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Throughout his career, Lachlan Morton – among the world’s pre-eminent ultra-endurance cyclists – has spent some long days on the bike. The Australian has raced the Vuelta a España and Giro d’Italia, ridden from Land’s End to John o’Groats in the United Kingdom, and last year spent a month riding 14,200km around Australia.
But no single day has compared to an effort last month, beginning at 4.09am in Wellington, New Zealand and ending 18 and a half hours later in Auckland. Covering the 648km from the New Zealand capital to its biggest city in less than a day, the Australian cyclist made history.
It started with a phone call. In August last year, Morton was chatting with a Kiwi friend, Hayden McCormick, when McCormick recounted an important figure in his own cycling career. McCormick explained how his first cycling coach, Brian Fleck, had set the Auckland-Wellington record in 1983 across 20 hours on the bike.
“As he was telling me about it, I was trying to wrap my head around how fast he’d done it, at that period of time,” Morton tells Guardian Australia.
“It seemed like an amazing record, and it was incredible no one really knew about it. So that sparked an interest, and we slowly plotted – finding a time to go and have a crack at it. One it was interesting to see if I could do it quicker, but the main reason was to celebrate the ride he’d done all those years before.”
Fleck’s achievement was remarkable. The New Zealander was in his 40s at the time, employed as a post office worker, and trained before and after work for a year in preparation. He completed the ride on a steel bike, with intermittent time checks from a support van.
“Considering the context – equipment at the time, and the fact he was a 43-year-old with a full-time job,” Morton marvels in a short film that recounts the Wellington to Auckland ride.
“Even disregarding the context, this was a ride that was bigger than local folklore, it was a ride that should have been known internationally.’
And so, in January, Morton set off from the Wellington darkness on a mission to make it to Auckland, at the other end of New Zealand’s North Island, before the end of the day. In honouring Fleck’s record, Morton and his support team – the Australian rides for World Tour team EF Pro Cycling – minimised reliance on modern advancements.
“We wanted to replicate the same conditions as best as possible,” he says. “Obviously modern equipment is significantly better, but we weren’t dialling in all the nutrition, doing all the one percenters, it was more just trying to get on the road and have a crack at it and see where that got us.” Morton also met with Fleck beforehand, to hear his insight and pay tribute to the record-holder.
From 4.09am onwards, it was just Morton and his bike against the clock. “It was a huge day out,” he admits. “If you quantified it in terms of pure energy output on a single ride, it was probably the highest [I’ve ever done]. It was 18 and a half hours of full focus.”
As Morton approached Auckland, he was making good time – having only stopped once, for barely a minute. Then the headwinds hit, with 200km remaining.
“That was really challenging,” he says. “It combined right with when the fatigue really set in. I guess [it was] different in that it was just a single day – so it wasn’t about saving some energy for the next day, dishing it out over a longer period, like Australia, but just leaving it all out there on one day.”
Morton dug deep, cheered on by his support crew in a trailing van, and ultimately reached the finish at 10.36pm, 18 hours and 28 minutes after leaving Wellington – an hour and a half faster than Fleck’s time. “This isn’t just chasing a new record,” the cyclist says in the short film, “it’s chasing a legend – attempting to bring the past into the present.”
Morton’s achievement is all the more astonishing given it came just months after he completed his record-breaking journey around Australia. The cyclist took barely two weeks off after finishing the loop around mainland Australia in October, before beginning to build towards his New Zealand endeavour. “It wasn’t a huge amount of downtime, to be honest,” he concedes.
This weekend, Morton begins a bikepacking race in Colombia, starting in Bogotá and heading through the coffee-growing country towards Medellín. It is the beginning of a season-long calendar of globe-trotting racing.
“It’s a big season,” the 33-year-old says. “This is the start of a whole whirlwind of racing. The idea is to explore new races for me, new frontiers in cycling, the sport is growing rapidly and there are a bunch of different events popping up all over the world. That’s the challenge this year – to race as well as I can all over the globe, and experience all the countries, people and cultures that come along with that.”
A big year ahead for Morton – although at least his toughest single day on the bike, 18 and a half hours from Wellington to Auckland, is now behind him.
