ZOOM INTERVIEW WITH ENDURANCE CYCLIST MARK BEAUMONT

Whilst the Scottish adventurer Mark Beaumont is probably best known for his circumnavigation of the world by bike in less than 79 days, he has dedicated pretty much all of his life to endurance travel. He cycled across the Americas in 2010, rowed from Resolute Bay in Canada to the 1996 location of the North Magnetic Pole, and broke the world record for fastest solo ride for the length of Africa; and has been the face of many BBC documentaries.

He’s easily one of the coolest adventurers in the game, and is a real fount of knowledge. I loved talking to him – and here’s what he said.

I’m Mark Beaumont and I’m 37, and I’ve spent the last 15 years taking on the first and fastest expeditions around the planet which have taken me to around 30 countries. I started when I was about 12 years old when I had the ambition to cycle from Lands’ End to John O’Groats, but my mam pointed out that I should probably try something smaller first.

So I was encouraged and supported to do a wee ride across Scotland which was 145 miles over three days, and that kind of peaked my interest in not just the journey but also the planning of it and the logistics and just the escape on a bike – I’ve always loved bike riding not really to be a racer but just because of where the bike could take you. By the time I was 15 I was going from Lands’ End to John O’Groats, by the time I was leaving school I was peddling across Europe, and by the time I was graduating at the age of 22 I was ready to cycle around the world.

how did your parents allow you to do this, to cycle from the very top of england to the very bottom of scotland when you were a child?

Yeah, my mum in particular has always been very supportive, she was always one of my core team. And then as a kid, you know, she was usually supportive. I’ve got two daughters now, a six year old and a three year old, and I can’t imagine the day when I work for them on their business. You know, I was homeschooled and my mum homeschooled myself and my two sisters until we were 12, and growing up on the foothills of the highlands of Scotland in Perthshire I just had extraordinary freedom.

I probably spent an hour or two around the table doing subjects and the rest of the time was working on the farm. We had 60 goats to milk, 200 laying hens to collect the eggs from, we had horses to ride and muck out and sort, we had a farm to run, you know. So I spent the first 10, 12 years of my life outside, being adventurous. I wasn’t doing it in a planned manner, I was just being a kid on a farm.

and then, you circumnavigated the world in 78 days, 14 hours, how did that come about? how did you have the motivation to do something that big?

Well for the circumnavigation record, when I was a teenager I watched Ellen MacArthur sail around the world, and I thought, why is the cycling record for exactly the same thing – you know, how fast can you get around the planet – why is it not the most coveted professional record in the book? So in 2006, 2007 when I first spotted that opportunity, the record stood at 276 days, it’s not that I was the world’s best bike rider, I just thought it hadn’t been done properly. I thought it was crazy, it was the world, and yet no one’s really had a crack at it. So the first time I cycled around the world I took a couple of months off that record, and did it unsupported in the time of I think 184 days. That was a big BBC documentary and it kind of launched my career.

I watched with awe and with interest as people over the decades took it to another level, went faster and faster, took different degrees of support and it became an ultra-light, super competitive thing, like when I first went for it it was a trekking record, it was more about where am I going to sleep each night, where am i going to find my next meal? As opposed to actually being a racer.

In regards to motivation, you know, I’ve always loved that concept. How fast can you get around the planet, you know the romantic side of it, Around the World in Eighty Days was a 1873 fiction book by Jules Verne, and whether it is Michael Palin or Disney, around the world in 80 days means something.

how would you overcome naysayers and family members saying that it’s impossible, saying that you can’t do it?

I’ve spent my entire career trying to do stuff that’s not been done before, so by definition I’m doing things that are impossible, just because it’s never been done before. It is often people who are closest to you, as in family and friends, who doubt you because they care too much, they don’t want to see you failing. I always think that when it comes to parents and friends you need to be very careful about what attitudes and feedback you surround yourself to, because those people who are really invested in your success and don’t want to see you fail – their worries and insecurities on your behalf can be a really drag and break on progress, and all they mean is support and care but actually it manifests itself in doubt and that’s got to be really carefully managed. I need people who whether I succeed or fail, their own journeys are completely different to mine, they can be objective.

so, what are you doing now during quarantine?

I normally spend a lot of my life out there filming projects, but I’m taking this time to write a book about endurance and starting a podcast series. The podcast series will take care of itself because I will be interviewing so many people on the subject of endurance, but I never would have had time to write that book or have those conversations if I’d been doing my normal work, so there’s a big silver lining. That will be out by the end of the year.

I’m enjoying spending time with the kids, I live in Edinburgh and my six year old is enjoying her bicycle. So everyday I go for a run and she cycles with me, and we have this little project that by the time she goes back to school in August to have run and cycled together every single street in Edinburgh.

final question, what’s your next big project, whats next for mark beaumont?

Well there’s nothing bigger than cycling across the world, that was very much my Everest. But I’ve never entered a traditional race where I’m on the start line with a few people around me. So I would like to spend the next two, three years taking on the most iconic endurance adventure events on the planet, running, cycling, mountain biking, all sorts of stuff. I’ve always had that bucket list but I’ve just never privatised it as I’ve been doing my own thing in the expedition world.

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If there’s any other questions you’d like to ask Mark, let me know in the comments below!

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