Up against the skinsuits and disc wheels brigade, he entered on his road bike and won. Hayden discovered his talent for cycling when, not long after becoming hooked on road riding around his hometown of Royston, he entered an evening time trial. You’re not going to be able to close them. “Those negative thoughts, if you let them creep in, it can be like opening the floodgates. So that survival mechanism is not necessarily logically correct,” Hayden says. It’s your inner monkey brain, hell bent on survival and ignorant to the logic of your conscious mind. The biggest battle can often be with that voice in your head that tells you to stop, to seek shelter and to rest. The distinction between adventure and race often comes down to the competitor’s own state of mind. It forced me to go away and learn a lot.” “I learnt a hard lesson, a lot of humility. It was a lesson he learned the hard way in his debut Transcontinental he rode flat out to arrive first at the first check point at Mont Ventoux but his body soon began to fall apart and he scratched from the race in Montenegro with a debilitating case of Shermer’s Neck, where the neck muscles can no longer support the head. There’s what Hayden describes as an “extremely, extremely delicate balancing act” between pushing yourself hard enough to competitive, but not pushing so hard that your body cannot sustain the effort. In both events, outside assistance is strictly forbidden.Īs an ultra-endurance racer, the biggest obstacle can be yourself. Then there’s the Silk Road Mountain Race, a 1700km odyssey through the sparsely populated mountainous back-country of Kyrgyzstan, where in 2018 he fended off an attempted mugging by two armed men on horseback. Besides four compulsory checkpoints, which often reduce even the best riders to heaving their bikes up un-rideable gravel roads, the route is entirely down to competitors. The Transcontinental Race that made his name is 4000 kilometres long and, as the name suggests, traverses the European continent. James Hayden has seen his fair share of terrain and elements. In Hayden’s well thought out words, he describes it thus: “Competitors race over unimaginable distances, battling terrain and elements as much as each other.” To finish, let alone win, demands a superhuman feat of cycling hundreds of kilometres day after day, with minimal sleep and no support. Ultra-endurance races present riders with the ultimate test. I dealt with it, got the bike fixed, got riding again. And from that moment on it wasn’t a problem. This is an opportunity to pass this test. “I thought to myself: this moment is a test. “Now, when something goes wrong, I don’t see it as something bad. But for some reason this absolute calm came over me. In these moments, I would normally lose my s***. “It wasn’t the end of the world, let’s get some perspective, but it was going from bad to worse. “This was one of these moments when everything was going wrong,” he recalls. He dismounted and dismantled his machine, becoming increasingly frustrated as the rain drops and the midges began to descend through the Highland twilight. He repaired his tube, remounted his bike, pedalled 20 metres down the road, and broke his shifter. With 12 hours riding to the finish, he punctured. He admits that for all his ultra-racing pedigree, he soon realised that he “didn’t have a damn clue.” He was competing in the Highland Trail 550, a gruelling off-road ultra-endurance bike-packing race across the most rugged terrain in the UK.Ī two-time winner of the Transcontinental Race, the most well-known unsupported ultra-cycling road race, this was Hayden’s first foray into off-road racing. From his apartment in the Catalan cycling mecca of Girona, James Hayden casts his mind back to one summer evening in Scotland in 2019.

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