The Port Macquarie (NSW) school teacher loves pedalling – the longer, the better. 

"My mileage normally falls somewhere between 500-700km a week.
Images: Krystle Wright

English’s wife is forever telling him he has an exercise addiction. He agrees wholeheartedly. The Port Macquarie (NSW) school teacher loves pedalling – the longer, the better. Twenty-four-hour mountain bike races – where competitors punch out as many laps of a set course as they can – are his idea of nirvana. “I love my job!” he says. “I just ride around, talking to people, eating food ... It’s great.”Don’t be fooled by the blase tone, however. When he won his second 24-hour world title at Canberra’s Mount Stromlo in October last year, he clocked 24 laps of the 18km course (finishing a full lap in front of his main rival, Canada’s Cory Wallace). Do the maths and you’ll realise that’s over 430km of dirt-track pedalling; a full day and a full night of lapping a course notable for its rockiness, its dustiness, and a nasty climb at its back end.Here’s how he does it.

Clocking miles

“My mileage always depends on how busy I am at school, but it normally falls somewhere between 500-700km a week, around 15 to 18 hours on the bike. All that riding will be on-road. If you’re riding in the bush, a lot of the time you’re riding down hills or you’re braking into a tricky section of track, and your heart has a chance to recover. But on a road bike you can keep your heart rate elevated the whole time, and really maximise your time on the bike. If I’m coming up to an important race, however, like the 24-hour Worlds, I’ll ride my mountain bike on the road for a couple of weeks before, just to get used to different riding positions.

“I’m fairly time-poor, being a full-time PE teacher, so I want to make the best of the hours I do get to pedal. If I have to be at school at eight in the morning till three in the afternoon, then I’ll do a few hours in the morning and another hour or two in the evening – that’s the only way I can get the three to four hours on the bike I need. It’s a big commitment – even when I’m not riding I’ll be negotiating sponsorships or planning my racing calendar, playing around like that.”

BPM

“In training my heart rate varies a lot. For example on Friday I normally do a fast, intense ride, where my heart rate will sit around 180 for a 45-minute session. Tuesday, on the other hand, is normally a gentle day; on that ride my heart rate will be down around 120.“On Monday and Thursday, where I start school an hour later, I’ll be on the bike at 5am and I’ll ride out to a 20-minute hill climb near my house and do three or four laps of that climb. On that ride my heart rate will really depend on how hard I want to go. This morning, for example, I was still pretty busted from a race, so my heart rate didn’t get much above 160. On other days it’ll be pushing 180. Personally, I believe it’s not necessarily how hard you climb the hills, it just about climbing the hills. I like looking at the total ascension of a ride and thinking, ‘That’s awesome – I’ve just got in, you know, 2000 vertical metres of climbing and that’s the same amount of climbing I’ll do in an average 100km-mountain bike race.’”

Why taper?

“Because I’m racing so often I try not to focus on one particular race. Take last year’s 24-hour Worlds for example: I had a race two weekends before and as soon as I finished the Worlds I was thinking about another race I had in two weeks’ time. So because of this constant workload, I really don’t go through too many phases with my training."

“But I certainly did a fairly serious ‘build’ leading into last year’s 24-hour Worlds. Two weeks out from the race I did a 44-hour week on the bike – which was just stupid! But it was leading into school holidays and I had the chance to ride seven hours a day – so I did it. The week after I didn’t have to do too much at all, so that was my taper week. I was just sort of riding around, getting used to the track ‒ I was still riding three to four hours a day but I backed the intensity right off."

“I find I go insane if I’m not riding enough. My legs start itching and I can’t sleep. Seriously – I have to make sure I don’t taper too much. I’ve worked out that I need to keep riding – I can’t take two days off in a row.”