- Sean Conway – racing round the world
For many of the non-cyclists in my life – family, friends, work colleagues – some of the stuff I do on a bicycle seems a bit daft. Indeed probably to some cyclists as well. To take a couple of examples: riding the queen stage of the 2010 Transalp, including the Mortirolo, while suffering from a stomach bug that meant I hadn’t digested anything since the previous day’s stage; or doing 24hr solo races, one of them 10 weeks after breaking a collarbone in the 2011 Absa Cape Epic; or doing 75 mile training rides on a singlespeed MTB. In fact for some people, just riding to work in London every day in all weathers is beyond the pale.
Come to think of it, even many of my cyclist friends would consider some of those things to be fairly daft.
So it is good for some of this to be put into perspective by someone who redefines “bonkers”. I had the pleasure of being joined on a training ride recently by a friend of a friend by the name of Sean Conway, who on February 18th is setting off to race around the world. That’s race, notice, not ‘just’ ride.
The ride / race round the world seems to have attracted a bit more attention in recent years. In 2008, a Scotsman called Mark Beaumont established a new record for the 18,000 miles, of just under 200 days. Fairly shortly thereafter, an Englishman by the name of James Bowthorpe took some more days off the record. And then in 2010, yet another Brit, Vin Cox, set a new record of an astonishing 163 days. It doesn’t take much maths to work out that that means riding an average of 110 miles a day, every day, not taking into account rest, for those 163 days.
Not satisfied with this though, Cox has now set up a race round the world – http://www.greatbikeride.com/globalbicyclerace/index.htm. Riders have to complete 18,000 miles, travelling in broadly the same direction round the world, and they are all starting on the same day, from London.
Breaking the record will clearly require a pretty exceptional ride, drawing on tremendous reserves of physical and mental strength, as well as excellent logistics and planning.
Sean and I rode a fairly rapid 100 miles, out of London to the west and back again, and I can verify that he is highly capable of doing that. I also suspect, just from spending those few hours with him, that he has got the mental toughness which it seems to me must be the biggest requirement in doing something like this.
Just thinking about what he will be doing makes my eyes water: after two big days in the saddle over the weekend in question, I spent the whole of Monday back at work only able to think about food or sleep, and certainly unable to contemplate training. My training for the Absa Cape Epic was also put into perspective by the fact that a couple of days later, Sean was “off for a training ride” – the difference between this and most people’s training rides being that Sean’s was going to be 250 miles.
River crossings not part of the plan...
Sean is racing for the record, but also to raise awareness and funds for a great cause – http://solar-aid.org/, which aims to bring clean, renewable energy to the poorest people around the world.
You can follow Sean http://cyclingtheearth.co.uk/, or on https://twitter.com/#!/Conway_Sean.
Come on MarathonMTBers, get behind Sean!