Lachlan Morton is a hard man to tie down. The Australian rider began his career in traditional fashion, leaving home to race in Europe and America, building a palmarès that included victory at the Tour of Utah in 2016 and appearances at the Vuelta a España and Giro d’Italia. However, the pro race scene didn’t really suit him. Morton was happier taking on less formal but more gruelling solo challenges that captured the imagination and built a loyal following of fans.
His team, EF Education-EasyPost, was quick to spot the value of this so released Morton from standard racing duties to concoct a calendar of gravel races, ultra-endurance events and record attempts that it called Far Beyond.
Karter Machen
Morton found himself flying around the world, pursuing an intense schedule of challenges that required him to ride lots and sleep little. These included the 320km Unbound in Kansas (which he won last year), the 2,000km GBDuro race from Land’s End to John O’ Groats (which he won in 2019), the 4,418km Tour Divide race across America (for which he would have achieved the Fastest Known Time but his effort wasn’t recognised owing to the presence of his film crew), as well as numerous other events from South America to Africa to Asia.
Last year Morton set a new record for riding around Australia, completing 14,200km in 30 days, nine hours, 59 minutes. The feat was captured for a film called The Great Southern Country And this year Morton met up with ex-pro and presenter Matt Stephens in northern California to go for a ride and produce another video (available on YouTube) as part of Sigma Sports’ Café Ride collection. This is an edited extract from that film.
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Karter Machen
Matt: So when was the last time you did a ride like this?
Lachlan: I did a little bikepacking trip in December with a few mates. I’ve come to the conclusion that, when you have the time, you should really enjoy it. Not epic days, just enjoying the ride, eating and hanging out.
Morton leads Stephens! But Morton has left traditional road racing behind, and his original ambition of competing in the Tour de France is not what drives him now.Karter Machen
Matt: Because most of the time you’re pushing yourself to the limit so there’s not a lot of room for this sort of stuff. How do you tolerate such punishment?
Lachlan: All the extremes I push myself to, it’s always a choice to do it. I’m lucky that I have to seek out hard things to do in my life, because a lot of people have hardships imposed on them. The intensity of racing is something I grew up with and something I still crave. I actually really hope that there’s a time when I don’t need that.
Matt: It will come. Your body and mind will tell you, at some point, ‘I don’t need this anymore.’
Lachlan: Exactly. But for the time being I want that intensity. I enjoy it, but I also enjoy the contrast. There’s always discomfort and a part of me that says, ‘I’d rather not do this now,’ but then what happens beyond that is growth. It’s a fine line between overextending yourself and what is a healthy realm of growth and development. I like flirting with that line. That excites me and that’s something that I want to continue to do for as long as it excites me.
This calendar I’m doing, even having completed a small bit of it, I’m like wow, this is going to be a huge year and it’s going to push me in different ways. I know there’s a bunch of things that will make me uncomfortable, but again I feel lucky to be in a spot to do it, so I feel obliged to do it.
Karter Machen
Matt: What’s it like being you at the moment? There’s a lot of people who follow what you do. They love the videos you make, yet you’re a very private person. There’s this enormous media spotlight on you. How do you cope with it?
Lachlan: It makes me uncomfortable, for sure, because I feel like there’s a bit of imposter syndrome. Everything I’ve done, it’s things I would like to do. So I don’t feel like I’m out there with this huge goal to do anything except enjoy the experience that I’m having.
The thing I enjoy most is when I see people who have watched a video and gotten into cycling, and later they’re at an event that they thought they could never do. That gives me a lot of satisfaction, but that wasn’t ever my intention. It just happened. So if I could do what I do and have less attention with the same effect, I’d prefer that.
Matt: What strikes me, and I think it’s why people care so much, is that you haven’t changed. You’ve evolved as a rider and you’re one of the biggest names in our industry, yet you just continue to do what you want to do on your terms.
Lachlan: Yeah, that’s kind of the way I go about it. I’ll never take something on if it’s not something I genuinely would like to do. The second that motivation is not there, I guess it would be time to find something else.
To start with, in my head, it was always about racing the Tour de France – like you needed to do that to be a real bike rider. It’s like if you’re sitting on a plane and the person next to you asks, ‘What do you do for a living?’ and I say, ‘I race bikes’. And they’re like, ‘Oh, have you raced the Tour de France?’ And the second you say ‘no’, it’s like they lose interest. It would be so nice to just be able to say ‘yes’. But once you detach the ego of it, it shouldn’t really matter what this person thinks of me. And once that part of it passed, I haven’t wanted it back.
Karter Machen
Matt: And here you are in the public eye, doing these things that are, like, mad – in a wonderful way. The lap of Australia, I mean, wow. What a record.
Lachlan: I have no doubt that someone could do it quicker, but for me it was just about the idea of committing to doing it.
Matt: In the film about that ride, the moment that stuck most with me was the bit where you were reduced to walking on that sandy stretch, you know, towards the end. You had less than 1,000km to go, and you were reduced to walking. It wasn’t even a big incline, you just couldn’t ride your bike because it was sand. You picked up your bike and I thought, ‘He’s going to hurl it in the hedge.’
Lachlan: I was. I was going to chuck it. But that’s when you return to the thought: I chose to be out here, to do this. This is my mission and everyone who’s around me is here because I wanted to do this. So now, as ridiculous as this moment is, this is my task.
Morton’s bike computer is still recovering from the crazy numbers it recorded on his ride around Australia: 14,200km at an average of more than 450km per day.Karter Machen
Matt: Having Rachel [Morton’s wife] there must have been pretty special. I would imagine it adds another dimension to your relationship.
Lachlan: I think we were both nervous going into it, like how are we both going to react to being in such a pressure-filled situation? How will we be together? It was amazing. She knows me better than anyone, and then she got to see even further beyond what I knew myself, to points where I would be so fatigued and so despondent.
Karter Machen
Matt: She would likely have never seen you like that before, and that’s really quite raw and challenging in a relationship, isn’t it?
Lachlan: One hundred per cent. But then it’s doing those things where I feel most myself. There were times when I’m sure she could see strengths in me that maybe she hadn’t seen before. But then also it can be ugly when you’re on those limits, as there are parts of your personality you can’t hold in – they’re just on show.
Matt: Then there’s the rest of the [support and film] team. They need to be at their best for you, so was there a time when you thought, ‘I need to strike a balance here, where it’s on my terms, but I can’t go too far beyond that because these people are here to help me.’ How was that?
Lachlan: Normally the mindset of going into an ultra is the less emotional you can be, the better, because emotions get in the way of progress. If you get frustrated or angry or sad, it only gets in the way, so you have to manage that. Whereas this experience, the more I could actually express the way I felt to other people, what I was going through, the more it served everyone. I could shift that emotion in a lot of ways to other people.
Morton brings EF Education–EasyPost plenty of extra coverage via his YouTube videos and social media stories.Karter Machen
Matt: And it’s OK to do that because that’s what they’re there for. I bet they’re waiting for that so they can say, ‘We can help.’
Lachlan: I’d give myself half an hour from when I woke up to when I left. And in that time it was just Rachel and me, and that’s when I could be like, ‘I’ve got no idea how I’m going to do this. I’m screwed, I can barely walk, I don’t know how the hell I’m going to ride.’ But just to be able to say that out loud, and then hearing someone say, ‘It’s fine, it doesn’t matter if you can’t do it.’ Well, that then enables you to do it. To do the thing.
Links to the full film can be found on the Sigma Sports Café Ride video on YouTube.
