UK Edition
'Riding a bike helped me lose six stone': Meet Chris Hall, cycling's Forest Gump
It was 6am in Richmond Park, and Chris Hall had been cycling for 18 hours. Just the six more to go.
“That really was the toughest bit because your whole body is telling you to go to sleep and to rest, and you obviously can’t,” the endurance cyclist tells me, reflecting on his 24-hour cycle in 2016.
It was his first long-distance trial, but it wouldn't be his last. Just a few months later, Hall completed his biggest challenge to date: cycling 107km every day for 107 days, while juggling a 9-to-5 office job in architecture. He was dubbed ‘cycling’s Forrest Gump’ and raised £250,000 for The Pace Centre, a children's school and charity for children with motor-based disorders.
“I figured out I was quite good at endurance stuff,” he says with characteristic nonchalance. Since then, he has competed in the National 24 Hour Championships, winning an award for the furthest distance in 2018. The next year, he went further – 760km – even though he had a slipped disc in his back.
Now, Hall is training to go to Morocco for the Atlas Mountain Gravel Race in February. This race stretches 1,000km across the Atlas Mountains, all off-road. Riders must support themselves, and supply points are often savagely far apart.
What attracts him to such extreme challenges? “There’s got to be a point where you go ‘I can’t do that’ and I haven’t found that," Hall says. "I want to find it because I want to know what that limit is, so that then I could work out how to go through it."
Why now is the moment to set your fitness challenge
Hall's transformation into a bike-bound Forest Gump happened quickly. “I’m a pretty normal guy from a pretty normal background," Hall says, explaining that until the age of 26, he simply cycled to work and back. Then, in 2016, he committed to going the extra mile, in order to raise money for Pace, after being introduced to it by parents of children at the school who were members of his cycling club. He hasn't looked back since.
It probably comes as no surprise that Hall is an advocate of taking on fitness challenges – but he emphasises that now, January, is a particularly good time to set them. “It gives you something to motivate yourself with and something to focus on. It makes sense doing it in January at a time when there might not be a lot going on.”
Isn't the weather a bit bleak at this time of year to go out on bike rides? Hall counters that it's the ideal moment to start exercising, because “the weather’s only going to get better as the year goes on, and you’re going to be feeling amazing by the summertime.”
Hall is a living testament to those words. Like many of us, weight loss was a key motivator for him when he first came to endurance exercise. He was 18 stone 12 lbs in 2012, and now weighs over six stone less – 12st 2lbs – although he adds that his weight has yo-yoed dur to cycling. After the 107km for 107 days challenge in 2016, he says his body went into "survival mode" and he piled on three stone. He lost it through a combination of getting back on his bike and eating more carefully. Today Hall trains between 10 and 20 hours a week, and eats a lot of salads with lentils and pulses for sustenance.
Such an intense exercise regime can, unsurprisingly, take a toll on Hall’s mental health. He says he particularly suffered during the 107 day challenge, when he was waking up at 4.30am to cycle for three hours before work, then doing the rest of his training after work. “That challenge pushed me to breaking point, and not just physically,” he says. “Because I was spending so much time out in the dark, and then being in an office all day, I wasn’t getting enough natural light. So as the days ticked by I started to struggle with depression.”
Hall says he still struggles “on and off” and had a “big wobble” last year. “I put a lot of pressure on myself and it was really getting to me,” he says.
When this happens, his solution is to “get back to just riding a bike and not training. When I’m feeling down, the best thing to sort my head out is to go for a bike ride. Just go and enjoy it, don’t even think about it.”
“I do all the training and things to help me get faster and fitter, but essentially I enjoy riding my bike.”
Chris Hall has registered to take part in Red Bull Timelaps as part of Red Bull’s New Year New Challenge. For more information or to sign up and take part in Red Bull events please visit here