This piece has been made in association with Cervélo.
Trigger warning: this feature contains reference to suicide
What’s harder than completing an Ironman triathlon? Completing the Double Brutal – a double Ironman triathlon in which part of the run includes climbing and descending Snowdon? Or completing a sub-12-hour Ironman on the same day as a 1,000lb powerlifting total (a 452lb squat, 267lb bench press and 285lb deadlift if you want to give it a go)? Or doing a 501lb squat then running a sub-five-minute mile and then a marathon in the same day?
Fergus Crawley doesn’t easily fall into any category. He describes himself as a ‘hybrid athlete’, and his sporting journey has taken him from being the sports-mad son of a cricketer father who represented Lancashire and was the English and British Universities captain, into playing rugby, then powerlifting, then, well, a bit of everything, including cycling. The Ironman events and running/powerlifting achievements are part of a quintessentially modern career portfolio: Crawley also coaches, speaks on corporate wellbeing, raises a lot of money for the Movember charity, hosts the Modern Mind podcast which he set up in early 2021 and posts videos on a YouTube channel where more than 40,000 followers view workouts, reviews and monologues of advice in exercise and in life. He’s also reluctantly dabbled in TikTok.
“Athletically, I fall into the marketing category of ‘hybrid athlete’,” Crawley tells Rouleur. “That’s all it is. There’s no league. There’s no judging what’s x and what’s y. I’ve raised just over 100,000 pounds for Movember through campaigns focused around ultra endurance and strength challenges. Along the way, I found out I was quite competent at maintaining that strength alongside building my aerobic base. I’m not good, any more, at any one thing, but I’m at quite a high level of doing more than one thing simultaneously, which is something that cyclists struggle to process.
“A sub-five-minute mile, if you’re a runner, isn’t anything mental, and a 500-pound squat, if you’re a powerlifter, isn’t anything mental, but to be able to do them side by side is where the challenge is. It’s essentially me having fun with my training, because I enjoy doing these things. I’m not putting across a philosophy that this is the way that everybody should train, I’m just a big proponent that people should train for what they enjoy, and not let the…