- Hopefully, you'll have seen by now mine and Mark's
ride around the North Coast 500 in Scotland.
Don't let us know the ending yet, we don't know,
because we haven't finished and, quite frankly,
I'm not entirely sure whether we're gonna make it.
But anyway, whilst we've been cruising along,
on this incredible stretch of road,
we thought it would be a great opportunity
to actually talk to Mark, and find out
some of his ultra endurance tips.
So, probably a bit late for me now,
given that we're nearly all the way around.
- I dunno, I think you've got it in you.
(dramatic orchestral music)
Ultimately ultra endurance is your ability to suffer.
Just doing long lines, believe it or not,
doesn't actually set you up particularly well
to ride or race ultra.
Physically, it's amazing what the body can suffer,
if the head can just stop freaking out about it.
(steady guitar music)
- So what would your golden tips be then,
for someone that perhaps is comfortable with road cycling,
they've done sportives, Gran Fondos, races,
but to then, transition over to those ultra distances?
- So, if you're doing, certainly multi day rides,
but you're not racing,
I mean, I would encourage anyone who's riding big distances
for the first time not to enter a race,
just to go out there and try
and push themselves over distance.
So, your setup on the bike's gonna be a bit different.
Don't try and be too much of a race snake.
Your positioning on your bike,
your form on the bike is absolutely crucial,
so, if you've got a really slammed front end,
if you're used to going out with your mates on the weekend
on a really aggressive setup,
that's really gonna hurt you over the big distances.
As you've felt on this ride,
especially maybe raising the front end a little bit,
getting a bit of weight off the hands,
if you're really slammed at the front,
that gets pretty sore.
I mean, when I'm driving big distances
and it's safe, and it's flat roads,
I'm out on the tri-bars.
But anything you can do to move your hand position around
so you're not just sit on the lugs all the time
but moving the middle,
using that as a good climbing position,
because that numbing, that pins and needles you get,
is avoidable, so don't just live with it.
The amount of riders who have said to me,
"Really bad saddle sores and hand numbing is just something
"you have to live with."
You can really learn to adjust your body
and be more comfortable on the bike.
The other thing I would say when it comes to
being comfortable on the road-
and here's a great example.
Here's a road with just a lot of bumps and loose.
As you get tired, as you get toward
the end of your big days,
we all tend to get quite A-framed on the bike
so we end up riding like this.
So, it's so, so important that your upper body
is the shock absorber on the bike
because over five, 10, 15 hours on the bike,
that really hurts.
So, keeping a neutral upper body, for me,
is always starting with the elbows.
If your elbows are relatively flat to the road
then the upper body can just take whatever's given to it,
whereas when we tire, you see so many riders
with their shoulders up around their ears.
It's so much punishment.
It doesn't really let the legs continue
to have a nice high cadence either.
So, whatever you can do on the bike in terms of form
just to make it a bit more comfortable for yourself.
You'll feel early on in a ride
if you've got too much weight through your hands
or you're taking too much punishment through the road,
you need to just relax up that upper body a bit.
- Okay, that's a great tip, actually.
I hadn't thought about that.
Now, what about the training side of things?
So, I mean, how do you train for something
that's gonna take 12, 16, 24, 30 hours?
- Or multi day.
I mean, it's one thing doing a mega day,
it's another thing waking up after a few hour's sleep
and then doing it again, again, again.
So, whether Land's End, John O. Groats,
or it's a trans con, or something even bigger,
it's all about not just how good you are on any given day
but how quickly can you recover?
I spend my life telling people
trying to get into ultra endurance
to stop riding distance.
We can all go out and do temporal rides.
We can all go out and just
turn the pedals over zone one, zone two.
But actually, what really builds that tolerance-
what I mean by that is, riding ultra endurance
is about not breaking down, it's about not injuring.
The amount of riders who they're really strong club riders,
but you take them for a four or five day ultra
and the tendonitis would start to come in,
repetitive strain injuries.
So, your fit on the bike's pretty key for that.
You've felt it yourself, even on this ride,
that tightness through the tendons.
It's more than the muscles,
it's just that use from the tendons.
And if your alignment isn't quite right on the bike
then you're gonna pay for it.
So, your bike fit's key.
But training- train hard.
Train through the ranges.
By that I mean power ranges, cadence ranges.
I spent a lot of time doing much shorter sessions,
90 minutes, two hours, and then you can build
the conditioning on the bike on top of that,
the ability to just go out and do long, long rides.
Just doing long rides, believe it or not,
doesn't actually set you up
particularly well to ride or race ultras.
- So, it comes down to getting really fit.
But what tips can you give for sort of mental conditioning?
Because I guess that's gonna be the difference,
isn't it, between being a fit cyclist
and someone who can go the distance.
- I think we're all fascinated with the human psyche.
Ultimately ultra endurance is your ability to suffer.
I mean road racing is your ability to suffer as well
but it's your ability to suffer amongst others.
Whereas, you know, ultra endurance riding,
you're racing yourself.
You're pushing yourself.
If you wanna stop, you just stop.
The only thing keeping you going is your wish and your want.
There's no mile markers, there's no
sportive route that you're following.
It's on you so you've gotta hold yourself to account.
You've gotta be really good at
giving yourself mile markers down the road.
How are you gonna break up the ride?
I mean, when we set out this morning,
we had 200 miles to ride
and we've now got a pretty nasty headwind.
It doesn't bear thinking about
how many more hours we're gonna do this for.
But physically it's amazing what the body can suffer
if the head can just stop freaking out about it
and just get busy with the task.
- Well, the difference for me is that a road race
is like acute discomfort.
It's more painful but you know it's short lived.
Whereas, like you say, this, I know that I've still got
100 and goodness-knows-what miles to go.
And I'm struggling with that if I'm completely honest.
(upbeat Scottish music)
- We all like the idea of taking ourselves
out of our comfort zone and figure out what our metal is.
That is to be human.
We don't actually want the comfortable life.
We wanna suffer.
We wanna do things that are difficult.
But then we want to have a shower, have a beer,
tell our mates about it.
And we're all motivated through tough stuff,
whether it's running a marathon,
riding a sportive, doing a race, whatever.
We're all motivated by getting through that suffering
and then the light at the end of the tunnel.
Whereas the challenge with ultra endurance,
and expeditions when it comes to my world,
you sometimes have to be motivated
because of what you're doing,
not the idea it's soon going to be over.
You know, I've cycled around the world twice.
And trust me, when you're in the middle of the Outback,
you're not thinking about getting back to
the start and finishing line in Europe.
It's just too big.
It's way, way too big.
That's an 18,000 mile race.
You're in it.
You're absolutely in it.
You have to motivate yourself by that reality,
not kidding yourself by some shower,
beer, the fact that it's soon gonna be over.
- So, do you break it down into smaller chunks then,
or is it a case of, literally, just one pedal rev at a time?
- I try not to distract myself from it.
I try not to take myself out of the moment.
Just- that sounds a bit zen but
you're in it.
Just be in that moment.
If it's bad it will get better.
If it's good it will get worse.
Nothing is steady state when you're doing big ultras.
You just need to somehow learn that-
I think the other thing, we were talking about this earlier,
unless you've done
big single day events or multi day events,
whenever you start hurting, like you are,
like I am right now, then you think
you're kind of on the way to injury.
It's amazing if you stop for five minutes,
grab some food, stretch the legs, get back on the bike,
you can keep going.
The body adapts incredibly well.
And there's a big difference between
being sore and being injured.
So, a lot of people, I guess if they've
never been there before, the moment they get sore
they think they're on their way to injury.
- And what about the physical pain then?
Because you can, I guess, do yourself a lot of damage
by riding your bike for such inordinate lengths of time.
But how do you know when you do yourself proper damage?
Is that a consideration?
- Yeah, I mean, I do think that comes with experience.
There's a big difference between hurting and being injured.
You learn, as you learn your body and you push yourself
through more and more endurance, what that difference is.
I think if you've never been to that place before,
the moment you start really hurting you back off.
But you can ride through.
I guess that links really well
with just how to ride endurance- road riding I'm talking.
Because if you go out for a club ride or a sportive
you leave it all out there.
It's a battle of attrition, it's a ride to fail.
You're allowed to finish absolutely done.
Whereas ultra endurance riding is all about, yeah,
pushing yourself, but ultimately being in a state
where you can wake up a few hours later
or after a night's sleep and do it again,
and again, and again.
So, your style of riding needs to change.
- One thing I've noticed, and I noticed it first
when I was lucky enough to join you
on your first day of your around the world,
was how regimented you were with time keeping.
Although, obviously, this is not
around the world record attempt,
there is still this sense that-
- Time matters. - Exactly.
If you sit in a cafe for an hour,
then that's potentially gonna be
you're riding into the dark.
Is that something that comes naturally to you?
Is it something that you look at a watch and go,
"Hang on a minute, we've sat down now for 10 minutes.
We've gotta get on the road"? - It depends.
I think the bigger the group, the more of the tendency
to procrastinate, chat, faff, check your phone.
Time flies.
It's totally fine, if you're doing a backpacking trip
and you wanted to ride 100 miles a day,
faff all you want.
You can get your hundred miles done.
If you're wanting to do 150, 200, 250 miles
you're gonna have to be seriously diligent on time.
My mantra going around the world the last time was,
"Don't ask me to ride the bike faster,
"just make sure I'm on the bike at the right time."
So, if we faffed-
considering I was riding four hour sets a day, four of them,
if I faffed for five minutes every time I got off the bike,
that would add over a day to the world record.
So, yeah, rather than me-
and what I would say to the team,
getting on the bike at 4 a.m.,
if I got on the bike late and eight o'clock,
we needed to have a conversation why I was on the bike late
'cause even if I had tailwinds and down hills
and I made up that in terms of times
and I got the distance done,
you're still cheating yourself.
You're still not doing the simple things right.
As you know, as soon as you try and up the tempo at all
riding ultra, your quads scream, your legs hurt.
'Cause you're tired, you're depleted.
You sort of quite quickly
get to that stage of almost over training.
Where I guess if you were racing you'd back off,
whereas that's just kind of
the constant state of an ultra ride.
(chuckles)
- Constantly tired.
- But it's important to say,
if you are hurting on the bike, which happens,
it is worth saying that you are gonna hurt on the bike
as you push the distances and it's perfectly okay
to have some painkillers, simple stuff.
But as you get super tired and pushing yourself
it's really, really important to avoid anti-inflammatories.
- Ibuprofen. - Yeah, exactly.
So, it might be the first thing that you reach for
just thinking, "Wow, my joints feel inflamed
"and I just wanna look after my bones and body."
- I was tempted this morning.
- Yeah, anti-inflammatories are really
quite harsh on the kidneys in particular.
And when your body's already under
so much pressure and you're so pushed and depleted,
there's been some good research
on the fact that it is not good for you.
And athletes who have suffered
with kidney failure and stuff.
So, painkillers are fine,
but I would just stick to
plain old Paracetemol or something.
- Well Mark, there's some absolutely brilliant tips there.
Thank you so much.
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