In almost every call I’ve had for this show, my guest has listed ‘mental health benefits’ among the reasons they love cycling - but if they’re like me, they’re probably leaving a lot of the potential benefits on the table.

I’ve found peace on my rides, challenged myself, forced myself to confront weaknesses, but then got back home, had a shower, and moved on. What Mark Smith does for his clients, and for disadvantaged youth, is use those same experiences as live learning opportunities, and providing tools to transfer the lessons learned into our ‘real’ lives.

In this episode of The Most Fun You Can Have on a Bike, I speak to Mark about his cycling history, about learning from cycling, and about adventure coaching.

When I was a kid, in South Africa in the ‘80s, there was a gravel BMX track next to the local sports fields. After a few years of destroying our knees and elbows, it disappeared and we migrated to road and mountain bikes - but it turns out BMX itself lived on.

Jon Kearns is an Australian freestyle BMX’er who got into the sport as it revived itself in the early 2000s, and now it's a few weeks away from its Olympic debut.

In this episode of The Most Fun You Can Have on a Bike, I speak to Jon about that riding for the love of the sport, the value of community, and freestyle BMX’s path to professionalism.

At the start of the global COVID lockdown, professional cyclists seemed to catch a bug for ‘Everesting’, the challenge to cycle a single hill as many times as necessary to accumulate the equivalent height of Mount Everest, or 8,848 vertical meters.

Phil Gaimon brought it to my attention in May 2020 when he set the first sub-8 hour time in a world record he held for all of 4 days, before losing it to Keegan Swenson. By the end of July that same year, Keegan had lost it to Lachlan Morton who’d lost it to Alberto Contador who’d lost it to Ronan McLaughlin!

So, in that regard, Warwick Gill was a man ahead of his time when, in 2012, he did a Kilimanjaro’ing.

True, at 5,895m tall, Kilimanjaro is a chunk shorter than the ‘Goddess of the Valley’, but where the others rode lightweight carbon up the smooth tarmac of their local hills, Warwick had to get his 17kg trike all the way to Kenya, and then up some pretty rough dirt tracks to the peak of the mountain itself!

In this episode of The Most Fun You Can Have on a Bike, I speak to Warwick about that ride up Kilimanjaro, about training low to the ground on Johannesburg’s sometimes chaotic roads, and about the value of chasing difficult goals.