Lachlan Morton's winning effort at Unbound Gravel was around 320km long but his next big challenge, chasing the record for the fastest time around Australia, means he'll have to ride even further every single day for more than a month.
On Thursday the EF Education-Easypost rider plans to set out from his home town of Port Macquarie and ride around 400 kilometres each day so he can complete the 14,200 kilometres journey around Australia in about 35 days. The current cycling record – set in 2011 by Queenslander Dave Alley – is 37 days, 20 hours and 45 minutes for a distance of 14,251km.
Morton's attempt will be supported, with family and friends following behind in a camper to keep him well fed and provide a mobile rest stop as he tracks counter-clockwise around Australia.
"I've been able to have a lot of really amazing experiences doing long bike rides, but being able to share that with a group of people I'm very close with will be very special," said the rider who has taken on adventures ranging from Thereabouts, through to the Alt Tour and last year's fast effort along the Tour Divide route.
"There will be less to think about besides just continuing to push and push and push."
Morton will first be heading north to Brisbane and Townsville before cutting inland into more sparsely populated areas until Darwin and after that it is a long and remote journey through Western Australia. He will hit the halfway mark on the road from Port Headland to Karratha and then after heading south for another 1,500km, Morton will hit the Western Australian capital of Perth, skirting by Kings Park where the Australian Road Championships will be held in 2025.
Heading down as far as Albany – one of the mandatory checkpoint locations for a record – Morton will then work his way across the Nullarbor Plain to South Australia and Adelaide before continuing his journey back to the more heavily populated east of the nation.
After the stretch from Melbourne to Sydney he'll complete the journey and more than 14,000km of riding across across a diverse mix of roads and landscapes when he heads back into Port Macquarie via Pacific Drive and finishes the journey where it all started.
It's not the first time Morton has taken on a big adventure in Australia, though the scale of the latest is a significant step up as "by far the biggest bike ride I've ever done", with Morton going on the 2,500km journey into the heart of the nation when he headed to Uluru with brother Angus in 2013, an experience they documented in the first film of the Thereabouts series.
"Through experiences like that you realise that you don't know all of Australia," said Morton.
"Australia is big. There are all these amazing people who live out in remote areas who you won´t cross paths with unless you go out on a big trip like this.”
The making of a record
There is a long history to the lap of Australia record, with the Road Record Association of Australia outlining that Arthur Richardson started the attempts rolling in 1899 when he set out from Perth. He returned 245 days later, only to have his mark beaten just weeks down the track when Donald McKay completed the journey in two days less.
Over the years the record has dropped in fits and starts, falling below 100 days in 1985 and then to the current mark of 37 days, 20 hours and 45 minutes – or an average of 377km a day – when Alley claimed the around Australia cycling record in 2011 before also going on to claim the run record in 2015, although that has since been topped.
Initially the cycling records varied in length, with distances ranging from 14,100km to 18,000km, though a formal structure was put in place in 1996, with the minimum distance set out as 14,200km and there were also a series of mandatory checkpoints around the coast. These, according to the Guinness World Records, are Perth, Bunbury, Albany, Eucla, Port Augusta, Adelaide, Geelong, Melbourne, Bairnsdale, Wollongong, Sydney, Newcastle, Brisbane, Gold Coast, Rockhampton, Townsville, Darwin and Geraldton.
As Morton crosses through these locations during the warming conditions of the southern hemisphere spring he will also be raising money for the Indigenous Literacy Foundation, a group that helps children in remote Australian communities access stories and books, especially those in their native languages.
“Any cause that supports children in rural communities is super important,” Morton said. “People in remote Australia face a lot of unique challenges and don't always have the amount of support they need. Being able to contribute something to the communities that we are going to ride through is important to me," said Morton.
You can follow Morton's journey via the live tracking page, and donate via Morton's Indigenous Literacy Foundation fundraising page.
