bike

Thirty Days to Cycle Around Australia!

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From road.cc

450km a day, sweltering heat and headwinds, and dodging kangaroos and truck drivers: Lachlan Morton completes epic 14,210km lap of Australia by bike in 30 days and 10 hours – over a week faster than previous record

“Trying to complete the route and also not get run over was a challenge in itself”

by Ryan Mallon

Sat, Oct 05, 2024 14:26

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30 days, nine hours, and 59 minutes – and 14,210km – after rolling out of Port Macquarie, Lachlan Morton arrived back in his hometown at 1.54pm local time on Saturday afternoon, having completed the fastest known lap of Australia by bike.

The EF Education-EasyPost pro averaged a staggering 450km a day to set the Around Australia record, pending verification from the official arbiters of such things, beating the previous mark by over a week, after battling sweltering heat, brutal headwinds and rain, and the usual dangers on the road (close passing lorry drivers), along with the not-so-usual (kangaroos and snakes).

The record is the latest mammoth ultra-cycling feat for the 32-year-old, who in recent years has ditched the rigours of the WorldTour for a more varied, off-beat racing and riding schedule, winning Unbound Gravel in June and completing similar solo tours in the past.

These have included his ‘Alt Tour’ in 2021, which saw him ride every stage of that year’s Tour de France (plus transfers, and sometimes in sandals) ahead of the peloton, clocking 5,509km in 18 days, while he also covered 1,000km non-stop in a fundraising ride for Ukraine in 2022.

Lachlan Morton on unreleased Cannondale 2 - EF Pro Cycling

(Karter Machen/EF Education-EasyPost)

To qualify for the Around Australia record, the country’s most prestigious cycling distance record, first set in 1899, Morton had to cover at least 14,200km and pass through six of the following cities and towns: Adelaide, Brisbane, Broome, Darwin, Esperance, Melbourne, Perth, and Sydney. The rest of the route was left up to him, and he was also permitted to bring a support crew of hardy friends and family along for the ride.

Before his homecoming in Port Macquarie this afternoon, the previous record, as certified by the Road Record Association of Australia, stood at 37 days, 20 hours, and 45 minutes, set in 2011 by Brisbane-based Dave Alley. However, another time of 37 days, one hour, and 18 minutes, courtesy of Reid Anderton, is credited by Guinness World Records, though Anderton’s lap covered 14,178km, falling short of the RRA’s minimum distance.

In any case, once all the paperwork is completed, Morton’s time will certainly put that particular debate to rest, with his time of 30 days, nine hours, and 59 minutes for the 14,210km loop blowing those previous marks out of the water by around a week.

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Lachlan Morton on unreleased Cannondale - EF Pro Cycling

> “Not ideal, but it happens”: Lachlan Morton wakes up “drenched in sweat” and vomits up breakfast – but still manages to compete 500km in one day during Lap of Australia attempt

Along the way, the 32-year-old was forced to endure long, hot days in the saddle on even longer, dead-straight roads in the outback, speed-debilitating headwinds, bouts of nausea and sickness, sleepless, sweat-drenched nights, and plenty of 500km and 600km, 16-hour-long epic days on the bike.

Despite the seemingly never-ending torture of it all, Morton did find time three weeks into his ride to pull over and help an injured bird by the roadside, though that wasn’t his only encounter with Australia’s wildlife.

During one nighttime ride, he collided with a kangaroo that had leapt on the road, almost sending him over his handlebars, while he also spent a day dodging snakes on southern Australia’s Nullabor Plain.

Lachlan Morton, Lap of Australia attempt (Karter Machen/EF Education-EasyPost)

(Karter Machen/EF Education-EasyPost)

Animals were the least of his worries, however. On the 25th day of his ride, Morton was forced to “bail off the side of the road” after an oncoming lorry driver close passed him – a startlingly frequent sight on Australia’s roads that forced the EF pro to eventually eschew the continent’s faster, more dangerous roads and seek out some quieter gravel trails.

> “The truck driver actually tried to kill me”: Lachlan Morton forced to “bail off the side of the road” as lorry driver “kept going directly at me” and “didn’t move his truck one inch” during monster ‘Lap of Australia’ effort

“I just had the first truck driver actually try and kill me,” Morton said on his daily Instagram video following that particularly bad close pass.

“He just kept driving directly at me, until I realised he wasn’t going to move. So I bailed off the side of the road. He didn’t even flinch, didn’t move his truck one inch.

“All good things come to an end, but the trucks seemed to have quieted down a bit… Basically I just get off the road when they come. There’s no shoulder and it’s just not worth taking the risk.”

Lachlan Morton, Lap of Australia attempt (Karter Machen/EF Education-EasyPost)

(Karter Machen/EF Education-EasyPost)

“Trying to complete the route and also not get run over, it’s been a challenge in itself, for sure,” Morton told CNN(link is external) towards the end of his ride this week.

“Rainy days, big, long headwind days – I think mentally they’re probably the most challenging. You’re going to spend 17 or 18 hours just pedalling in one direction straight into the wind, which is quite maddening, to be honest.

Read the rest of the article here

Rescue Plan

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It was a perfect morning for bike riding, as so many of them have been lately.

It was a Saturday morning, and I was nearly home after a 40 km ride that took me down the Kamilaroi Highway to Turrawan, across the Tariaro Bridge and back along the Old Gunnedah Road. Whenever I take this route, I stop at the bridge and admire the beauty of God’s creation.

Less than 2 kilometres from home, I noticed that the back tyre felt soft, and a minute later it was clear that there was no air in the tyre at all. The greatest hazard a cyclist faces is a puncture in the middle of a ride.

Without a second thought, I called my wife, who jumped into the car and came to rescue me. I was thankful that it was only a 2 km ride home and not a 20 or 30 km ride.

A couple of days later, the inner tube was replaced, and I was back in business.

My need to be rescued reminded me of an even greater need that we have.

Our tendency to run our own lives our own way is described by the Bible as “sin.” Our lives work best when we live God’s way, but we all want to do things our own way, regardless of the cost to ourselves or other people.

Sin separates us from God. It destroys the relationship that we have been created for. We can’t fix it on our own abilities.

But God initiated His own rescue plan, by sending Jesus into the world to pay the penalty for our sin. The most famous verse in the Bible reminds us: “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”

If you are finding that your life is about as much fun as a bike with a flat tyre, why don’t you ask God to take control? Say “Sorry” to God and ask Him to lead you to a church where you can learn to live God’s way.

Out of Alignment

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Scrape! Crunch! It happened again, and at the worst possible time.

I was on my bike, pedalling around the corner on to the bridge, and the chain had come off the front cog. As cars and trucks approached, I quickly discovered that the safety fence was for me a danger fence, trapping me on the road. I quickly walked my bike back around the corner and managed to get to safety before any B-Double truck squashed me.

The problem was that the mechanism that pushes the chain from one gear to the other had got out of alignment, allowing the chain to go past the cog. Instead of smooth, silent travel, you get a noise and then nothing.

Having a chain out of alignment on a bike is not a big problem. It is inconvenient and annoying and takes a few seconds to fix, leaving you with dirty fingers. Adjusting a cable solves the problem for good.

When your life is out of alignment, there is a much bigger problem.

Most people are familiar with the story of Adam and Eve. They were created perfect and placed in a beautiful garden. God told them they could eat any fruit except the fruit of one tree. The inevitable happened and they were tossed out of the garden. What happened later is shocking. Their eldest son Cain killed his younger brother Abel.

Perfection to murder in a generation, and all because people had come out of alignment with God’s purposes. We see the ongoing consequences of this everywhere we look in the world.

How do we get back into alignment with God? You can’t fix the world, but you can fix you. Read the Bible and see how Jesus lived. Ask God to change your heart. Let God’s Spirit spark in you a desire for you to worship Him and obey Him. Join up with a group of believers, often called a church, to find out how other people follow Jesus.

Not as simple as adjusting a bike, but certainly worth the effort for a better life.

A Long Way On My Bike

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According to Map My Ride, I have now completed 600 rides in the last 4 years and 8 months. There are also a few that didn’t get saved.

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The distance of 14265 km is roughly equivalent to riding from Sydney to Perth and back again- twice. Further than Narrabri to Calgary (13000 km) but not quite as far as Narrabri to London- much drier than either, as I haven’t had to ride under water.

The energy I have burnt off is equivalent to 1186 Big Macs- that works out to 2 Big Macs per ride!

I never set out to ride a big distance, just to keep fit and have fun a few days a week. All of which shows that putting in a little effort every day adds up to big results.

 

 

Bikes As Teleportation Devices

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From peopleforbikes.org

BICYCLES ARE INSTANTANEOUS TELEPORTATION DEVICES, SAYS SCIENCE

April 26, 2016

Michael Andersen, Green Lane Project staff writer


On the Indianapolis Cultural Trail.

Sorry, I don’t have time to use the car to get there. That’d take too long — I’d better bike instead.

No, I don’t mean “biking saves you money and time is money.” I mean biking actually saves you time.

No, I don’t just mean during rush hour. Sure, everybody knows that in a city during rush hour, bicyclesusually travel faster than cars. No, I mean biking is always more time-efficient than driving.

In fact, a study released last year found that riding a bicycle transports you from place to placeinstantaneously. As in, it takes no time at all.

Stay with me.

Naturally, this study came out of the University of Utrecht. Utrecht is a Dutch city that’s about the size of Wichita, with the minor difference that about half of all trips of five miles or less in the city happen on bicycles. That means that the Utrecht scientists had really good data to analyze. They studied the habits of 50,000 Dutch people, most of whom rode bicycles for various amounts of time each day, over the course of many years.


Utrecht. Photo: Jonathan Maus/BikePortland, used with permission.

Here’s what the study found: for every additional 75 minutes a week that you spend on a bike (that is, for every 11 minutes per day) you generally increase your lifespan by six months.

This isn’t super surprising in principle. Virtually every scientific study of what makes us healthy is just a complicated way of saying one of two things that we all already know: (1) don’t eat much junk food and (2) get your heart beating for a little bit each day, the more the better. Maybe that’s why this study didn’t get wall-to-wall coverage when it came out in 2015: it seemed obvious.

But the longer you think about this finding, the more interesting it becomes.

Eleven minutes per day. That’d be 3,906 minutes per year. Over the course of, say, 70 years, it’s 273,385 minutes.

Which comes out to … six months.

Which is exactly the amount of extra lifespan that these scientists discovered that 11 more minutes of biking per day will give you. Which means…

Woah.

Every minute you spend on a bicycle increases your lifespan by one minute.

I don’t know about you, but in my case I know that riding a bicycle also makes me happier. The first day I rode a bike to work, I could feel the endorphins tingling appreciatively in my elbows.

But when I’m deciding whether to go somewhere on a bike, I still find myself weighing that happiness against time. Can I afford those extra 10 minutes? I could spend those 10 minutes writing emails, or finally organizing my desk, or just relaxing with Facebook.

But those things don’t actually make me happy. (OK, having a clean desk does, but we both know I’m not actually going to do that.) And one thing is for sure: those minutes don’t come back.

When you think about it, this study means that any time you spend on a bicycle is literally free time.Every minute you spend is coming back to you. Because bicycling is going to give you back all the time you invested, there’s no net time lost.

Which is why, if you do the math, a bicycle is basically a teleporter.

A teleporter that makes you happy.

Saves you money, too.

 

Beam me up, Scotty.

The Ultimate Weapon Revealed

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It’s magpie season in Australia, when highly intelligent and normally friendly birds suddenly turn feral and swoop on unsuspecting humans, sometimes quite viciously.

It seems that people wearing helmets are at a higher risk of attack than pedestrians. We have a friendly maggie that hangs around our house, but the other day he repeatedly made a lot of noise and did some fly-bys when I was standing on the driveway preparing to go riding. At the other end of the bridge we have what Tim calls the psychopath magpie which swoops like a stealth bomber, silently approaching and then hitting the side or back of the helmet.

Since both of these birds are quite tolerant of pedestrians, it made me wonder if the helmet is the problem. It might be that the shape and shininess of a helmet  makes a cyclist appear bigger and more threatening than a pedestrian.

We tested the hypothesis by strapping a clown wig to my helmet. If you are going to do science you might as well look amusing.

With great trepidation, and feeling somewhat silly, I mounted the pushie and headed out. The first magpie did not make its presence felt at all which was good. Then I headed over the bridge into the territory of psycho. I saw it sitting on a low fence at the end of the bridge. It took off and flew some distance behind me and then attempted the swoop. As far as I can tell, it did not approach very closely and there was certainly no impact. Winner!

On the return trip I experienced a similar result.

There are a couple of other magpies on the Old Gunnedah Road, but neither  came close enough to cause me any distress.

So artificial hair on the helmet does seem to make a positive difference. Whether the magpies will resume their previous aggression remains to be seen.

The one downside is that the wig stops the ventilation in the helmet so you wouldn’t want to do this on a hot day. Hopefully they will stop swooping before the weather gets too hot.

UPDATE:

My optimism about the hairy helmet was short lived. The second day I tried it, the magpies had worked out there was a helmet under the wig. However on the way home, I started to pray as I approached each magpie territory and it seemed quite effective.

Kevlar Tyres!

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It’s burr season in Narrabri- no it’s not cold. We have a unique ecology of plants which produce various kinds of thorny seeds which find their way into feet and tyres. Your average road bike is configured for lightness and speed, including narrow wheels and thin tyres with minimal tread. Apparently they also have some kind of magnetic device which sucks burrs from the roadside right into the wheels.

Traditionally the answer to this has been to insert rubbery goo into the inner tube which seals up small holes as they form. Unfortunately the Presta valves in high pressure tubes do not allow this to be done easily.

So last week, having had yet another puncture, I investigated puncture resistant tyres. I found these:

Schwalbe make hundreds of different tyres for almost any type of bike riding situation. Each style is given a rating for speed, friction, puncture resistance, and some for snake-bite resistance.Many, including the ones I bought, feature a solid band of a special rubber which is resistant to punctures, even a thumb tack cannot penetrate this layer.

I ordered a pair last weekend and when we got home last night discovered them waiting for me. After dinner I decided to tackle them- just  a half hour job, I thought.

After an hour of trying to wrestle the first one into submission I was ready to give up. Tim and Margaret then came to my aid. It apparently takes 3 pairs of hands to hold the tyre in place on the rim as you progressively push it on. With three of us, it only took about half an hour to do the job.

I’m hoping that they live up to the advertising. I don’t want to go through that again to fix a flat tyre that shouldn’t happen. Tim tells me that since he put his on, he hasn’t had a single puncture.

We’ll see! I won’t be aiming at any brown snakes , even if the tyres are supposed to be tough enough to stop them!

Dreams Deferred

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About a month ago, I wrote about an opportunity to join a charity ride on the Great Ocean Road with 25000 spins. The ride is happening in February 2015.

I decided this a morning that I’m deferring participating in this for 12 months. It’s a bit crazy when I wake up with a sick feeling in my stomach from the anxiety of doing something  that I want to do!

Physically, I think I could be up to it, certainly getting there by February. Last weekend I did a 53 km ride with no ill effects, so the idea of working up to 100 km in a day is really no problem.

I think I was starting to put too much pressure on myself in a way that isn’t good for me.

So The Great Ocean Road is now in the 2016 bucket. I’m going to sign up early and give myself lots of time to prepare and fund raise.

In the meantime I hear there is a thing called Bike For Bibles in April.