Rarebreed Club

Three weeks before RideLondon 2024 he was on IV fluids in a hospital bed. He promised his doctors and his wife he’d ride only the shorter route, on an hour and a half’s sleep, and kept that promise exactly. Nobody had said anything about how hard he could ride it, or what happened after the finish. We tell the story of The Tenacious Cyclist’s sixty-three miles at threshold, and the eight he added.

Four years ago he went up Yr Wyddfa in a wheelchair. This time he walked it, with no cartilage in either knee. The four-and-a-half-hour descent nearly took him apart, and his watch logged it as a spa weekend.

The story of The Tenacious Cyclist on Snowdon: a summit stop that nearly switched his blood pressure off, a heart-rate monitor that was accurate and completely wrong, and a plan to come back next June on a mountain bike, purely out of spite.

In October 2019, thousands of runners were waiting at the start of Peterborough’s Great Eastern Run when a 999 call about a man on Alexandra Road brought out armed police, and the half marathon was called off. It turned out to be a misunderstanding. Jack tells the story of a race that vanished for a decade, was kept going by a diesel engine company, lost two more years to a pandemic and still keeps coming back, right through the cathedral grounds where two queens were buried.

London Marathon 2026: two men ran under two hours, Joe Wicks lost to Daddy Pig by one second, and 59,830 people finished the biggest marathon in history.

Ultra cyclist Jack, who thinks running is far too much like hard work, follows it from the front to the very back: a burst blister treated with fizzy Coke, a split so fast the timing company deleted it, a man carrying a fridge, a 5.59-metre scarf, and four people who have finished every London Marathon since 1981.

Glasgow once rented out window seats to watch a hanging. The Great Scottish Run now finishes on the same spot.

Thirty-five thousand people ran through Glasgow on the first weekend of October 2026, the biggest field in the race's history. Jack follows them across a motorway bridge that engineers shoved two inches sideways, past a museum that was legally meant to be sixteen miles away, through the field where the Pope's crowd got heatstroke, and under a wandering arch onto ground where the record crowd might still belong to an execution. Plus a blister mistaken for a tendon, a brother using a giant screen to heckle his sister, and the one thing in Glasgow nobody can move: a traffic cone.

A dark comedy podcast about endurance events and the people daft enough to do them.

On the longest day of 2026, more than fourteen thousand people rode fifty-four miles from Clapham Common to Brighton.

A lot of them began by taking a coach to the start at four in the morning, with their bikes wrapped in blankets in the back of a lorry.

Jack follows Europe's oldest charity bike ride down the Brighton Road: a Victorian pioneer doing victory laps of a station he'd just lost at, a man who couldn't stand middle-class people, an Iron Age hill fort, a headless dog, and Ditchling Beacon, which has been repelling visitors for two thousand years and is still very good at it.

205 miles, sunrise to sunset, and the only official who decides who won is ninety-three million miles away and has never waited for anyone.

Jack follows Chase the Sun UK South, coast to coast from the Isle of Sheppey to the end of the Grand Pier at Weston-super-Mare. There's a 4:30am start that one rider prepared for with sleeping tablets, and a support car that follows the slowest riders across England offering advice but refusing lifts. South London ends one solo rider's day at eighty miles. Cheddar Gorge is where they found Britain's oldest complete skeleton, and skulls polished into drinking cups. And the finish line is a pier that has burned down twice.

Of 875 starters, 578 beat the sunset and 125 never reached Weston. Then the real question: is 205 miles on someone's wheel, with a car full of sandwiches, the same ride as 205 miles alone?

Jack runs the drafting physics, tests the e-bike comparison, and makes a modest proposal about ribbons.

Solo and unsupported, or group and support car: should they get the same medal? Tell us.

Rarebreed Club: dark comedy about the endurance events people do on purpose.

RideLondon died in February 2026, aged thirteen. Nobody told the 20,000 people who rode its final edition.

On 26 May 2024 they rode out of London into Essex and back to Tower Bridge, on closed roads, assuming they'd be back next year.

Jack delivers the eulogy for the last RideLondon: a man who rode 100 miles on a mountain bike because his road bike lives on a turbo trainer, a man whose only preparation was shaving his legs, a rider three weeks out of a hospital bed who found a loophole in his doctors' orders, and a coffee queue in Felsted that never ended. Plus the professional sprinter who can now never be beaten, because nobody holds the race any more.

Dark humour about real endurance events. RideLondon-Essex 100, the RideLondon Classique, Lorena Wiebes, and the strange way big events die.

Every July, hundreds of cyclists gather at a pub in Hackney. There's no entry fee, no start gun and nobody in charge. They ride through the night to a beach in Suffolk where a medieval city used to be, before most of it fell into the sea.

Jack follows the 2025 Dunwich Dynamo: a snapped gear cable fixed by a stranger at midnight, two emergency malt loaves at a 3am village stop, and bats that probably won't go for your jugular.

Then he follows the one rider who reached the beach as everyone else stopped for tea, and turned north for Norwich. He had no sleep, a knee that wouldn't stay in place, and a chatty imaginary badger for company.

221 miles. Liverpool to Cardiff. Disabled and non-disabled riders. Hand cycles, trikes, tandems, adaptive bikes. One rule hanging over the entire thing like a battle flag:

No one gets left behind.

This episode is about Ride Together 200 and why a bunch of exhausted strangers crawling across Britain together might be one of the most quietly radical things happening in sport right now.

Not inspiration porn. Not a corporate advert with piano music and a brand logo at the end. Something rarer: a cycling event built around the idea that we move at the pace of the group.

In a world that rewards speed and punishes slowness, that is almost offensive.

And that is exactly the point.

This is Rare Breed Club. New episodes every Wednesday.

Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts.

For the full story, head to WheelsForTenacious.co.uk