Molly Weaver - Fastest known times

We caught up with Albion ambassador Molly Weaver, after her recent Fastest Known Time (FKT) on the Lakeland 200.

Molly’s an ex-pro roadie turned amateur multi-terrain ultra racer. These days, you’re more likely to find Molly riding on her own in the UK than on the smooth roads of Europe, and she holds a number of self-supported, off road FKTs in the UK.

There’s something about FKT’s that I fell in love with as soon as I started following them. I like the simplicity and relative accessibility of the effort, just one rider and their bike taking on a challenge in often complete isolation. It’s uncomplicated competition in a form that feels positive to me, and it often brings a more complete, personal, story to these kinds of efforts.

I have a difficult relationship with racing, but for some reason I’ve found that attempting to break records has only ever been fun. Perhaps it’s the lack of external pressure.

Without getting too deep, I didn’t retire from my road career with a lap of honour or blaze of glory, it was more of a gradual, unglamorous, decline. I wasn’t the rider I had once been, or perhaps could have someday become, after a serious training accident left me with thirteen broken bones including my back and neck. Perhaps more significantly, I had also been battling depression throughout my last season of racing.

By the end I never wanted to ride a bike again, and for a long time I didn’t.

My transition into the ultra endurance world wasn’t a quick or simple one following my retirement, but I’ll skip the lost years and jump to the moment that I knew I wanted to give this kind of riding a go. I had stopped following the more mainstream forms of cycling, perhaps largely as a form of self preservation, and had become addicted to the dotwatching and storytelling that came from the ultra world. I had a feeling that this could be the arena within which I found myself again.

I wanted joy to always come first on the bike, for everything else to follow that, and choosing your own adventure is an integral part of making that possible. In many ways I’m getting to rewrite the role that cycling plays in my life now; from my downfall to my salvation.

The allure of the Lakeland 200 is hard to explain, it really is something you have to experience to understand. The sheer scale of the landscapes you ride through in a relatively short distance is at times overwhelming, the change of surfaces under wheel continually challenging you, there are no dull moments out there.

I first heard about the route when a group of women set out to get their names on the leaderboard, which requires you to complete the loop in under 40 hours. In the decade that this had been a target, only one woman had done so. They wanted to change that, and they did.

I’m not sure why I thought I could do it too, given that I didn’t own a MTB at the time and had never really ridden one, but I was inspired to give it a shot. One of the good things about an FKT is that it’s a relatively low stakes undertaking, if you get it then great and if not then you’ve still had an epic adventure by bike.

I broke the record for the first time in 2022, took it back again in 2023, and this time I wanted to go two and half hours faster than my original ride and bring the FKT under 20 hours. I’d had this idea in the back of my mind for the past year that it would be cool for the women’s record to break that barrier, which means riding at over twice the pace needed for a coveted spot on the leaderboard.

Ultimately I pulled it off, completing the Lakeland in a time of 18 hours 54 minutes.

It wasn’t a flawless ride by any means. I took a couple of wrong turns, a few spills, got a bit sick towards the end in the heat, and punctured twice. That being said I don’t think I could have shaved much time off out there, in spite of the minor mishaps it felt like one of those days where everything came together. I had good legs, my head was happy, and I had the benefit of experience on my side.

People often ask where the motivation comes from for efforts like this, but I don’t have a good answer for that. It isn’t something objective and tangible, but rather a feeling that you have to follow. I don’t think it’s something you can force, and nor should you, the desire to ride in this way is either there or it isn’t.

All I know is that I love these challenges, and I go wherever that takes me.

The big goal of the year for me was the Transcontinental race (TCR), starting just a couple of weeks after the FKT. The sheer scale of it can’t be underestimated, and the amount of work it takes to even make it to the startline is incomparable to other events that I’ve done. That’s before the small task of crossing Europe, 4000 km from Roubaix to Istanbul, even begins.

You have to know yourself both physically and mentally to prepare well for these things, it’s a balancing act of the two. I’m someone who needs smaller objectives at regular intervals to keep me motivated to ride, get a big training effort in, and give me something else to focus on so I don’t burn out psychologically in the leadup to a target like TCR.

Taking on the Lakeland 200 FKT might not have seemed like the best prep for everyone, but for me it was the right thing to do. It gave me a much needed confidence boost, and there was plenty of time for the ride to trigger a nice rebound in form by the time riders rolled out of Roubaix.

Sadly it wasn't meant to be, and after suffering an accident at home, fracturing my foot and snapping a ligament, I won't be on the start line at TCR this year.

Regardless of what I’d done in the leadup, I don’t think you will ever feel ready for something like TCR. I personally thought I might wait a couple more years before I took it on, but with it being the tenth edition there was promise of it being the biggest and best women’s race to date. The startlist hasn’t disappointed, and it looks like it will be a really exciting battle with the likes of Jana Kesenheimer and Jaimi Wilson also lining up, the dotwatchers are going to have some fun over the next two weeks.

Looking to the future there are definitely some races I still have on my bucket list, and others that I feel I have a degree of unfinished business with, but I think the dream rides for me now are mostly record attempts. First I want to try and take on the length of Europe both on and off road, and then maybe one day it could be the whole world.

I’ve also learnt over the last couple of years that so often the biggest and brightest moments come from unexpected places, and not the objective ‘wins’ as others see them. I finished Trans Pyrenees last year, but it’s the tour that I went on from the finish line with my Dad that holds a really special place in my heart, and during this year’s Atlas Mountain Race I had to put my ambitions to one side when I got ill midway through, but the journey that I went on to still reach the finish line was an incredible one.

There’s beauty in all of this, and leaning into the diverse experiences the bike can bring you is only ever a good thing.