Books that Bang: The Hour

The Hour: Sporting Immortality the Hard Way 

Michael Hutchinson

Yellow Jersey Press (2007)

288 pages

ISBN: 0224075209

It seems so simple: ride a single speed bike on a track for sixty minutes. If you can go farther than 30.8821483 miles, you hold the record. Simple, yes. But not easy. So hard that the hour record is the rarest, most elite cycling achievement of them all, maybe the hardest record in all of sport. It holds a mystique of exclusive otherworldliness. The purity of it--just a bike, a rider, and a clock, the uniqueness of it—there’s no distance, like the “mile” in running; instead it’s based on time. Who can do it? Coppi, Anqutiel Merckx, Indurain. Who can't--or who didn't try because it's so hard? Just about everybody else. Rainbow jerseys, yellow jerseys, gold medals: they all make careers. But nothing defines a career like the hour record.

Against this backdrop I picked up Michael Hutchinson's book, The Hour: Sporting Immortality the Hard Way. Hutchinson, now a journalist, was a British TT'er, who never rode a bike competitively as a child or young man, but realized later in life that he had the cardiovascular gifts to go fast. He writes: “I … discovered that I could ride a bike faster than almost all of the more serious-looking riders in the park, the ones with the Lycra, the shaved legs and the multicoloured kits. They waved to each other, but none of them waved to me, with my flapping tracksuit trousers and running vest. They felt, I'm sure, that I was rather lowering the tone."

This sentence is typical style for the book. It's an engaging, funny, coyly imagined memoir. He writes with a rhythm and energy, much like a strong cadence of riding a bike fast--a serious rider would feel the tempo and be comfortable with it. The storyline is good. I enjoy the idea of building to some goal, which preparing for a monumental record like the hour is all about. Planning, methodically, progressing toward a great achievement. It's a process we're all familiar with and aspire to.

Hutchinson went after the goal with single-minded dedication, where nothing was minor. But along the way he tended to overemphasize the details. Organizing an attempt like the hour is not a minor affair: he had to build two bikes (the rules require the athlete to bring one bike for the attempt and one for a backup), schedule the track, arrange for the officials, etc. And he had no team to honcho the logistics. Regardless, though, he became so enamored in secondary points that he wasted much of his time and energy solving them. For example, he spent a stupendous amount of time finding just the right helmet, one that had the least amount of venting so that it would be the most aerodynamic. Record attempts are forbidden to use modern time trialing helmets; the rules require traditional gear so that the athlete, not the equipment, decides the outcome. Thus he set off on what seemed to be a Manhattan project to find the ideal helmet. "I spent hours that could have been used for training and building up my confidence leafing through old cycling magazines looking for helmets--my new obsession--and worrying that if I could not find exactly the right one, the whole project would crumble away." He goes on for the next four pages describing how he searched before settling on a skateboarder's helmet that was the most aerodynamic yet legal he could find. Such it was with every detail. The result was that he sacrificed training time, time when he could have spent raising his functional power level, the most decisive of all factors for an hour effort.

As he got closer to the date, and as each detail seemed to become larger and more nuanced, he began to encounter setbacks that colored his outlook grayer. He became focused on not failing, instead of achieving. I'm sure that Merckx had trepidation of failure when he went for the record, but Hutchinson is not Merckx. Hutchinson is not expected to get the title. That should've taken much of the pressure off. Instead, he was supremely troubled at the possibility of not succeeding. He describes the gradual change in outlook with the following words:

[Bike racing] stopped being about hope, and started being about fear. Fear of losing....Where winning had once been a simple joy it started being nothing more than relief. I'd managed to avoid being beaten. I'd got away with it again. I started to remember races where I was beaten much better than races where I won, because the pain was so much sharper than the relief. Winning is just winning; being beaten is something someone does to you. It's the difference between opening your front door and being burgled. 

This sentiment summarized the tenor of the book. But the end result (spoiler alert: he fails to set the record) was totally satisfying. While reading about his bike prep, about his organizing challenges, his lamentable setbacks, his unbreakable anxiety, it’s hard to not identify with him. We've all experienced things like this if we’ve ever set after lofty goals. But what separates him from grand tour champions and the classic winners who never set the record is this: he made a go of it. He fell short, yes, but he went after it. The story, humorous and poignant, succeeds in telling about the everyman who tries. He's no Merckx, but, nor are we.