• Beaumont

  Mark Beaumont

  Guinness World Record holding Cyclist

  Mark (or ‘Monty’ as he’s known to his friends) was almost born on two wheels. Aged 12 he cycled across Scotland from Dundee to Oban. Two years later he bought his first road bike and then aged 15 did the classic ‘End to End’ journey, riding from Land’s End to John O’Groats. After high school, Mark then helped raise £50,000 for the Erskine Hospital by cycling the 1,334 miles from Sicily to Innsbruck in Austria up the length of Italy. During university, however, he started to get an itch for ‘a big one’ and you can’t get much bigger than circumnavigating the globe! After graduating, he went to work for a few months but the thought wouldn’t go away. So despite people telling him that he’d need longer than six months to plan and train for something of this size, Mark left his job and threw himself into it. Luckily, everything fell into place and with a great team behind him (including sports scientists, nutritionists and the BBC!) he eventually set off from Paris on 05 August 2007. All in all, Mark travelled 18,000 miles and toppled the existing record of 276 days by 82 days.

STAY IN CONTACT

Follow @debatingmatters

Subscribe to our regular newsletter or our RSS feed