As far as father and son bonding trips go, George and Josh Kohler’s recent bike-based excursion must be right up there. In fact, it lasted 400 days, covered 30,000km and 30 countries, and bagged them three Guinness World Records. Which beats a few hours at the pub, I suppose.
Listen to the road.cc Podcast on Apple Podcasts
Listen to the road.cc Podcast on Spotify
Listen to the road.cc Podcast on Amazon Music
In early May, the Norfolk duo made national headlines when they finished their 13-month-long around-the-world cycle, becoming the first father and son ever to complete the globe-trotting feat, raising over £70,000 for UNICEF in the process.
When George and Josh rolled back into their home village of Halvergate, accompanied by a 70-strong peloton comprised largely of strangers, they were greeted by a crowd of around 100 well-wishers, as well as a snazzy blue-suited official from Guinness.
That official duly presented the pair with three certificates confirming their status as the fastest father and son duo to circumnavigate the world by bike, as well as the new record-holders for the longest bike journey by a father and son and the most countries visited in a continuous bicycle journey by father and son.
Of course, they’re the only father and son so far to have – officially, in the eyes of Guinness at least – circumnavigated the globe by bike together. But hey, someone had to do it first. And who knows, maybe their successful attempt will open the floodgates for cross-generational family ultra-cycling feats?
“Good luck to them!” dad George laughs, when I ponder whether their new record will inspire a host of challengers. Not that the pair have really had the time to fully appreciate the scale of what they’ve accomplished, however.
“It hasn’t sunk in yet. It almost seems as if it was another world that kind of happened in our dreams,” George, who served in the military for almost three decades before setting up a chimney-sweeping business, told the road.cc Podcast.
“We’re trying to get back to normality, but our feet still haven’t hit the ground. There’s so much going on. But it just seems to be something that happened in the distant past now.”
The pair haven’t just spent the last month reminiscing. They’ve been busy selling specially designed T-shirts to raise money for UNICEF, while also working on a book and film based on their experiences. Josh has also caught the travel bug and has joined our video call from Lombok, Indonesia. His dad, meanwhile, is busy working through a year-long to-do list of household chores.
Considering they’ve just returned from an 18,000-mile bike ride, it’s hard to believe that both Josh and George were, in their own words, “complete novice” cyclists just five years ago. In fact, their cycling adventures first stemmed from their shared love of adventure, rather than cycling.
When Josh was still in sixth form, the Northern Irish adventurer Leon McCarron gave a talk at his school, inspiring the youngster to read McCarron’s book, ‘The Road Headed West’, about his 6,000-mile cycle between New York and Seattle.
“I read the book and thought that sounds like fun. Why don’t we give that a go?” he says. “So I told dad the idea and we agreed that we were going to attempt to cycle across the US.
“The only problem was we didn’t own bikes at this point. We’ve never really cycled. The most we’d cycled was to school and back, and that was about that.
“After a lot of research we bought two bikes and started training. I think the first ride we went out for about 10 miles and came back and couldn’t walk. We knew it was going to be a long process to get up to a standard where we could continuously cycle 60-plus miles a day.
“But over the next year we trained every weekend, went out on rides, and then the next summer we cycled from Land’s End to John O’Groats as our first sort of multi-day trip and that was just fantastic. That gave us the confidence that we could do a long-distance trip.
“So about nine months later, we flew to New York and then cycled across to San Francisco, which took us about 80 days. That was just amazing, such an incredible trip. And the US just blew us away with all of its scenery, the people. We just really enjoyed that.
“We came back from that and both kind of went our separate ways. I started traveling. And then about two years ago, we came back together and thought, well, what can we do next? What’s bigger and better?
“Originally we planned to fly to Singapore and cycle home. But then after a little bit of research, we thought, well, if we just add a couple more continents on, we can make it around the world.”
View this post on Instagram
And that’s exactly what they did. It wasn’t easy, of course. A cracked frame in Turkey and a series of customs delays almost put a halt to their record attempt before it had really got going, only for the pair to be rescued – naturally – by Josh’s mum, carrying a new Trek.
“Mum managed to find the only frame left in the UK that was the right size,” Josh says. “She drove down to London and picked it up and then flew with it out to Tbilisi. She got there with the frame and we managed to get it swapped out.
“And because of our Guinness World Records, we were only allowed to stay still for 14 days. So we were close to the deadline. Mum, she’s the glue.”
There was also the battered bottom bracket in the middle of nowhere, Kazakhstan. The relentless hills of Brazil. The brutal nothingness and energy-sapping headwinds of Australia (“we cycled for 60 days in Australia and only five of those days we had the wind behind us, which didn’t help”).
And, most gruellingly, the long, two-day slog up a gravelly mountain pass in Kyrgyzstan and the slapstick descent that followed it, featuring a swarm of bees and Josh dropping his bike on his foot, an experience ultimately saved by a much-needed ice cold Fanta at the bottom.
After all that, has their around-the-world ride strengthened their father and son bond?
“You’re spending so much time just with one person, especially when it’s your dad,” Josh says.
“You get at each other, you have your little arguments and everything. But now that’s all forgotten and being able to appreciate that time, I mean it’s priceless being able to spend such an incredible time with him. I learned so much from him and I would always be forever grateful that he took that time to do this with me.
“It was the most amazing thing we’ve ever done and I’m so glad that we got to share that together.”
“It wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows,” George concurs. “We did have a few sort of tense moments with each other over the course of the trip. But what for me has been hugely rewarding is to see the way Joshua grew over that year. To be faced with some pretty tough challenges and pretty tough decisions, that he took on board and took on head on.
“And to come out the other end of it a very different person with a far more focused and much more rounded approach to life and a greater awareness. There’s nothing like travel that will help you understand different cultures and people, and he’s absolutely lapped that up.”
Most importantly, 30,000km later, do they seem themselves as cyclists finally?
“I don’t, to be honest,” says George. “I’m not someone that goes out every day just for a bike ride.
“For us, it was a means to an end. Really the focus was on the travelling and seeing the countries. And the best way to do that, I think, is on a bike.”
“When you’re on a bike, you’re going at a speed where you can cover ground, but you’re not going too fast that you miss things,” adds Josh.
“All your senses are taking in what’s going on around you. And also we found you’re quite vulnerable on a bike, meaning you’re very approachable. Locals come up and speak to you and ask you what you’re doing. You’re more immersed in the cultures than you would be if you’re on a bus or train.
“So I would always say that cycling is the best way to travel.”
As far as cycling advertisements go, it’s not a bad one. Even if they don’t view themselves as cyclists.
The road.cc Podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Amazon Music, and if you have an Alexa you can tell it to play the road.cc Podcast. It’s also embedded above, so you can just press play.
