Unleashed by lockdown

With his usual races cancelled, Robbie Mitchell figured he would have a go at ultra-distance cycling – with spectacular results

- David Bradford

No one would have wished for it, but the pandemic gave us the breathing space to completely reevaluate our cycling. It’s the starting point of my conversation with Robbie Mitchell. Without lockdown, would the former rally driver have turned himself into a record-breaking ultra-distance cyclist? “Absolutely not,” he says, “there is no doubt about that.”

The 40-year-old Scotsman is speaking to me by phone from his home in Duns, Berwickshire, and he explains what happened when racing was suspended last March. “I started doing a lot of longer loops, taking it a stage further with every ride. As long as I was hitting the numbers, my coach was happy, and it really started to pay dividends.”

In any normal year, Mitchell would have raced 10 and 25-mile TTs through the summer before switching to cyclocross come the autumn. “I wouldn’t say I was stuck in a rut,” he says, “because I enjoyed doing that, but it had become a habit: do one race, save myself through the week for the next one, and repeat.”

Having broken free from his old routine, the longer Mitchell rode in training, the more his fitness seemed to flourish. He knew he had potential over long distances, having previously raced the Strathpuffer 24-hour mtb event. He decided in July last year to ride the length of Scotland north to south to test himself on the road. “I ended up doing it in under 18 hours. It was then that people started telling me I should look at the North Coast 500 record.”