Georgia Hunter Bell’s Instagram username, @georgiabelltheduathlete, has been causing confusion among her followers. “I tried to change it the other day, actually,” she says. But Instagram informed her that, as a verified Olympic athlete, she’d need to contact the platform’s big bosses. The “duathlete” hints at a life beyond her running – although many fans assume it refers to her dual discipline versatility on the running track – she is an Olympic bronze medallist in the 1,500m and a World Championships silver medallist in the 800m. “That’s not quite what duathlete means, but I see where they’re going with it,” she concedes.
A scroll through the tiles of her profile starts to tell a more intriguing story. Between the running shots and celebrations beneath vast stadium crowds come flashes of something else: bicycles. There’s Hunter Bell on a Wattbike, a Zwift indoor trainer, and a deep blue Canyon road bike, descending a mountain on clear-skied Mallorca. “Once you delve into people’s stories, you usually find that they’re quite multi-layered,” the 32-year-old says.
Hunter Bell’s story came to me in a PR email, the sort I get 20 times a day and usually ignore. I’d seen her race on television, but knew little about her, and assumed she spent most of her waking hours pounding roads and tracks in her running shoes. I was wrong. “Though best known on the track,” the PR email read, “she does 70% of her training on the bike.” On the bike? But she’s a world-class runner. I was mystified and somewhat skeptical. “Could I meet her?” I typed in reply. And so, two weeks after Hunter Bell won silver at the World Athletics Championships in Tokyo, I find myself sitting across from the Olympian and her black Americano in a cafe in Clapham, South London.
(Image credit: Future)
I have two pressing questions: first, how can so much cycling make someone an elite-level runner? Second, can it work the other way round – can doing lots of running make you a better cyclist? The answers, it turns out, are not straightforward; Hunter Bell begins with a stirring comeback tale.
Born in Paris and brought up in London, she was a gifted young athlete and rose to become the UK’s top-ranked junior 800m runner. She continued to excel in athletics while at university in Birmingham, and later earned a scholarship to train at the University of California, Berkeley. There, US coaches doubled her training volume to 60 miles a week – to disastrous effect. “I was getting stress fractures from the impact of running,” she says. “For long periods, I was hobbling around in a boot, on crutches.” In 2017, after two years stateside, she turned her back on racing and found an office job in cybersecurity sales.
It wasn’t until the cycling boom of the 2020 Covid lockdowns that her now husband George Hunter suggested she try a road bike. “Originally it was a way to stay fit while also giving my body an impact break,” she says, “and then very quickly I got the appeal of cycling and was saying, ‘Let’s do 50k, 100k, 200k, let’s cycle around Mallorca, Ibiza, let’s do some of the climbs from the Tour de France.’”
Ibiza, I realise, is a reference to the Duathlon World Championships in 2023, which was Hunter Bell’s first serious race on the bike, and her first event in GB kit. She won in the 30-34 age group. “I gained quite good fitness through all of that training, and ran a sub-16[-minute] 5k. That’s when I got back in touch with my old running coach,” she says. The rest, as the saying goes, is history.
Despite her comeback transpiring as a duathlete – hence her Instagram handle – Hunter Bell revived her running ambitions, made it onto GB’s Paris Olympics squad, and earned her place on the podium in the 1,500m, realising the dreams of her childhood. She left her office job after the Games, and is now a Nike-sponsored pro athlete. And what most interests me is that, through it all, cycling remained integral to her progress.
Hunter Bell (centre) won a silver medal in the 800m at the World Championships in September.
(Image credit: Getty Images)
Returning to that 70% cycling claim, how much does Hunter Bell really ride her bike? “Basically I do about 30-35 miles of running a week, and about 100 miles of cycling,” she says. “It’s more cycling in terms of mileage, but time-wise, it might be similar.” As a rough calculation, that equates to about five to six hours of cycling and about four hours of running, so the PR’s 70% figure isn’t far off the mark – and it strikes me as an immense amount of cycling for a runner.
Does it set her apart among her running rivals? “It’s very uncommon,” Hunter Bell says. “Most of [my rivals] only go on the bike when they’re injured, so cycling carries negative connotations.” For her, it was the opposite: the bike spurred her back into competition. She is now five years injury-free – “touch wood,” she smiles – for which she is thankful, in large part, to cycling.
It’s not just about avoiding injuries, though. “People are realising that you can actually get a lot of endurance base built on the bike, saving running input for the speedier stuff, where you’ll do that flat-out sprinting on the track. That gives you a balance,” Hunter Bell says, adding that she credits cycling – and especially Zwift – with helping to improve her finishing kick. “I’m picturing the names of the sessions now, like ‘Grin and Bear It’, ‘Under Overs’…,” she says, wincing at the thought. “I feel like I go to the same place [mentally] on the track, and you just keep pushing through.”
I want to explore the science behind Hunter Bell’s success, and whether cycling can form the basis of elite running achievements – and vice versa. My first call is to physiologist Professor Richard Davison, whom I ask what he makes of cycling training for runners. “I think it makes a lot of sense,” he says. For Davison, a central tenet is critical power: the maximum power output an athlete can sustain without fatiguing rapidly. Go above this, and you begin to drain your ‘tank’ of energy, known as ‘W Prime’ (or W’) – “it’s a finite amount,” stresses Davison. Provided you stay below your critical power, the levels in the energy tank are spared.
“I can see how, with the appropriate cycling intervals, you could make your critical power as high as possible,” he says. “A 1,500m runner will be trying to run most of the race not dipping into that W Prime too much, preserving it for the last 200m. You will have seen many runners get to the last 50m, or even the last 30m, and all of a sudden have nothing left. If you can operate in your race for long periods of time without having to dip into W Prime, then that gives you a weapon.” I think back to watching Hunter Bell race, and notice it’s often on the final stretch that she comes alive. Suddenly, all that low-impact, cycling interval training makes sense.
What I’m more interested to know is this: can it work the other way? Can a cyclist get better at cycling through running? Davison immediately bursts my bubble, warning that, for a cyclist, too much running is likely to prove counter-productive. He speaks from personal experience. When he trained for the Highland Cross, a duathlon in the Scottish Highlands, he found that increasing his running volume was “hurting” his performance on the bike. “If you’re running off the back of cycling, it’ll develop your aerobic capacity, but it’ll wreck your legs,” he says. “If you want to compete at a good level cycling, running won’t help. It damages the muscles too much.”
Running is a high-impact sport, generating forces that an uninitiated cyclist’s legs simply can’t handle. We need to start slowly: the gentler impact of jogging can be good for improving bone density, but beginners should be careful not to push it too hard too soon. “You really have to just tread on eggshells for quite some time,” says Davison. “Aerobically you’ve got the lungs, the heart and the muscles [to run], but the impact is liable to damage the muscles, the joints and the tendons.” After a few weeks of gentle jogging, you should be able to cautiously turn up the speed. For most cyclists, a single weekly jog is enough to boost bone health and add variety without denting performance on the bike.
British cyclist Max Stedman discovered the cruel impact of running when he threw himself into it last year. Having spent 10 seasons riding for Continental teams, and breaking the British Everesting record in 2020, he began his cycling retirement with a third place at his local Parkrun in Bristol, “and then I was buckled,” he says. “My calves were wrecked for about three months.”
Stedman, now a coach at Belmont Performance, understands the pain came from a lack of conditioning of his muscles and tendons, which had gone impact-free for so many years. His cycling team bosses had never advised him to run, though he went for the odd jog, and recalls a 5k competition he had with team-mate Rory Townsend, who beat him by three seconds, posting a 18:08. “I couldn’t walk for about a week and a half,” Stedman says of the aftermath.
Despite his injuries, Stedman’s running times are well above average – he completed his first half-marathon in 1hr 20min this year, and has set his sights on his mum’s 2:36 marathon PB – but he hasn’t seen any uptick in his cycling. Quite the opposite, actually: he feels he’s lost his “punch” on the bike since taking running more seriously. “With running, there’s no need to accelerate that hard. I might need to ‘up it’ by five seconds a kilometre for a few kilometres, but that doesn’t really require a hard change of acceleration, whereas cycling does,” he says.
Cyclists who run
At the 2022 Tour de France, Primož Roglič confirmed a rumour that he was setting out every morning to jog for 20-30 minutes. His then Jumbo-Visma team bosses explained he did it to “wake the body up”, but it was only ever at a slow rhythm. It’s rare for cyclists to run competitively during their careers, for risk of injury, though some are daring enough; Adam Yates, for example, ran a sub-three-hour marathon in Barcelona in late 2021, less than a month after finishing third at Il Lombardia. The most impressive running PB by an elite cyclist is held by gravel pro Freddy Ovett, son of Olympic 800m gold medallist Steve Ovett. Ovett Jnr blasted round the 2023 Valencia half-marathon in 1:09:43.
Most pro cyclists who decide to take running seriously tend to do so only after retirement. 2017 Giro d’Italia winner Tom Dumoulin ran October’s Amsterdam marathon in 2:29:21, an exceptionally fast time that puts him in the top 1% of marathon finishers. Likewise, after Emma Pooley announced her retirement from racing in 2014, the former time trial world champion went on to win four consecutive long distance duathlon world titles, each time running 40km. Demi Vollering, the current number-one-ranked female cyclist, is also a keen runner, and holds a 5k PB of around 20 minutes, according to Strava.
Back in Clapham, my coffee meeting with Hunter Bell is coming to an end. Her next stop is Battersea running track, for a session of gruelling all-out efforts she’s been dreading all morning. It’s the type of training, alongside her cycling, that’s guiding her to medals and PBs in her 30s. I cut to the chase and ask how much of her success she puts down to the bike. “It’s hard to know,” she says, cautiously, “but I feel it will be a part of my plan forever. The number-one thing is that it has allowed me to be injury-free and stack year upon year [of training], that’s what leads to Olympic and Worlds medals.”
Cycling alone does not make someone an elite runner. From speaking to Hunter Bell and others, it’s clear you need a base of conditioning, the type she built in her teenage days, and the lack of which likely led Mark Cavendish, arguably the fastest cyclist of all time, to run a fairly average 1:57 half-marathon this spring, before abandoning his tilt at the Paris marathon. But if you can find the right blend for you, as Hunter Bell has, the performance gains can be medal-winning.
“For as long as I’m a professional track athlete, cycling is going to be 50%-plus of everything I do,” she says. She may no longer be a duathlete, technically, but her training says otherwise.
This feature originally appeared in Cycling Weekly magazine on 20th November 2025. Subscribe now and never miss an issue.
