WOMAN OF THE HOUR

Next week British time triallist Joss Lowden will attempt to set a new women’s Hour record. Vern Pitt finds out how she’s been preparing for it

- Vern Pitt

The Lowden family don’t do anything by halves,” says Joss Lowden, wannabe Hour record holder when we ask her about how she got into cycling as a child. “We’d do 130km or 150km. And this is before we properly knew about eating and nutrition so we’d be out with one bottle on our bikes and be surprised that we needed picking up 30 minutes from home because we literally couldn’t pedal. This was the reality of a lot of our bike rides.”

We put it to her that her father sounds like a Roman general that would march his troops/family until they collapse. “You’re not entirely wrong,” she says, before pointing out there were some great experiences on big rides with her father but that she was probably a “stubborn teenager” at the time.

Stubbornness, determination, a familiarity with intense pain and fatigue. These are all qualities that should come in handy next Thursday when, at 4pm British time (you can watch it on Eurosport), she’ll attempt to set a new Hour record in Grenchen, Switzerland. To do so she’ll need to better Vittoria Bussi, who rode 48.007km at altitude in Mexico in 2018. There’s not been another attempt since.

In truth it’s not been a long-held goal of Lowden’s. In April 2020 aero ace Dan Bigham, who is also Lowden’s fiancé and who she describes as the “brains” behind the attempt, had been scheduled to make an assault on a raft of track records.