The amazing hour record feats of 105-year-old Robert Marchand got us thinking about our own, far from amazing attempt a couple of years ago...
It's perhaps the purest challenge in cycling. The Hour is man and machine versus the clock. It’s 60 minutes of unremitting agony, where there’s no hiding place, no opponent to blame and little consolation in defeat. It attracts obsessives, fanatics and masochists, demanding from each blood, sweat and tears. It requires days in the wind tunnel and weeks on the track, yet it all boils down to a singular, solitary hour that will surely be the worst of their lives.
Former professional racer Jens Voigt knows it, so too do WorldTour pros Matthias Brändle and Rohan Dennis. Britain’s Alex Dowsett is the latest record holder, having surpassed Dennis in Manchester at the beginning of May with 52.937km, but Sir Bradley Wiggins will be gunning for it in London on 7 June.
It’s not been a procession to the record, some have fallen short. Dame Sarah Storey chased the women’s record, but fell two laps short of the 46.065km benchmark, and Jack Bobridge called the final stages of his attempt "the closest to death I will ever be before actually dying".
Amateurs are getting involved too, guys like Australian Nick Bensley, who, in falling just over 4km shy of Dowsett with a remarkable, non-sanctioned 48.275km, wanted to compare his own level against the very best in his sport. Sacrifices are made, devotion to their sport taken to new levels, all in the name of going as far as they can round a wooden bowl in one hour.
And then we rolled up at Newport to have a go. Again, new benchmarks would be set. Sadly for us, they’d be new benchmarks in slapdash.
Sweet Dreams
“Bradley Wiggins has got sports science, I’ve got Skittles,” says editor Rob, flinging the sum of our Hour 'nutrition’ onto a highly dubious pile where a bag of Haribo Starmix would be considered the healthy option.
Okay, so I won’t pretend this was any sort of revelatory moment where we realised we were out of our depth. At this moment, Rohan Dennis was the man to beat at 52.491km and we weren’t getting anywhere close. We’d sacrificed nothing – not the bottles of Peroni at the works do the night before, nor the bacon butties at the train station earlier that morning.
Our goal now was simply to put the efforts of the pros into some kind of perspective, to show the superhuman powers these guys have to ride over 50kph for an hour and how us mere mortals pale in comparison. That we could do.
In our planning – a word I use very loosely – we’d decided, this being Cycling Plus, that we wanted to have a bit of fun with it. Had one of us attempted it on our own, we would have fallen well short and in all honesty it would have been a bit dull. But what if we rode with multiple members? How far could we get? So we put together a team of three: myself, editor Rob and deputy editor Paul. Six legs have to be better than two, right?
Then we had to decide how. Would a team pursuit give us more distance over a relay? Almost certainly not. How long should each rider’s stint on the track be? Five minutes? Ten? How should we ‘pass the baton’? With a Madison sling? (The resting rider drops back on the outside of the racing rider, with their right arm on the drops ready to race. Their left arm is off the bar and they place it out to their side for the racing rider to grab. The resting rider then drops further back and transfers their weight forward to get a sling away to begin their effort.) That seemed a bit ambitious for three guys with a combined lifetime track experience of five hours. A relay of three seemed like the best bet to get close to one bloke on his own.
Our balloon was popped from across the office by new Procycling magazine editor Ed Pickering, a man who learnt a thing or two about this Hour malarkey writing The Race Against Time, the story of the Chris Boardman-Graeme Obree battle in the 1990s. It turns out the slowest time of Rohan Dennis was 17.88 seconds, aside from his opening standard start lap of 23.63. New record holder Dowsett was even faster. Once he got up to speed over his opening four laps, he hovered consistently around the 17-second flat mark. In the final 10 minutes,
he was consistently riding laps of 16.6 seconds.
It took me back to a flying lap I did in Manchester a few years ago, during my first experience of track riding. This involved a steady half a lap on the blue line, riding to the top of the banking into the home straight and swooping down to the line and launching into a single eyeballs-out lap. I don’t remember the time exactly, but I believe it was closer to their opening laps than any of their others. We didn’t have a hope in hell.
Mekk Our Day
“You’d better not have promised the guys at Mekk that we were going to make their bikes look good.”
Rob, it seems, thinks even less of our chances than I do. Bike brands normally team up with cyclists to bolster their image by association with winners, but the best you could say here was that Mekk, whose Pista T1 bikes we’d borrowed for the day, was clinging to the idea of all publicity being good publicity.
A coach needs to be present to supervise when you ride on the track and ours is Garrie Tillett, who runs the velodrome day-to-day. A track man through and through, Garrie has been thrilled at the response the revitalised Hour record has had on participation numbers at the track, particularly on the age group Hour records, attainable targets for those willing to put in the training. Last November Mike Cotgreave broke the 70-74 age group record on this very track.
It takes Garrie a while to cotton on to what we’re trying to do – for a time he thought we were here for a serious record attempt. You couldn’t blame him. We didn’t have much of a clue either.
His advice is for us to do stints of 10 minutes each, before passing on to the next rider. Five minutes would give us more speed, but the added number of handovers would cause chaos. We’d also get more rhythm with 10.
First up are the flying laps. Using Dennis as a reference, his slowest of 17.88 seconds was on his 208th and penultimate lap. Despite giving it our all, I am the only one to beat it, and then only just, with 17.63 seconds. It’s hardly motivation for the main event.
There are caveats to this. We don’t have any aero helmets or TT bars – both massive in the Hour – nor do we have much help from our gears: our 49x15, compared with Dennis’s monstrous 56x14, sees us spinning out in that flying lap. Still, 17.88 seconds or more for 209 laps, whatever gear you have, is mind-blowing.
Then we have to work out the best way to switch riders at the end of every effort. Garrie initially encourages the Madison sling, but we find it a difficult skill to grasp in the short amount of time we have. It’s tricky to learn on the flat at crawling pace; on the track at speed it’s impossible. Towards the end of this practice, and the point where we realise we need to think of something else, I attempt a sling with Rob that ends up with us holding hands. A pretty embarrassing moment to have with your boss, I’m sure you’ll agree, and one I can only hope gets forgotten in time for my next job appraisal.
Split Seconds
At this point in a story I’d work hard to ramp up the drama, to make us out to be a bunch of plucky underdogs fighting hard against the odds. But that would be overstating things.
Of course, we’re behind from the very first pedal stroke. Rob, up first, stretches the idea of negative splits to their limit by apparently using his opening 10 minutes as a loosener for his second. He unclips after 6km, already 2.75km behind the rampant, invisible Dennis. “I’m not sure I went hard enough,” he says, and in giving away over a lap every minute to Dennis he has a point.
But we do give it a good go. Paul picks up the pace with 27 laps in his 10, I match him, and Rob ups his game for his second stint.
When our time’s up, our total number of laps – 155 plus 100m – add up to 38.85km, a pitiful figure later greeted with cackles of laughter by colleagues on our return to the office. Deserved, perhaps, when you realise Dennis on his own covered that distance with 16 minutes to spare.
To see us sitting in reception afterwards waiting for the taxi, coughing and wheezing like we each have a 40-a-day fag habit, shows how hard we’d worked. We had given it a good go – we got dizzy, saw stars and dry heaved – yet we were still way, way behind the eight ball.
As we learned on the day, there are some unique elements to the Hour, as opposed to, say, a 25-mile time trial on the road, chief among them that you aren’t allowed a water bottle on the boards. Ten minutes was long enough in the dry, airless velodrome to get horrible dry mouth, another 50 would have been unbearable.
There’s a skill level, too, which gets lost in the mix of such a physically demanding challenge. Because the distance of the Hour is measured in laps, you need to stick to the black team pursuit line, the line that adds up to a 250m lap. Stray onto the red line and you’re adding a wasted 8m each lap – over a kilometre in the course of the current Hour record distance. In the vice of fatigue, we found out just how difficult this is.
We left as much as we could muster on the track. There wasn’t much cheer to motivate us from the stands – tumbleweeds could be seen drifting through the seating areas – but trackside the whooping and wailing of the resting riders pushed us to our limits.
“You always tell yourself after you’ve finished that you maybe could have gone a bit harder, and in this case a bit further,” says Paul. “But we didn’t hold much back and we shouldn’t kid ourselves that we did.”
Actually, our distance would have been good enough to set the record once upon a time. But that was in 1894, which isn’t much to brag about.
It’s not just the world record where we can see how far we’ve come up short. Last November, on the very same Newport track, Manchester’s Mike Cotgreave, mentioned earlier, at 70, rode 41.25km, a full 10 laps further than three Cycling Plus staffers in their apparent prime could manage.
Have a Go
You only have to rewind a couple of decades to find a time when Britain didn't have a single indoor, Olympic sized velodrome. Now we’re spoilt for choice, with tracks in London, Manchester, Newport, Glasgow and most recently Derby. It’s never been easier for a spin on the boards. Newport, where we rode, is committed to giving the track to Welsh Cycling three mornings a week, but almost every other time it’s open to everyone to hire out. It’s £81 an hour to book out the whole track, plus £25/hour for a qualified coach, which is essential unless you bring your own. All the tracks in the UK have taster sessions for newcomers, which in London, for example, cost £35/hour, and bikes to hire.
This article originally appeared in the July 2015 issue of Cycling Plus magazine. To see our current subscription offers, head here: tinyurl.com/hpk33el
