If you ever finished your favourite long-distance ride and thought, ‘I should get a medal for that’, how about something even better? Not a shiny piece of metal to chuck in a box with the others, but a place on the Fastest Known Times records leaderboard for the whole world to appreciate.
The UK’s Fastest Known Times website was taken over earlier this year by ultra bikepacking site Dotwatcher and is now looking for riders to submit new routes for record attempts.
For anyone unfamiliar with ‘FKT’s, they have been around for a while as a super-accessible way of setting records over long-distance cycling routes. No Guinness World Record adjudicators or unnecessary red tape are required – just a GPX file to prove you did the ride.
There are new developments too – as of last week, there is now a set of rules in place – that were previously unspoken understandings – that riders need to adhere to in order to have their record count.
And the guidelines are generally pretty non-interventionalist and easy to understand. Number one on the list – and one that people were not always sure on, says Shaw – is that rides must be self-supported, and the exact definition of that.
Talking of those official stats, you could be supplying those yourself for your own route if you have one in mind. Key guidelines here are that the route must be at least 100 miles long, should start and finish at logical ‘landmarks’ such as a trailhead or train station, and should be an established route – perhaps a challenge ride or a trail.
