Going The Distance: 100,000km In A Year
IN THE LONG AND WINDING ROAD OF CYCLING HISTORY, only nine people have held the world record for distance ridden solo in a single calendar year. Four Brits, two Frenchmen, two Americans and a lone Australian, who actually broke the record twice, Oserick Bernard ‘Ossie’ Nicholson.
The current mark was set by America’s Amanda Coker who, just two years ago, travelled 139,269km at a mind-bending average of 381km per day. While Coker’s achievement was epic in every way imaginable, when judging it against the feats of her predecessors, it’s important to view it through the appropriate prism of history. For example, her attempt was fully supported on a closed and virtually flat course on the outskirts of Tampa in Florida, using lightweight modern equipment and the finest in 21st Century sports science and nutrition. By way of contrast, almost exactly 90 years before Coker, riding with scant support on pot-holed open roads, using heavy steel bicycles with limited gearing, Ossie Nicholson covered a whopping 100,837km in 1937. That’s 276km per day, every day, on a bike that weighed in the vicinity of 20kg. For an entire year.
Of course,
