Cheers Dom, Looked weird seeing it in the big, pink paper version. Tom (the FT travel editor) didn't want to write it from a performance perspective but he got round in sub 8.5 hours which we were pretty pleased with on 10 weeks preparation.
His previous experience on a bike was typically fleet-street journalist... any ride of over 2 hours was considered such a major achievement that he'd spend the rest of the day in the pub celebrating, so there were a lot of lifestyle changes involved as well as the training.
The other guy, Mike, he refers to in the article is the travel editor for the Guardian who also completed the challenge and is writing a similar feature in that paper. Mike was your typical 'have-a-go' type but at 85kg+ not very suited to the Marmotte. Mike has threatened to take my life as soon as he can find me after he got round the course in 10 hours - so should be interesting to see how his story compares