Ready for adventure: How Lachlan Morton trained — or didn’t — for the Alt Tour
On the 26th of June, Lachlan Morton set out to ride the entire route of this year’s Tour de France, plus all of the transfers, in a self-supported effort to make it to Paris before his teammates would race onto the Champs-Élysées. It has been one of the hardest, most rewarding things that he has ever done on a bike. Ahead of his ride, he faced a challenge that many athletes encounter: He had little time to prepare specifically for his goal, because he was at work.
Between mid-May and mid-June, Lachlan rode Tro-Bro Léon, the Mercan'Tour Classic, the Dauphiné, the Mont Ventoux Challenge, and La Route d’Occitanie for a total of 14 race days. So, he raced his bike on one out of every two days for a four-week stretch. Add to that the international travel and the time he needed to prepare for and recover from each day of competition, and Lachlan hardly had a spare moment to get ready for his Alt Tour. He was hardly able to test his equipment before he set off from Brest.
During the Tour de France, competitors have been racing fast for four or five hours per day. They have slept in comfortable beds in hotels, received massages, traveled by bus between stages, and eaten meals prepared by team chefs. This is very different to the self-supported, ultra-endurance effort that Lachlan has taken on. He has spent most nights in a bivy sack by the side of the road, raided bars and boulangeries, and pedaled every kilometer of his journey around France himself. For three straight weeks, he has been accumulating fatigue with little chance to recover.
It has been a daunting challenge. A lot of athletes would do well to learn from Lachlan’s attitude, though. Going into the Alt-Tour, he was looking forward to embracing the uncertainty.
“If you look at the distances and the amount of time that I will spend riding, I think that it will be the most difficult thing that I have done,” he said before the start. “It’s going to be three full weeks with more than half of that time spent pedaling, which is pretty daunting. But that is what excites me about it. I think there is a pretty significant probability of not finishing it, you know. The unknown of it is always exciting.”
Athletes tend to want to control every possible variable in order to maximize their chances of victory. That’s the doctrine of marginal gains. Inevitably, though, events run counter to expectations. There will always be factors that you cannot control—especially during an ultra-endurance ride. If you’re unable to deal with that uncertainty, you won’t succeed. Athletes need to be able to adapt to adversity. For Lachlan, that is all part of the experience.
“The more you control, the less that can happen,” he says. “It’s about finding that balance between being adequately prepared, but not smothering the flame by working out different possibilities and outcomes and ways that you can try to minimize the difficulty of it. Because if you are just trying to minimize the difficulty of it, what’s the point of doing something hard?”
After La Route d’Occitanie, Lachlan rode from the race finish in southern France to his home in Girona, Spain with teammate Mitch Docker to give his bike-camping setup a quick run-through. All went well. With just over a week left until the start of the Tour de France, there wasn’t time left for any specific ultra training. It was just a matter of getting a lot of rest.
“My goal was to ride as little as possible before the event,” he says, “just to get my head really wanting to get out there and ride, just depriving myself of riding for that time ahead of the race, so that I’d get here very fresh mentally and ready to put myself through a significant amount of difficulty every day for three weeks.”
To fully embrace the challenge and be in the moment for the full three weeks of his ride, Lachlan also had to make sure that his life back home was in order.
“You want to have your life worked out before you go, so there is nothing to stress you while you are doing it, “ he says. “Just make sure your relationships are where they should be, take care of mortgage payments, all that kind of stuff that could not only interrupt your flow, but could significantly alter your state of mind, in that it could belittle what you are doing and make it seem kind of trivial, when, if you’re undertaking something this big, you kind of need it to be all that is going on.”
Out on the road, Lachlan had to take things as they happened. A sore knee in the first week would have fazed most riders, but, with thousands of kilometers left to ride and the Alps and Pyrenees left to cross, Lachlan got a set of flat pedals and pair of rubber sandals that he could use without too much pain. He cut off their lower straps when he got blisters. Then, a dot watcher gave him some carbon soles to make them stiffer.
“You just have to work it out as it happens,'' he says. “I am a big believer in that enhancing the experience. There has been a lot of working it out as it goes and just sort of seeing how your body responds and then building into the effort. There were long days right from the get-go, but it was the last week where it really got difficult with a big week in the mountains and a huge transfer back to Paris, plus the accumulated fatigue of three weeks of riding. I don’t think there is anything you can do really physically to prepare yourself for that. So, that was my approach, not entirely by design, but it worked. I just had to adapt to the circumstances.”
VO2 refers to Neilson’s VO2 max, the maximum rate at which his body is able to consume oxygen during exercise, so he was going as hard as he could possibly go during those efforts. He would gauge his improvements by comparing his power numbers to his heart-rate data. He knows he is getting fit if his heart rate is lower for a given steady power, so long as it will also jump up to its max when he wants. If his heart-rate fails to respond during an all-out two-minute interval and is, say, 10-20 beats below its max, he knows that he is getting fatigued.
In this effort, he saw some of the best numbers he has ever seen.
“That was a fun workout, because you just fly up a mountain,” he says. “It was just in a training workout and I didn’t realize it until I got home, but I was just like, wow, that was the fastest that I have ever gone on that climb, and the hardest I have ever gone for 20 minutes, and I didn’t even feel as if I was going for that. I was just sticking to the workout, and on the last couple I kind of pushed, because I was feeling really comfortable and feeling really good, and I think that bodes well for the plan for improving that recovery from explosive efforts.”
At the Tour de Suisse, Neilson’s work this year came to fruition. It was his final week of competition before the Tour de France, and he rode a fantastic race, ushering Rigoberto Urán to second place overall. By the last day, he was climbing with the best ten riders in the race in the high mountains.
“In terms of my own ambitions, it was really motivating to close out the Tour de Suisse getting stronger each day and having my best day on the final day,” Neilson says. “It just makes me really excited for what can happen in the Tour.”