Lachlan Morton pulled off some massive feats in 2024, most staggeringly a dash around Australia which he completed in just over 30 days. So after that what does 2025 hold? In usual Morton style, the answer is something a little different.
The former WorldTour professional with a taste for adventure said that the 14,200km effort he finished in October may have quelled his hankering for those distance-riding extremes for 'a while.'
"Yeah, that was obviously big," Morton told Cyclingnews after RADL GRVL last month, obligingly taking a break from the friendly banter of rivals as they sat around at picnic tables in the shade to compare tales of the race.
"I mean I'm back at a racing level now but it took a lot of work from when I finished. I was pretty broken. So just chill on that, I guess, for a little bit."
Another plan is afoot for 2025, with the next big thing being a lot of smaller things and Morton taking on a packed international gravel racing calendar. The 33-year-old, who also won Unbound in 2024, has been somewhat tied to the US events in recent years, having committed to the Life Time Grand Prix Series.
"I enjoyed the Life Time series when I did it, but it feels good to be able to break out of that a bit and experience different events because that's the thing I enjoy most about cycling," he said.
The string of international events started with RADL GRVL in South Australia – his first gravel race in his home nation – where he finished 16th after crashing, and from there, he will move onto the eight-stage Transcordilleras in Colombia from Feb 23 to March 2.
After that, it is expected to be the Hills Gravel in Italy in late March, which will be part of a six-week stint in Europe that includes The Traka. Then it's back to the US for Morton to race Unbound.
"It comes very thick and fast," said Morton.
"Even just to pull off this calendar will be a challenge in itself. It's pretty full-on because I kind of had a long list of events that I wanted to do, thinking that not all of them would be, approved and then they are like 'Yeah, let's do them all'. So it's going to be heaps, which is cool, but, yeah, it's not going to leave heaps of room for anything else."
However, just because there isn’t too much space to do other things doesn’t of course mean there is none.
Morton had already taken on an, as yet, undisclosed adventure on the Saturday before RADL GRVL – which he described as 'a pretty massive ride' – and he was continuing his time in Australia with a more relaxed-sounding bike-packing trip around the familiar territory of Port Macquarie in New South Wales.
And of course, there is also no guarantee as the year progresses that some other ambitious endeavour won’t come along that piques the interest.
"This time last year, I hadn't even planned, the around Australia thing," said Morton. "So there might be something that comes up that I really want to do, and then that becomes the big thing."
