Notice, I said “benefit”, singular? That’s because extra reading time is the only advantage commuting by train offers over bikes. Hrmmf!
In aid of all this extra reading time, thanks to my recently snapped GT frame, I bought a stack of bike mags (C+, Cycling Weekly, Cycle Sport, MBR).
In Cycle Sport, I glanced an article written about The Hour record and noticed it was actually referring to an extract from a book, called, surprise-surprise, “The Hour“.
Rushing over to Waterstone’s I was stoked to see that they actually had a copy of Michael Hutchison’s “The Hour”. I put down the other fifteen books that I wanted and settled on just the one (for now) – I have a bike to buy after all! I’ve only read a few pages, I might let you know if I like it later, meanwhile I’ve stolen a synopsis for you:
Synopsis: “The Hour”. It’s the only cycling record that matters: one man and his bike against the clock in a quest for pure speed. No teammates, no rivals, no tactics, no gears, no brakes. Just one simple question – in sixty minutes, how far can you go? Michael Hutchinson had a plan. He was going to add his name to the list of record-holders – riders like Coppi, Merckx, Anquetil, Boardman, the supermen who’ve made the Hour the domain of cycling’s greatest stars. It didn’t sound too hard. All he needed was a couple of hand-tooled bike frames, the most expensive wheels money could buy, a support team of crack professionals, a small pot of glue, and a credit card wired to someone else’s bank account. Still, getting the glue wasn’t a problem.
“The Hour” is the story of how a man who became a professional athlete by accident embarked on a quest for sporting immortality. But it’s also the story of an extraordinary record, and the riders who have made it so – from Graham Obree, the genius who built his own bike using parts from a washing machine, to Jacques Anquetil, great champion, great drug-taker and great family man (having had a child by his step-daughter, he married his step-son’s ex-wife).
Gripping, packed with fascinating stories and very, very funny, “The Hour” is what happens when a man from the secret, early-morning world of British bike racing takes a shot at stardom.