery and and that put him off and he didn't come and that and that trip honestly that last this was years ago i did this i ended up in bloody mass hey miserable that was probably i maybe want quite an arizona trail race miserable, but it was miserable.

24:48Yeah. And I think I might've got, I woke up one morning. I knew all I had to do was get to Marseille that day. I had to be there for tea time. Right. And then I'd shoot it down in someone's driveway in a little town called Orange. And I woke up there in the morning. Right. And I didn't have to get up at like three or four o 'clock. I thought the sun come up at like five and that got me up. And I was like, oh, no rush here. This was meant. right and the sun was coming up it was warmer it was a bit because it was in the south of France at that point packed my sleeping bag up bike down the road this was in Orange and there was a coffee shop just opening and I went in there and had a croissant and a cup of coffee just like that I haven't forgot about but that whole trip was absolutely miserable but that one bit of waking up in that driveway and just yeah hacking my stuff up thinking this is alright and then going and having a brew and a bit of French food in the morning I mean, I love it.

25:45I love it. I love it. But I know what I'm chasing. I know exactly what I'm chasing. I got to the end of the tour de Vida, right? I'd not spoken or seen anyone for... I set off to America early, so I hadn't spoken to anyone for three weeks. From home, my girlfriend, wife now at the time, came and picked me up from the border in Mexico and we'd no contact for three weeks. She just had the spot track. You know how the spot track has worked. So she sort of knew when and where I was going to be. But we hadn't spoken one word, not one text message. Didn't even have a phone. I had a Nokia 6310i that I used in my hand block.

26:20And I just used a preset GPX file in a Garmin touring. And then I got to the finish line of the tour divide, 18 days, 7 hours. And I don't know what happened, right? I just peeled my eyes out. And I'm a bloke. I mean, I don't bloody cry. I just get on with it. And I got to that finish line. I just peeled my eyes out. I don't know why I did it. And that's all I've been chasing since, is just to get to that point. I don't know why I've spilled my eyes out. And not a day goes by where I don't think about that ride. Or the ride I did last year, the ride I did the year before. I just love the misery.

26:56I don't know. That's a long word. I just addicted to the misery. Addicted. I can tell you, I mean, I was going to ask you, do you ever get emotional at certain moments? And I can totally relate to that. I've been in similar, not doing something quite like that, but similar situations on a bike where I've just felt just being overwhelmed emotionally or like finished the race and then just being like there's tears in my eyes I don't know why I should sort of be happy I'm kind of sad it's like a mixture of like a relief but it's also just something that's completely sucker punched me from nowhere and you see it a lot in professional riding um you know guys crossing the line on the Champs -Élysées after three weeks riding the Tour de France and you know just bursting into tears because what I guess you're just holding on to so much emotion when you're doing the thing because that emotion would get in the way of you doing the thing that maybe it just has to come out of the end i don't know i'm pop psychologizing now but basically um totally understand the overwhelming emotion of cycling yeah you you can relate to that i've never really spoken to anyone i've made cycle but you know by cycle but not to the not that i'm at any level but they yeah no one understands that but you yeah that's the first time i suppose you understand that yeah is that one is you're bottling up all that emotion over the duration, and then it has to come out.

28:09Is that what it is? I don't know. Who knows, yeah. But that hasn't happened. I got to... I tried to get from Georgia into Azerbaijan, but they wouldn't let me over the border, and that was a bit of a bore-ache, and that was a proper suffer. Getting through Georgia was a bloody misery. But then I got to the bloody airport to get home in Tbilisi, and I didn't bloody cry. I just thought, this was crap. And then the year before, I ended up in a bloody hospital in Bratislava, and then ended up at... Oh, I ended up in bloody Istanbul. Yeah, yeah. And I think Cryo Day Arrival. So I'm just trying to replicate that.

28:40And I can, I can. But I'm not giving in. I think next year, I don't know where I am. I know, well, this year, sorry. I've sort of got an idea where I'm going. So 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.

29:27And the crew is good for up to 35 hours. But 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.

30:03Then head over to hammerhead.io and use the code cyclist to get a free heart rate strap with every Karoo purchase. Just be sure to add the strap to your cart, then apply the code at checkout.

30:18It kind of pains me to admit this as a cyclist, but I rather like cars, and I think I've just been driving around in the nicest car I will ever, ever drive, and that's the Maserati Gricali, which it turns out is what happens if an Italian supercar company designed an SUV for people like me for cyclists now the Grakali is fast like 0 to 60 in 4.1 seconds fast but it is also it's just delightful to sit in it has the legroom of a first-class flight to Singapore it's arguably more luxurious inside than my own house and yet I kind of can't believe I'm saying it because of what it is it's a genuinely practical car I could happily chuck a dirty bike in the back of it, then do the shopping, and then go and pick up the rest of the family.

31:01Now, I've been driving the electric Fulgori version, which has the equivalent of a 557 brake horsepower dual electric motor with a 360 mile range, which sounds incredibly impressive, I know, but let's just put that in cycling terms, which we actually understand. That is the same power output as a thousand Tadej Pogacchas, all racing Milan San Remo at once, and then racing back again. Now, as well as the electric version, there are multiple engine options too, and prices start from£59 ,990, which, when you think about it, is something of a bargain, given Pogaccia's Tour de France-winning Colnago from last year sold at auction for£143 ,000.

31:42You could have bought two brand new Maserati Gicalis for that. Now, you can find out more and also find out where your local Maserati dealer is at maserati.com where else so that's maserati.com and check out the Maserati Grikali.

32:02So you sort of doing these things once a year and how are you planning your routes because I think I'm all right in saying that say you're Istanbul to hopefully to Azerbaijan Caspian Sea but you didn't make it because of the border controls you got to Georgia that was almost like a second leg of a ride where you'd ridden from Hull to Istanbul. Are you trying to complete some longer ride over years? And how have you kind of worked that out? I think, as a kid, I think I'd have been living with my girlfriend at the time. I wasn't a kid. I'd moved to Ireland, and then I was going out this last back home, and I used to live with her mum and dad a bit, and live with her a bit.

32:41I just got obsessed with watching bloody Ewan McGregor and Charlie Bourne on the long way around. Oh, yeah, yeah. And then they ended up in this place in Russia called Magadan. Just watching that, that did something to my mind. I thought, why would you ever go there? It's full of prisons, right? And just to put the spits of it, I just thought, that looks like an amazing place. And then for some reason I thought, that's where I'm going to bite to there one day. I'm going to bite there one day. And that's what he came off watching that long way around, what, 20-odd years ago. And I thought, oh, I'm going to do that one day.

33:11That's sort of the pinnacle of me doing all these long-distance push-by-rises. and I've never set off to get there. But the time I've spent doing these daft rides, whether that's going to Azerbaijan or Istanbul or Tordovar or whatever it is, and I've just sort of worked out, you know what, I'm just going to pick bits and do it a bit at a time. And I'm going to end up in Russia. Because we get a lot of negative propaganda about Russia, don't we? I'm not getting involved. I'm not political at all. But we made a TV program in Russia maybe about four or five years ago. And I came away from there. What an amazing place.

33:50What an amazing people. What a vast country. And yeah, I just want to go back to Russia. I thought, what an amazing place with such interesting people. So yeah, that's what I'm going to do. That's what I'm going to buy. So yeah, last year was, I flew back to Istanbul. The plan was to get to Baku. They won't let me into Azerbaijan, but that was only like 250 miles short of Baku. They won't let me into the border. so I made a phone call to shout, which never happens. I made a phone call to shout saying, right, we could be sort a visa out. She got a visa. They still won't let me in. I biked south to the Armenian, Georgia and Azerbaijan border.

34:25They still won't let me in there. But then it turns out that I don't let any civilians in through any of these borders. And then they explained to me, yeah, you can go back to Tbilisi, which is only like 50 miles back from the Armenian border. Back to Tbilisi, fly to Baku, right? And then I can bike back from Baku, back into Georgia, but I can't go to Georgia into Azerbaijan. jam so so and i just thought what that and the trip would be miserable but good in ways like good loads of little windows that i will never forget right but yeah misery i had to pay for it i had to pay for it i had to pay for it in misery i've got to say you're the only cyclist i've ever heard to say you know you're feeling a bit down in the dumps you're riding through lots of these like really long dangerous tunnels in turkey but then you're heartened by seeing lots of transit vans because they were transit van there's a big ford factory there and you're like a big transit van fan right whereas typically cyclists hate you know it's the horrible stigma of you know white van man but personally the transit van is like the the antichrist to a cyclist as they squeeze them up onto the verge and yet there you are going great another transit van that's heartened me i've never seen so many smiley face transit vans in mine i must have been biking for two hours and that was lined on the side of the road for two hours.

35:39That was in northern Turkey. Yeah, northeastern Turkey. Yeah, amazing. Because he was saying that I'm a transit fan. I don't actually have a transit. Oh, you don't? Yeah, I've got an MAN van now, because it was too expensive. But yeah, I do love a transit. I do love a transit. I actually don't want one, though. And you've also got, I think, one of the most amazing looking cars I've ever seen, the Volvo Amazon Estate, which you bought from a... Is it a guy? What's it? I can never say the name. He begins with K, the supercar company. Was he like an engineer or something? Conniseg? Conniseg, yeah.

36:07Conniseg. The bloke I bought it off is a bloke that works, a bloke called Matthias Vox. I bought it off him 16 years ago. Yeah, and that's, yeah, that for me is the coolest Volvo in the world. Yeah. It just looks like a car, it almost looks like a kind of flying hearse slash like a scraper. You like those cars they have in the States that have really crap engines, but they're just like really blinged out and they're super, super low. Massive wide, like wide space dalloys. It's all about the stance, isn't it? It's not really what they can do. It's how they look when they're parked. It is, it is.

36:34And this looks cool, but it also goes as well as it looks. It's 800 horsepower, 185. It's got 2.9 liter. But it's all built like it came out of a Volvo factory. It's got 2001 Volvo T6 2.9 liter, six-cylinder. It's the same as the T5, but the TC1 for cylinder, 2.9 liter. Yeah, we push like a baron out of Boozer. It does 800 horsepower. Yeah, Ford 9-inch backhacks. It's a trick. It's just a trick. The trick is that Volvo, actually, before I owned the car, Volvo paid for that car to go to the SEMA show in Las Vegas. Yeah, it's like, yeah. it's the coolest for all of a sudden it's not a point of debate it is yeah and I own it nice do you I mean you're like you've got an encyclopedic knowledge of like motor vehicles do you sort of take the same interest in bikes or are bikes more like I don't know like a pair of shoes like a kind of thing that just it just does the thing do you sort of get excited looking at a new Hope bike or a new Salsa bike or something yeah I suppose in ways yeah like I got the new Hope 916 are just the trickiest thing.

37:35And then they're coming out with a new 120 version. I don't know what number they're going to call that. These are full saucers. Yes. Yeah. And then, yeah, aside from that, like the Hope stuff, the Orange stuff, just because the proper hand-built, you know what I mean? Like where the carbons all wrapped in barrels, we call the Hope frames. You know what I mean? Some of them are done in China, but the vast majority of the aluminium ones are done in Halifax. They're all bloody Antigua welded. is just beautiful. But yeah, aside from the hope stuff and the orange stuff, no, I don't get that passion about Billy.

38:12You know what I mean? It is a tool. It's a tool. So like the bike I used to do my miles on is just an orange RX9. I would call him an X9. Or is it an RX9? RX9, I think. It was an early cross bike but sort of like almost like a gravel bike now would look. Yeah. Yeah. So that's what I use. I use that. But then I, yeah, I got sort of flared drop bars on it. I've got a sun front hub in it. I've got 12V1, but I used a classified back hub in it, which turned out not to be ideal, really, for what I'm doing. So I'm converting it back now, ready for the ride this year. I've got little 60mm forks in it, loads of bags on it.

38:45I mean, perfect. I don't get that excited. It's just very purposeful. It's a tool to do a job. At what point were you riding to Marseille? Did you think, I've taken the wrong tool when you were riding a full susser? Like, was it a 130mm travel hope bike? Which I'm assuming most of that ride is road. Would that be bright? It wasn't planned to be because there was a lad that had made a route and he called it the European Divide. And it was going from a place, Cape Nord. Is that in Finland? Like the most northerly part of Europe, I think. Nordkap or something? Nordkap. Yeah, Norway. Yeah, yeah. So it ran from there and the vast majority of it was off-road.

39:23Oh, okay, okay. It ran from there to, I think it is the most south-westernly point of mainland Europe, not taking the Republic of Ireland into account. Obviously, that's not mainland Europe. And it's this little peninsula that is off the south-west point of Portugal. So my plan was, obviously, I couldn't do the whole route. The whole route wasn't that far. It was maybe, I don't know, 1 ,500 miles or so. And I thought, well, I can't do all that. I can't get time off. I can get time off in match. right so i'm going to set off in march and i'm going to get off the boat in so i got on like the freight boat with a mate on a truck right so bunked in with a mate on a truck got on the freight boat at a killing home she's just up off grimsby docks more or less and then got off in holland and then i thought right i'm just going to ride east until i can get on the tracks i downloaded the track as a gps file get on the track in cologne somewhere right and then just ride on the track right until i get to portugal and then it turned out i got to the track and i don't really think anyone had rode this route right he'd sort of piece it together off gpx files and off google maps but at that time of year the vast majority of it wasn't rideable at all yeah so i just thought no one's getting anything out of this this is just misery right so i just ended up riding a load of it on road and i ended up going a bit sort of southeast and i got into the like germany switzerland bit i think and then yeah then started coming sort of south and i was what i was going to do i just thought this is bloody misery and then my mate i rang my mate dolby up like it was a big cyclist and he says i said this is just miserable because he was in spain he was in spain on a motorbike test he drove out there and he was driving back and he says oh this was sort of planned before i'd set off he said i'll meet you when i'm on the way home we'll just have a cup of tea i thought hey that'd be meant we'll plan that and we were sort of keeping in touch as the ride was going on i did have a phone at this point so i could keep in touch through text message I says, this isn't getting very good here, mate.

41:17I says, I'm going to call this a draw. I said, well, best way to get home here. And he said, I'll tell you what, my mate, this is his boss, he's got a Shelly in Switzerland, right? He said, he's got a van that wants to bring it home. He says, get there, put your bike in the van, drive the van home. I said, oh, yeah, that'll be me. Anyway, that was the plan. And then I put the phone down and I thought, I'll never live in myself if I do that. What a way out that is, is biking to Geneva, somewhere, getting in a van and driving home. I said, no, no, I'm never living myself. I wouldn't, because I have to do these things.

41:50I'm not really, unless I go on a miserable ride, I'm not really worth knowing for a year. I won't be worth knowing for a year. I thought, I can't do that. So I had to have a rethink in my brain, right, what does, Portugal wasn't possible at this time, and there was a massive storm coming through the southwestern Spanish area at that sort of time I was going through there. And I thought, what does a finish look like here? I thought, right, If I can dip my wheel in the Mediterranean, that'll be a finish for me. So I thought, right, Massey will be a finish for me. I'll go to Massey. So anyway, that's what happened.

42:19I got to Massey. Yeah, and I'd say, what a, yeah, yeah, I got to Massey. So what do you, you just mentioned then, what would you look like if you didn't do a ride like that every year? You said, if, you know, you don't want to meet me if I haven't done a ride like that. What happens to Guy? Yeah, good question. I think your best person to ask that is the wife, Sharon. and yeah, she said she also was getting ready for a ride. You see me, because they've obviously got this book coming out so I'm having to do a fair bit of press stuff but I don't really do stuff like that. It's good to talk to a fellow cyclist, isn't it?

42:49But I had to do press stuff and then the farming sort of slowing down now, everything's sort of getting done with the farm so I'm not busy, I'm not that busy of work. Trucks, I'm still doing like one or two days a week on the trucks. So everything's slowing down and I just, my brain's got a bit of idle space now and I'm thinking, right, I need to go on a ride. I need to go on a ride so what do I look like if I'm not going on these rides I'm just yeah I'm not really the man to ask I just know I'm feeling a bit on edge something needs to happen I'm not going through enough misery I need to yeah I need to go on my bike I just need to go on my bike I've been out this morning I went out this morning and went on 25 miles this morning it was shit it's been miserable so I just have to go do it this morning but that's what I do I do that most morning if I'm not like tomorrow I'm biking to Dow so I've got a bike to Dow so that's what I work in a truck yeah I'll be setting off at like 20 past 4 in the morning to get there for a five o 'clock start.

43:35Man. Yeah, and that sort of offsets him. I'm all right, because it's shit, it's just shit early in this. Yeah. Have you always been really sort of driven? And I was going to open with this intro, but I'll just read it out to you anyway, because I think it's just some, if anyone that hasn't sort of, you know, people I think up and down the country know who you are, I've seen you on telly, might know more or less about you, but to understand your prodigious output is kind of nuts. So 17 podiums at the Isle of Man TT, For more than, I think, 80 starts. You've done 132 mile per hour average lap. The record's 136.

44:10Multiple British superbike and supersport podiums. Four Guinness World Records broken, including fastest soapbox, fastest wall of death. You did the British Land Speed Human Power Bike Record Setter, which we chatted about earlier. You finished the Tour Divide, Arizona Trail Bike Race, 24-hour mountain bike racer. You've also podiumed at Fort William, which is pretty cool. and presented 32 TV programs, if I have managed to count your Wikipedia page correctly, of which some of those have multiple episodes. And you're in that amazing film, which I think lots of people may have seen, if you haven't, check it out, TT3D, Closer to the Edge, which is about you racing Ironman, TT.

44:51And you've authored six books, including, another plug, all the medals have been handed out, and you're a truck mechanic, and you're a husband and a dad. how do you get up really early and just need like Margaret Thatcher levels of sleep or how do you fit it all in? And you're only a couple of years older than me, right? I'm 41. Yeah, 44, yeah. I don't know. I don't do anything. I don't do, you know what I mean? I'm not going to always this. No, no, no, no. I'm not a big sleep. I mean, I'm always in bed before 10. I mean, I was up at 5 o 'clock this morning, which is normal. tomorrow I'll be up to quarter four because I've got to be on my bike at 20 past four.

45:33I mean, I just, I'm very much for an efficient use of time. Yeah, but it's not like the TV, yeah, that's a lot of TV programs, but that doesn't really get in the way of life that much, making all those TV programs. I mean, I do 60 days of filming a year. That's how it's been for the past 17 years. And we've been doing it for 17 years, yeah. So, oh, I'm not going to say, oh, it's this, no, I might actually get on with it. and I'm not trying to make out that I'm just a whinge and I love, I just love what I do. I love what I do. You missed out the farm a bit. And the farm, sorry, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

46:07Which that, right? I was out ploughing this week. We've been ploughing for the last bit of borage this week so I've had two days on the tractor this week ploughing. But that's, I mean, yeah, that's a nuts job in itself just having a farm. Most people would say that's enough. But, I mean, just with the TV stuff, you travelled loads, right? You said, you know, inspired back in the day watching Charlie Borman and Ewan McGregor on their motorbike going to Russia. But you've been to places like Vietnam, China, Japan, that helped me out here. India, another one. India was the first one. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

46:39Colombia. Colombia, yeah. Where's the sort of, I mean, it's such a hackneyed question, but where's the sort of maddest place you've been to? Where have you been that has made you feel a little bit like you watching those guys go to Russia where you just suddenly had your kind of eyes open? You're like, wow, this is just nuts. exciting, mental, and a bit scary? Russia. Russia. We went to, it was just, I think, we definitely did three weeks in Russia and a week in Ukraine. Yeah, and then the last bit we did in Russia, we went to, because they're just wild, right? They let us go in a bloody, like, full military fighter jet, right?

47:18Just to go out and do a rumble. I know I was going to sat behind the pile, but, right? These boys did not give a shit. This man was pulling massive G, right? And he nearly took the hats off the film crew as we came down over the runway. There was, it was, and like doing, just all fully controlled, but just a bit wiped. Just a bit wiped. Yeah, Russia. And that's why I sort of got this fascination to get back to Russia, really. Just with the pushbiking. Just, yeah, because they're wild. They're wild. It's such a vast country. You know what I mean? We went out as far east as Lake Baikal. deepest lake in the world, I think, nearly on the Mongolian border.

47:59Yeah, and then we was out in the Siberian forest there, and then we came back and we went up into Archangel, where the Arctic convoys came in, and we was there. We just got to Archangel, and the sea was frozen, and I think there was a point I'd never been as cold in my life. I remember what we was doing there. I thought we was going to a diamond mine there. That's what we was going. And we just was in Archangel. and then the sea was frozen and we got and all these boats frozen in the morning we got there and then all these massive tankers were just frozen in the sea and I just thought oh right they're going to be there for months so I wonder what happens there you know what I mean and then we're just talking a bit and then we're going round and then the whole town is on like main central heating from the power station so the whole town is heated you know what I mean no one has their own heating it's just like main central heating for the town right and I thought oh yeah and just like cold and it was just like oh my god got up in the morning like I was on my way to the diamond mine all of those boats that was frozen in in the sea they're all gone and all the sea had frozen up behind them and I got talking to someone I said yeah that happens every day I was just like oh man I've got no one shouts or screams about it I just thought so how do they get out do they just break the ice there's ice breakers yeah there's one to be supertankers there's ice breakers as well yeah but the time they'd gone it had frozen up behind them but what time they'd gone I don't know I'll never forget that and then we was in the diamond mine and then having to get me bloody ass inspected that you haven't smuggled any diamond.

49:22You know what I mean? Yeah, so I'm just, yeah, fascinating. Yeah, so the Russia thing was fascinating and then going to Ukraine and going to bloody Chernobyl, like react to room four and see what's going on there. And then understanding that we hear so much bad stuff about what went on with Chernobyl, which it was obviously, right? But the vast majority of Chernobyl, there's no background radiation. There's more background radiation in the Peak District, right? Because of the granite. that's in the Peaky Street, there's a lot of background radiation there, right? But the vast majority of Chernobyl has got less background radiation than there.

49:54There's just little windows in forests, right? And when you get anywhere near reactor ring four, it is mental. Reactor, we have little dosometers on, like little guided cars. It just, yeah. And then we went in to reactor ring four that controlled it. And then we got in to see the elephant's foot, which was where the reactor had melted. So, I mean, we just saw all that. Just like, yeah. And we was in there filming. I mean, we were only allowed in there for, say, a minute, because the things were going mental. The little dosometers was going mental. And then Nat was in there with his camera, and his camera was all going fuzzy because of the background radiation.

50:26Wow. Where else do you get to do things like that? I'm still here. So it hadn't got me yet. It hadn't got me. And then going to Columbia, which we went there a few years ago, and, yeah, getting waterboarding. I'd heard, I'd read a bit about waterboarding. I spend a lot of time in tractors, right, listening to podcasts. I love a bit about torture. and obviously it's illegal to do water torch. Waterboarding, sorry, waterboarding. It's illegal to do that in the vast majority of the world. But actually in South America and bits of Russia, you can do it legally. Oh, right, yeah, yeah. So we thought, well, we're in Colombia.

50:57I'll get kidnapped and get waterboarded. Yeah, I can tell you now that is... Because I just read about it and I thought, oh, what's the problem? You're just putting a wet rag over your face. And that's all it is, really. That is all it is, right? But they get you in a state of stress, right? So they kidnapped me and they didn't mess about. Now, this wasn't doing it in Grimsby, the Birmingham, you know what I mean, where they've got rules to adhere to. We went to Columbia and we got kidnapped by a trainee police force. They were trained to deal with kidnapping, right? So they do this for real with politicians so they know how to deal with torture.

51:31And then these coppers, they was the kidnappers. And they rugby tackle me, prock rammed me, chucked me in the back of a car, drove around like nut of a 20 minutes, right? While punching me and nipple twisting me and proper, no, I'm not fussing about it, I'm not funny, but they're proper hammering me, like proper hurting me because I sort of didn't mind that really because I was with the pushback and I loved the misery. But they kept telling me these same Spanish words they kept repeating, shouting at me while I was punching me, right? I can't exactly remember what the Spanish words were, but they kept repeating this to me and I'm like, oh, right, I want to do it.

52:02And I just kept saying to them, is that all you've got? Is that all you can do is I was punching me out and I was freaking, anyway, they dragged me out of the car and then a bit more punching and a bit more smashing me in the head and a bit more... It was proper. I fair play to him. I was doing it properly. And then I started with the waterboarding. But it's because the waterboarding only really takes effect when you're in a state of stress. And obviously, I was in a state of stress. I was getting battered about in the back of this cow while getting these shatting these Spanish words at me, right?

52:28And then I started the waterboarding. I only did it for a few seconds to start with. And I thought, shit, this ain't good. Because the body was in a state of panic. And then as soon as you felt that wet rag over your nose in your mouth, your body goes into an automatic default where you will not let you breathe, right? You need to breathe because you're in a state of panic, right? And that's what happened. And then they let me rest for a couple of minutes while I was punching me and shaving at me in Spanish and obviously I was filming all this all the time. And before we started this, James had told me, right, this is what's going to happen.

52:58Structured out what's going to happen. If it gets too much, say, un dos tres, right? And they know, the policemen know, un dos tres, which I think am I right it says one two three in Spanish am I right I'm not right they know that's the stop words right they know safe words that'll get me out of it right and obviously I'm not gonna need that right as soon as I started the waterboarding I thought shit I'm gonna need this right so they let me rest for like a minute and they're punching me about again then they started with the waterboarding again and I'm proper panicking at this point I cannot grieve I'm gonna pass out something's gonna happen right and I'm thinking shit I'm thinking right foreign language undos tres and I couldn't think.

53:37I could only remember Einstweidre, right? I could remember one, two, three, German. And I'm like, and I said that and I didn't stop. And then James, the cameraman, or the producer, he said, you've got to stop it. Like, he's obviously stupid. He can't remember. But one, two, three, in Spanish, so they stopped. They stopped. I'm like, oh, shit. Shit. And I just, like, took me a little bit to get over it. And then the coppers that was doing all his torturing, they were bloody brilliant. I had the best of crap with him after all this had gone. Right? Just change suddenly like that from shouting this Spanish there was just the friendliest people they pulled me up they made me a cup of tea having the crack could speak good English what a story what a story mate yeah just and then from that we went truck racing with these bloke that drive trucks all day for the living and then they go and race them at weekends we went racing and we went downhill push biking and these gravity races with these like yeah with these sort of like gangster lads from the hills in Columbia mate it was yeah that was in Bogota we went and did that and then bloody hell the drugs and sort of the goal of making that travel programme was to say you know to highlight that there is a lot more to Colombia than just Pablo Escobar and cocaine and yeah I was going to say I never watched the programmes but it turns out I think a lot of the programme was about cocaine and was about Pablo Escobar but that wasn't there was so much more to Colombia than just that what an amazing yeah and what again again again what amazing people and I say from the push bike rides I try not to listen to the news because we just I just remember this was a couple of years ago I was biking through sorry I'm swapping about here no no no go go but you just forget just people in Russia people in Colombia and then there's me in I'd just come out of Hungary no not out of Hungary in Serbia into Bulgaria Sofia I'd just come out of Sofia and I think I was in biking through on the back tracks just peddling along bitches on my way to Greece, I think Bulgaria, but I went through Greece in Turkey, I think.

55:38And I got into a shop, backstreet shop in Bulgaria, right? Bit run down, right? And I've got some water and some chocolate and some bits and bobs. Went to the counter and they won't take a cash. And I didn't have any cash on me. I really ran out of cash. So I said, no problem. So I put it all back on the shelf and then went outside. And I had enough for me bottles. I could have done another 50 mile. I was all right. And I was trying to look on my GPS where I could get into another town to get a cash machine to get some. And while I was just looking on the GPS, trying to find where I could get some cash to get some food and water, this old woman, like as old as the old, right, came outside to me.

56:17Couldn't speak any English. I couldn't speak any Bulgaria, right? She opened her little purse up, right? And she forced some money on me. And I said, no, no, no, I'll be okay. I'll be okay. And she forced some money on me to go in there because she could see that I couldn't buy the water. And she forced some money on me to go and get some water. And she didn't know who I was, She was just a nice person. You know what I mean? And I think we forget that generally people are nice. You know what I mean? Obviously, we get the odds, dickheads, and bad curse, and no way. But I think we need reminding somewhere that the vast majority of people are nice.

56:50There was a story as well in Istanbul. One got us out of the shit. You know what I mean? Just let us call and be over Russia. Just people are nice people. nice people yeah i think yeah you need to put yourself in that position i think every now and again just to make yourself realize oh yeah people are nice we forget that we hear so many bad things and that's and people are just trying to live their lives right there's nothing remarkable in that they're just getting on getting on despite the fact they might live in you know we're getting a bit political here but like living on the horrendous regimes and you know there's all kinds of international difficulties but the average person in the average country is just trying to live a life they're not you know they're sort of ultimately probably relatively ambivalent indifferent to the whole thing they just want to crack on not really too worried about who's in charge ultimately i mean maybe i'm you know i'm overstepping this is a cycling podcast what do i know about politics but i just want to sort of like contrast for you know for for finally let you go because this has been a very long chat already but i'm still amazed that yeah in the book you'd say you know and in various times in our chat right you sort of said things that have happened on a bike have been scarier than things that have happened on a motorcycle which to me just sounds mad because i don't know a little bit about motorcycle racing but not really but just looking at the stats of you know isle of man tt right it's 260 odd deaths of people doing it and you're flying around average speeds of yeah 130 miles an hour plus and there's something like 200 odd corners, which taken at speed of pretty dangerous things.

58:25And there you are earlier on saying, yeah, sometimes it's got to the point where I started thinking about, you know, what I was going to have for dinner while I'm doing this. It just blows my mind because to me, a push bike can feel quite dangerous when you're going down a hill at 80k and you realize you've got a bit of polystyrene on your head. But most of the time it feels quite sedate. And motorcycling to me just looks absolutely batshit crazy so yeah it's whatever you get used to when i've done that for years and for me that's why i packed in because it wasn't floating my boat anymore i wasn't getting the buzz out of it anymore that's why i went from that to mile racing now which is developing these thousand horsepower motorbikes they're trying to now that scared me that grabbed my attention right but it is only sort of 15 seconds right but for that when i've been fast on these mile bikes like by the day i did 260.65 i had a naked motorbike trying to hide on top behind the top yoke yeah i I didn't sleep for two days just because I'm wired.

59:18So I'm bloody wired. And then there's me biking through, this was last year, on the tunnels like northeastern Turkey and then in Georgia getting through to just, you know, on a curtain side of a truck, they've got straps on the side and they've got little span sets that just flap out. I'm going through the tunnels and I'm trying to get as far over as I can, right? And those little tags on the side of the trucks are touching the side of my shoulder. I'm thinking like that. I'm just like, this is not sustainable. This isn't ending good, right? I've got to change something here. And then, yeah, it's in there right in the book about what I have to do and fannying about.

59:58And then I ended up going back just to taking me chances. Yeah, just taking me chances because it was just too dangerous to try it the other way. Yeah, but that, yeah, that grabbed my attention. And that's the problem with the road racing. It wasn't. I've done it for years. I just found it. It's great. It's great. It's great. But when you've done that same thing for 10 or 15 years, it's just floating me above it's not exciting it's not exciting and that's why i just love going and doing these push bike rides yeah all right i'm not doing till the mall an hour but i'm getting some airy moments you know what i mean and i'm just yeah yeah i love it so what's the next thing that's like what's what's going to be that next kind of reset type ride or maybe even like looking ahead further than that a big challenge that you think okay in the next five years i really want do that on my bike.

1:00:42I'm thinking, I'm not that bothered about the Azerbaijan habit, right? If it's only 250 miles and I was going to get to Baku and then was I flying home then, might have done, or I might have got on the boat to get into Kazakhstan and then gone to Almaty, right? So I'm thinking now I might have done that, but that's not the best of time on a boat, fannying about. Or I could just miss out on that bit and get into Uzbekistan and go to Tashkent, right? Which isn't, I'm not actually missing that much out and go or Tashkent, bike over the mountains down Matty. It's not a thousand mile. I'm thinking, am I going to do that this year?

1:01:14Right? Maybe I might do that because that's sort of a decent winder. Last bit of May, first bit of June, I could do that then. Right? Work's not mental. Everything's sort of calmed down so I could do that. Or, I'm going to go and do the west coast of Ireland. Nice. The Wild Atlantic Way. Yeah. As long as you're thinking, it's 1 ,500 mile that. Mm. and you can get absolutely battered by the wind. That's one of the killers. It's not just the terrain. I think the weather can be just, yeah, really relentless. I've lived in Ireland a fair bit and I know how bad the weather gets. I lived over there and raced over there.

1:01:51But I've never actually done anything on the West Coast. You know what I mean? I've always been in and around Belfast, London, Derry. I live around there. And then my wife, she's from Dublin. So I've spent loads of tartan islands, right? But I've never done anything on the West Coast. I thought, what better way to discover Ireland and so I go and bike it. So I bike from here, get to Wales, get on the boat, get to Oliad and then just set up on there, go down to Cork. What would you say? Would you say north to south, south to north? I don't know. I'd have to look at historic wind directions and choose whichever one's going to be over my shoulder.

1:02:21It can kick the enthusiasm out of you when you've got a bloody 10 metre a second wind for days and days, haven't you? It really can. I think one of the things to watch out for are American tourists. They get a lot of American tourists going to Ireland and you notice around, because there's like the Ring of Bearer, which is like, I'm not sure if that's part of the Wild Atlantic way, but like famous, lovely drives on really narrow roads with a few little cafes and you come out of the cafe and then you just see a sign that just says, drive on the left. And it's just to remind people, you know, because you do that thing, don't you?

1:02:56If you're, you know, you're used to driving on the right, then suddenly you just forget and then you pull out and then there's nowhere to go for the other car or the other cyclist. so I think like in a way that's that's probably a biggest lookout that and the fact that you know every other shop is a pub and then you know Guinness is a wonderful drink I do love a part of Guinness good for calorific intake isn't it yeah it is it definitely is and there's a wonderful thing around there where loads of the shops they sort of look like like a hardware store or some sort of like I don't know like a fabric shop but actually it's a pub because a lot of the pubs kind of sprang up from people who went in to trade and then it'd be like oh you know while you're here, let's have a drink.

1:03:32We're going to barter over a drink. And then slowly, the shop that sold Hammers also started selling beers. And then at that point, it did get quite messy. And then after a while, they had to stop selling Hammers. But it's just, there's so, yeah, it's an amazing place to ride. I absolutely loved it. Right. So, right. Okay. Right. I'm either going there or I'm going Tashkent to Almaty. Pick the next bit. Tashkent is probably arguably more exciting. No offence to Ireland. Possibly. Possibly. But I'll see what I'll do when I get up that morning. yeah i'm building my bike i'm just changing my bike a bit from last year same bike though same base i'm just getting rid of the classified on it i'm just putting it back to conventional 12v1 little forks and it's still might go for a rack rather than the bag i have strapped on the back of the seat and then when you get penny shaft swinging and you've got a strap it up all i might go to a rack yeah well that yeah that's the plan that's this year's plan yeah not sure yet nice well you'll know you're a true cyclist where you start kind of obsessing over racks because let me tell you there's some really amazing ones by a company called tail fin which is i'm from bristol they're a bristol company right and they're carbon fiber and then you're suddenly like wow can a rack cost the better part of 600 pounds but then you go but it's only 350 grams and that's way better than this metal one over here anyway the obsession starts now i think right okay tail fin i'll have a look yeah top man could you ever see yourself going back and challenging for that number one senior TT at the Island Man having, have you run her up twice?

1:05:00Yeah. In different categories? Is that like, do you ever have sort of, do you look back and go, yeah, there is unfinished business there? No, I don't think I do, you know. I, like I said at the start of the chat, I'd always want everyone to know that it was never my job. I always had a, I was like, I've always got a proper job, right. I never used to say that too much. But I did, I never committed to racing properly because I'd always work. I love my job I love the racing but I never wanted to do it full time I never really wanted that to dictate my life and I thought right now obviously I'm proper I'm not retired because I never did it as a job but I sort of packed in road racing because I got bored of it but then I thought right when I have packed in you watch I'll start regretting that I didn't put more effort in and I'm probably probably been fully packed in with the road racing for 10 years now right and I have absolutely no regrets if anything I should have packed in earlier because I realised it took me for me to stop to realise that I wasn't enjoying it.

1:05:56That's why I need to go and do these bloody push bike rides. So no, at this point in time, never say never. No, I have no Brexit. I have no, unless I would go back because a part of the racing, the main reason I went racing was because I love developing motorbikes. I liked riding a bike and then getting it as good as I could possibly get it to get the most out of it. And if that resulted in a win, great. if it meant second or third as long as I got the most out of the bike I was satisfied right it wasn't actually about winning and then the motorbike rules have become stagnant they've been stagnant for the past 40 years really there's been no major development in the motorbike world they've been on port injection four valves per cylinder double over a camshaft nothing they're boring you know what I mean they're the same we've not gone down the road that Raleigh British Touring Car Formula One you know what I mean they've been forced induction so that drives a lot of innovation inside the engines and not just the engines and the chassis in packaging all of this, right?

1:06:54But the motorbikes have just been stagnant for 40 years. So if they opened a class hall, and they used to have this class in a race in Macau called Formula Libra, which was anything goes, anything goes, right? If they allowed that class in the Isle of Man, right? Or at a road race, I would be at the front of the queue, right? I'd be, I'd want to go there with a 500 horsepower, Honda Fireblade. and not to win no because I probably won because I wouldn't have to do a lap on a tango fuel right but I'd be the first man to do 260 mile down the longest straight you know what I mean I'd love I'd love the challenge of doing that and getting the bike to work around it that'd be amazing I'd see that as a challenge and then I'd be at the front of the queue but just to go and ride the bikes that everyone's been riding for the past four years ever since I've been riding they're all the same and I've no interest I've no drive to go and do that I want to see a bit of innovation in the motorbike world which would not see him but even as I love with a push bike like what hope got banned what hope built for the belladromes oh yeah yeah that was a bit of innovation wasn't it i love that yeah but you know in a way cycling suffers not dissimilarly to how you just outline motorbike racing in as much as you've got the uci which govern how bikes there's a rule book about what a bike can be you know there's literally sort of uh theoretical boxes that frames have to fit in so that their proportions of this and that and the tube shapes they've relaxed some of the rules around tube shapes they used to have have to have a certain ratio of i can't remember it was one to four or something now they can make them deeper and narrower so their bikes are becoming a bit more aero again but ultimately they won't the uci won't ditch the double diamond or triple diamond however you want to kind of describe it typical bike frame because it's traditional and road racing is just steeped in tradition whereas mountain biking is completely different and i look across and see, I've got a bike to my right or your left, which is a road race bike, 3D printed lugs, carbon tubes, semi-aero, best of the best on it.

1:08:56It's 20 grand, right? It's insane. It's 20 ,000 pounds. And if you look at what you can buy for 20 grand in a mountain bike, it would just be phenomenal. I'm not even sure if, I'm sure, I don't know enough about it. I bet there are mountain bikes at 20 grand, but your average road bike that's like eight or 10 grand for top end, a mountain bike has so much more tech in it or like a motorbike has so much more tech in it and it's something to do with the way that the rules just prevent things from changing all that much and so they have to develop other elaborate ways to create margins on products and create desire for them because they're all kind of really doing the same thing two wheels and some gears and then you pedal it yeah yeah like the pushback thing with the introduction of 29 inch and now we're talking about 32 inch and then but 26 inch you watch there'll be five years down the road we're talking about 26 inch again and there'll be a resurrection of that you know what I mean but I'm not allowed I just want the tool to do a job really yeah well yeah except for the hope stuff you know what I mean I love yeah well guys thank you so much absolutely time to end I could chat to you all day and I'll yeah stick some more info in our show notes and stuff about the book but all the medals have been handed out it's guys need book do read it it's fantastic there's loads of stuff about cycling in there but there's also way more exciting stories about other stuff because let's face it from your point of view bikes are exciting from my point of view and listeners we like to hear other things that aren't about bikes so do pick that up um it'll be out in uh it'll be out when this comes out so yeah jen's you're a bloody staff thanks very much so guy martin ladies and gents i've got no one to talk to about this now normally will and i do a little chat, don't we, and go, oh, what was your favorite bit, Will?

1:10:43And Will goes, oh, I don't know. I like that bit. And I go, yeah, I quite like that other bit. And then we sort of put something really tenuous in there that we may or may not have thought about earlier on. And then when we actually do it, it doesn't sound as good as we think it's going to. And then we just delete it and you never hear any of it. But this bit you are going to hear. I'm going to leave it in because I've got bigger fish to fry, unfortunately, like writing some deadlines for our brilliant magazine. We are a magazine. Of course, we're a magazine. We couldn't just be a podcast. It would never work just as being a podcast.

1:11:12Cyclist, lovely paper product that is. No AI. There is no AI in Cyclist. There is no AI in Cyclist. There is just an I in Cyclist, and that comes at the end. It's a wonderful magazine. I love it to pieces. I've been doing it for 14 years now, and I wouldn't still be doing it for 14 years unless I thought it was genuinely really good. Do pick it up. I think most of you will know all about it. But if you haven't, we are in Smiths. We are in Sainsbury's. We are in Tesco. We are in all the places you can still buy magazines. And I think once you buy one, you're going to have to subscribe. So hit us up, come to cyclist.co.uk where you can subscribe easily, or you can subscribe on behalf of somebody else.

1:11:51We do make an excellent gift if we say so ourselves. And I would just like to say, yes, that is me on the cover of the most recent issue where I go to Gran Canaria and ride up the Serenity Climb, which if nothing else, from the words I've just gabbled at you, go to Gran Canaria and ride up the Serenity Climb. It is nothing short of spectacular as is riding in Gran Canaria. So I am there to tell you all about it, as are a bunch of our talented freelancers and many of my lovely colleagues. This just leaves me one more thing to say, which is we also, we get out and about at cyclists. Yes, we do. We have the cyclist track days, which are a bit like car track days.

1:12:32you go and drive really nice cars around a track, you can come and drive, drive, cycle really lovely bicycles around a track. We had last year bikes from Cannondale, Condor, Pearson, Ridley, Scott, Ridley Scott. That's why Scott's called Scott, by the way. It was named after Ridley Scott and there they are, two brands. They're separate. Specialized, Trek, Van Riesel, more to be confirmed in the coming weeks. All you have to do is get a ticket, come down to one of the tracks. tickets are from as little as£12 if you're a subscriber or£18 for a full day and we will be on the uh the 9th of May Saturday the 9th of May we'll be at Lee Valley Velo Park uh in London uh Sunday the 10th of May we will also still be at Lee Valley Velo Park are we going to sleep in the velo drone that's what it's called isn't it that word just about came to me I don't know maybe we'll camp out in the middle and um you know talk about bikes uh then Sunday the 6th of June at the Brownlee Center, named after those brothers, of course, in Leeds.

1:13:33And then new, new, new, new for 2026, the Cyclist Gravel Track Day, which will be on Sunday, the 21st of June, aka Father's Day, aka Hearn Hill, aka get your dad a ticket, or your mum, or your brother, or anyone you know who may or may not be a dad, but just is interested in gravel bikes, doesn't know which one to pick, wants to come down and test out a bunch, or just wants to come down and ride some cool bikes and hang out with other people who want to ride cool bikes and want to talk about cool bikes. So that's new for 2026. And we also have the Cycling Electric, which is our lovely sister company.

1:14:12Can you hear me typing? We have tickets for the 2026 events. One has just passed, but I believe it was very successful at the Lee Valley Velo Park again. We've got another one. So this is the cycling electric. So come and try electric bikes, cargo bikes, hybrid bikes, gravel bikes, road bikes. If it's got an E and it's a bike, it's going to be there. The Brownlee Centre, that's those brothers Brownlee again, on Sunday, the 7th of June. Bath, the odd down circuit, oddly named, but a great circuit to cycle around on the 14th of June. And then at London's Herne Hill Velodrome on the 5th of July. That's a lot of dates I've just given you.

1:14:52It's the end of the show and it was a long one. You will have forgotten all of it. So I'll put these in the show notes. But if you're still listening, also just Google. You've used Google before. Cycling Electric, Demo Days, Cyclist Magazine, Track Days. All the dates are there. We'd love to have you. I even go down myself so you can meet me and you can tell me how little you enjoyed listening to all of this outro because Will was not in it and it was kind of try because I was just advertising other stuff we do. But trust me, these things are really good. I wouldn't talk about them if they weren't.

1:15:24I wouldn't do them if they weren't. I think I'll enjoy them too. Anyway, thanks for sticking with me and I shall be back in a couple of weeks, hopefully with Will, hopefully with Robin, for another stellar guest and hopefully another fantastic show of the Cyclist Magazine podcast. So, toodly.

1:15:46Hello, lovely listeners. I just wanted to tell you that Cyclist isn't just a podcast. No, Cyclist is also a beautiful print magazine. It's packed full of all the best rides from around the world, the newest bikes and kit, and loads of in-depth articles featuring guests just like on today's show. So head on over to cyclist.co.uk slash subscriptions and check out our latest cyclist magazine subscription offers.