After riding their bikes around the world for four months, battling through stifling humidity, downpours, and freezing temperatures, contending with puncture-friendly roads, stray dogs, bison, and dealing with long days, aggressive drivers, and an ill-timed collarbone break (caused by one of those aggressive drivers), it turns out Amy and Kyle Hudson still quite like cycling. And each other.
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“I was back on the bike two days after finishing,” Amy tells the road.cc Podcast, a month or so after becoming one half of the fastest ever married couple to circumnavigate the globe by bike.
“I thought that I’d be completely broken and I wouldn’t want to see a bike for at least a month, but actually, I’ve just wanted to ride my bike since we’ve been home. The legs are a little bit heavier than usual after a ride, though.”
“We were so worried about getting home and not wanting to ride the bike,” Amy’s husband Kyle notes. “And we’ve been itching, haven’t we? We still want to ride, so that’s a nice thing.”
“Just not in the rain or in the dark,” laughs Amy. “I’ve not been put off cycling. But I’ll be a fair-weather cyclist for a bit.”
Which is fair enough, really, when you consider what the ultra-cycling couple have been up to this year. On 2 September, the Hudsons returned home to a heroes’ welcome in Derby, 123 days after setting off on their 18,100-mile trip around the world, the biggest, most ambitious bikepacking trip of their admittedly short ultra-cycling careers.
Getting up at 4am, the couple rode until 8pm every night, passing through 20 countries and visiting both hemispheres, with no external support. Averaging 150 miles a day (a number that, bizarrely, crept upwards after Kyle broke his collarbone with two weeks to go in Canada), they ended up finishing 27 days ahead of their own schedule.
And, most importantly, they completed the around-the-world ride 83 days faster than David Ferguson and Caroline Soubayroux’s 2023 exploit, setting new world records for the fastest cycling circumnavigation of the globe by a mixed pair (according to World Ultra Cycling Association’s rulebook), and the fastest around-the-world ride by a married couple, earning them a certificate from Guinness.
“Obviously setting off, you’re full of adrenaline and the first few weeks just went by really quickly,” Amy says, from the comfort of her living room sofa. “But then in the back of your mind, you’re thinking, ‘I’ve got to maintain this for so long. When is this going to kick in? When am I going to feel horrible?’ I think after the first month, we both kind of felt a bit horrible, didn’t we?”
“I think it always takes a little bit to settle in,” adds Kyle. “I found that on a load of the things that we’ve done, you always find you start off feeling a bit rubbish, and then you get into a groove.
“And then because this was so long, it was like up, down, up, down. You get form and then you start feeling a bit rubbish again. Every time we had to take a flight, that’s when we really felt it, when you stopped.”
“You feel quite good once you’ve been going a few hours, you get into a rhythm, but when you stop for a day and take a flight and then the next day starting always just felt horrible. My legs just felt awful. They were trying to stop us,” agrees Amy.
When it came to overriding those ever-louder demands from their legs (copyright Jens Voigt), Amy and Kyle had one simple rule: ride the first 60 miles every day without stopping.
“That was the aim. But always when you got to 120 miles – some days were 200 miles, some were 170 – that last 50 to 60 miles to go, that was always the worst bit,” Amy says. “Because you’d think, this is a whole club ride I’d normally do on a Saturday.
“But then by the end though, we definitely felt good. I think it was just the high of getting back to England.”
“It’s crazy how things can change when you really get stuck in”
The couple’s ascent into the ultra-cycling record books is all the more remarkable when you consider that their cycling journey only began in earnest in 2021, when Kyle bought Amy a bike from Halfords, as a means of helping her mental health. While working as a mental health nurse in the NHS, Amy began suffering with anxiety and eating disorders and was, she says now, “living on the edge”.
Then a 45-mile bike ride with her dad changed everything.
“He planned it, not me. It was up loads of hills and it was awful,” she says. “But because I was so unwell at that time, to a point where I wasn’t really thinking straight, I was having a lot of worries. I constantly felt like something bad was going to happen. It got to a really bad point, basically.
“But then when I went out on my bike with my dad, going up the hills you can’t really worry because all you can do is focus on your breathing and get to the top. So it kind of brought me out of that worry for a little moment of time.
“I can’t think of anything else because all I can think about is pedalling and the rhythm of the bike. And that just really helped me.”
That initial 45-mile ride soon turned into the North Coast 500, one of her dad’s great cycling ambitions, “no cleats, no Lycra, just really basic”, as Amy says.
And within a year, Kyle was roped into this cycling malarky too – not that he was overly prepared for it, either. In 2022, Kyle accompanied Amy from Land’s End to John O’Groats (after agreeing to the challenge while ever so slightly inebriated), cycling the length of Britain in Vans trainers and with a Nike gym bag posing as panniers, strapped to his bike.
Fast forward another three years, and Amy was completing the entire route of the 2025 men’s Tour de France, plus transfers, by herself, covering 6,500km, over some of pro cycling’s most famous, gruelling climbs, in 29 days.
After that, there really was only one challenge left on the fast track ultra-cyclist’s bingo card: riding around the world.
“We joked about it during this year’s ride,” Kyle says, reflecting on their whirlwind five years on the bike. “I remember those early days struggling to 60 miles and thinking this is really taxing.
“And there we are four years later and we’re riding 150 to 200 miles a day. That’s the norm and it’s crazy how things can change when you really get stuck in.”
Talk about getting stuck in. Because despite the wealth of experience they’ve accumulated in such a short space of time, as they made their way around the world, they were thrown into the deep end at times.
There was the day in the United States when they suffered eight punctures, while carrying no spare tubes, prompting some late-night fiddling with puncture repair kits in baking temperatures. There were the stray dogs chasing them in Serbia and Bulgaria (“you could never switch off”) and the “massive, scary” bison, protecting their young from any suspicious-looking round-the-world cyclists, in Canada.
And there were the drivers, the terrible, cyclist-hating drivers. They were everywhere. But especially, Kyle notes, in New Zealand, where a few lorry drivers attempted to shunt them into the metal barriers at the side of the road. Just for existing, he speculates.
Those nerve-shredding near misses eventually came to a climax in Canada, where an overtaking motorist cut across them as they cycled on a bike path just outside Montreal. Amy managed to brake in time, but Kyle had nowhere to go and hit the deck. He knew straight away that his collarbone was broken.
“He wasn’t even apologetic at all,” Kyle says of the motorist who put their record bid in jeopardy. “He only stopped because he was getting a takeaway. We’d ridden 15,000 miles and then he does something stupid like that. I was so angry at him.”
With just 2,500 miles, and two weeks left, it looked like their ride had come to an abrupt halt. But thanks to copious amounts of dogged (perhaps foolish) determination, and with some much-needed help from Amy – including when it came to putting his socks on (“it was disgusting”, his wife notes) – Kyle soldiered on, Tyler Hamilton-style, to the finish.
“When I was on the bike, I was actually more comfortable cruising in one position,” he said, reflecting on that long, painful final stretch.
“But any time you hit anything, a pothole, any slight bump, it’d just be excruciating. And if I got out of the saddle, I’d feel it moving, grinding, and shooting pains all in my shoulder.
“There was one time when, probably a week later, we were going up a hill and my chain jumped and jolted my whole shoulder forward. I was just crying. It brings a tear to my eye now, it was so painful.”
Those tears continued to flow when they returned home to Derby, the world record in the bag.
“He was crying more than me,” Amy laughs. “I think both of us, every day when we finished I’d be in bed, like, ‘oh, thank God we didn’t get hit by a car today and we didn’t come off.
“The last two weeks were just so stressful. It was just nice to finish and be both in one piece and have done it.”
In many respects, it was the solid foundations of their relationship, as well as their yin and yang personalities (Amy likes the mornings and the cold, Kyle likes the night and the heat), which enabled them to power through the more difficult stretches.
“We’ve been together 10 years, so we do know each other pretty well, but you see different sides of each other that you didn’t realise were there, especially in hard times as well, when we look after each other,” Amy says.
“You learn how each other tick and you learn to also be comfortable in silence with each other, which we were already, but you just learn to be comfortable with more than what you realised. And you could be completely yourself and let your anger out, let your happiness out, just all the emotions.
“Because we’re human and you have to let all those emotions out. And sometimes that wasn’t pretty. But we did have a rule where if we had an argument – which we didn’t have many, but it’s obviously going to happen – we have a 20-minute rule where you have 20 minutes after the argument, where you can just have silence, your own time, don’t talk to each other.
“And then after 20 minutes, no matter whether you think you’re in the wrong or not, you both have to say sorry and just forget about it.”
“It was hard for me because I don’t like going 20 minutes. I like to make up straight away,” Kyle laughs.
“Like we always say though, we’re just a normal couple,” Amy says. “We didn’t cycle before 2021, and I do generally believe that if you really want to do something, you can do it.
“You don’t have to have ridden a bike to do these big challenges. Obviously, don’t go out and ride around the world next year!”
Amy and Kyle’s around-the-world ride has helped raise over £75,000 for mental health charities Shout and The Mix. You can visit their JustGiving page here.
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