One of the constants of bikepacking races and records has been dealing with sleep deprivation while pushing the body's physical limits, but Lachlan Morton wants to try and deliver a fast time over the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route – home to the annual Tour Divide race – without giving up too much valuable rest time.
The Australian, who has a habit of taking an unconventional approach, is setting out to go as fast as he can over the remote and rugged 2,671-mile (4,298km) trail from Banff, Canada to Antelope Wells, New Mexico, with one proviso – he is delivering a self-imposed quota of 12 hours of rest every 48 hours.
“I’ve done a few ultras now and they have all involved a fair bit of sleep deprivation in trying to go fast,” Morton said in a statement from his EF Education-EasyPost team. “The last one I did was the Colorado Trail around this time last year. And I enjoyed that experience, but in the last kind of push I was pretty sleep deprived and wasn’t enjoying it and had that realization that ‘I don’t want to do this again.’”
The fastest known time of 13 days, 22 hours and 51 minutes was set in 2016 by the unmatched ultra-endurance behemoth Mike Hall, who died in 2017 when struck from behind while racing in Australia.
