Tommy Godwin

On December 31, 1939, Tommy Godwin rode his four-speed steel Raleigh Record Ace a modest sixty miles through cold rain and snow, bringing his 365-day total to 75,065 miles. That shattered cycling’s “year record” by nearly thirteen thousand miles. The next morning, the twenty-seven-year-old Englishman climbed back on his bike and kept riding, en route to one hundred thousand miles, which he completed in May 1940 in an even five hundred days.

Think about that. Godwin averaged a double-century for five hundred consecutive days, on equipment that’s almost laughably primitive by our modern standards, with only modest support, through the cold and dark and damp of two British winters and the outbreak of the Second World War, wearing wool tights and silk knickers, finding his own routes and often his own meals — a seemingly endless train of eggs, cheese, fruit, and bread, washed down with copious amounts of tea and water. Godwin had also become a vegetarian as a teen when a job in a meat-pie factory