Lachlan Morton has torn around Australia, delivering an astoundingly quick time of 30 days, 9 hours and 59 minutes for the lap of his home nation, according to EF Education EasyPost.
While it's too soon for the usual arbiters to have officially declared it a new cycling record, the effort of over 14,200km that finished at the lighthouse in Port Macquarie at 1:54 pm on Saturday has shaved around a week off the previous fastest-known supported times.
Morton was looking to beat Dave Alley's time of 37 days, 20 hours and 45 minutes delivered in a 14,251km, 2011 effort listed by the Road Record Association of Australia as the time to beat – adhering to a 14,200km minimum set in the 1990s. Then there is also Reid Anderton’s 14,178km effort of 37 days, 1 hour and 18 minutes that is the mark cited by Guinness World Records. Morton's speedy effort may simplify matters.
“Mentally, it's a lot of time to be focused,” Morton said in an EF Education Easypost release. “And every morning you wake up and your body is kind of like destroyed and you push through, it just chips away at you so definitely the last four or five days were a pretty big challenge mentally.
"You’re just trying to keep showing up and doing it every day. It got pretty tough. I was definitely in a state of fatigue that I hadn't really reached before so I had to lean on the crew and rally to get home. Just dedicating such a massive amount of time to pushing yourself every day. That is the real challenge I think of the Around Australia Record.
"I've never been so relieved to finish something as I was today.”
It was clearly never going to be an easy feat to set a new best time, but from the outset the target looked well within the EF Education-EasyPost rider's reach, even when he added gravel roads and more climbing into the mix through the final week after some unnerving close calls left him seeking quieter roads.
He took time to rest, a strategy that he had tested with his efforts on the Tour Divide Route, with his tracker recording around a third of his journey as stopped time. Morton often restarted in the early hours of the morning, riding through a considerable part of the night was a strategy that would in particular have helped him beat the intense heat in the north of the nation.
Morton had plenty of company in his last stints on the road, apart from the support crew that followed behind in a camper, with riders turning out in force on Friday as he worked his way through Sydney and ever closer to his final goal. After stopping for a rest at Newcastle, Morton set out into the dark before midnight on the "scenic route" for the final stretch working his way through the often wet conditions.
"Seems like I'm trying to find every hill between Sydney and Port but that's all right, still making progress," said Morton in an update on his Instagram story. "I've got a full day ahead, definitely no gift for this last day ... and my legs are smoked, so smoked."
However, the 2024 Unbound winner's arrival back at Port Macquarie in New South Wales, where he set off from on September 5, meant he could finally rest them with a beachside beer in hand and a record that's going to be hard to beat under his belt. He averaged more than 450km each day, despite the heat, headwinds and rain.
It's a dramatic time cut to a record that riders have been chasing in fits and starts since 1899, when according to the Road Record Association of Australia Arthur Richardson started the attempts rolling when he returned to Perth 245 days after he set off. The record then fell in fits and starts, first falling below 100 days in 1985 and Alley knocked three days off the former record when he sit his 2011 mark.
Morton has raised over $124,000 Australian for the Indigenous Literacy Foundation as part of his record chase.
You can look back on Morton's journey via the live tracking page, and donate via Morton's Indigenous Literacy Foundation fundraising page.
