This cyclist rode a record 612 miles in 24 hours — and it left him wanting more

Matthew Lefthand hunches over his Cruzbike V20c — billed as the fastest recumbent bicycle on the market — with a tape measure in his garage. He uses a piece of black electrical tape to mark a spot on the angular frame that he wants to fine tune for a better fit to his body. It’s a 2 mm adjustment.

Every millimeter makes a difference for an endurance cyclist like Lefthand, a 33-year-old marriage and family therapist in South Ogden, Utah, who last month became the first American and second person in the world to ride a jaw-dropping 600 miles — 612.38 to be exact — in a 24-hour time trial format. More on that later.

“This was the first time in any race event, worldwide, that anyone has surpassed 600 miles on any unfaired two-wheeled bike, upright or recumbent,” said Bike Sebring race director Larry Oslund. Unfaired means the bike is fully exposed to the air without coverings or fairings to make it more streamline.

Every pound makes a difference, too. Six years ago Lefthand’s 6-foot 1-inch frame carried 270 of them. How he found himself pedaling the 3.66-mile Bike Sebring course in Florida for 167 laps to set the record is a remarkable journey of discovery. And he’s just getting started. As a kid he always wanted to hike to the top of the next mountain.

“My slogan is ‘No Limits Left.’ And it’s not because we are completely limitless, it’s because we put too many limits on ourselves or society puts too many limits on ourselves or we were raised to think a certain thing is possible or not possible, and you really don’t know until you get out there and try,” Lefthand said during an indoor training session on a rain-drenched March afternoon.

Known as “Lefty” in the endurance cycling world, he changed his last name from Johnson to Lefthand to honor his Navajo heritage.

Ultracycling traces its origin to the late 19th and early 20th centuries in France. It picked up some momentum in 1982 in the U.S. with Race Across America, covering roughly 3,000 miles coast-to-coast. Today, ultracycling is any bicycle ride that is more than 125 miles in length or six hours in duration, completed as a single effort. Most races are much longer, according to the World Ultra Cycling Association.

Austrian Christoph Strasser holds the world record for a 24-hour distance of 637.66 miles, set on a closed-loop track on an air base in 2021 riding a standard time trial bike with “aerobars” that allow riders to lean forward and rest their forearms to create a more aerodynamic position. Lefthand is coming for him. According to Cruzbike co-founder Jim Parker, who helped crew for him in Florida, Lefthand is “built to smash every ultracycling record.”

But that wasn’t in Lefthand’s life plan. He intended to become an ultrarunner. Cycling never dawned on him — until it did.

A weight-loss journey

Through college at Weber State and grad school at Oklahoma State, Lefthand slowly started adding pounds. He always liked running and hiking but the added weight made it more difficult. When his wife Bailey became pregnant with their first child in 2020, they discussed what kind of parents they wanted to be. Being a healthy, active family ranked high.

They followed the Clean Simple Eats program to the letter. And he started training for marathons. He’d shed 100 pounds by the time he ran the St. George Marathon in October 2021. After a “really good” winter of training, he ran the Ogden Marathon in the spring fast enough to qualify for the Boston Marathon. Come summer he was running 70 to 80 miles a week.

And then the overuse injuries started to pile up. Ankle and knee problems were too painful to push through. He decided to take two weeks off to heal. It left him depressed.

“I remember sitting in my living room looking at the mountain being like, ‘I should be out there. I should be active,’” he said. “I was wanting to get into ultras and stuff like that and run the mountains.”

Perhaps Lefthand has his brother to thank for what happened next. His brother had stored his mountain bike in Lefthand’s garage. Lefthand took it for a two-hour spin on the farm roads in west Weber County. He discovered cycling fit him well — and didn’t hurt. He bought a road bike at a local shop, and within a couple weeks did a 100-miler. He had no idea a century ride is a big deal for recreational cyclists.

Then someone suggested he try LoToJa. “What’s that?” was his initial reaction to the 208-mile race from Logan, Utah, to Jackson, Wyoming. Cyclists typically train for months to ride it. He thought it was crazy given he was about a month into cycling and the race was a month away. But after a few more long rides, he thought it might be fun.

“And it was like the worst and best thing I ever did,” Lefthand said.

Lefthand had never ridden in a group or in a pace line. He had no clue about drafting or cycling etiquette. He mostly rode alone that September day because he was so uncomfortable. But he put up a respectable time. He paid for not knowing about electrolytes when he had the worst leg cramps of his life later that night. He lay in the bathroom, wanting to cry.

At the same time, he was already plotting his return. He rode with the fastest group the next year, shaving about two hours off his previous time. That was the beginning of biking. Wanting more continues to drive to him.

Training body and mind

Over the past three years, Lefthand has trained about 25 hours a week, mostly using the training platform Zwift in a room at the back of his garage where other bikes hang from the ceiling and assorted bike parts and ripped cycling bibs adorn the cement walls. Nasty road rash and two broken collar bones from crashes haven’t slowed him down.

On most of those training rides and even races, Lefthand casts a solitary figure turning over the pedals mile after mile, hour after hour. It’s as much a mental game as it is physical, maybe more so.

“I’ve worked really hard to create a positive environment in my own mind where I don’t mind being with just myself. I don’t mind being lost in my own thoughts. I give myself a lot to think about because I’m constantly studying bike stuff or race stuff or family stuff or mental things,” he said.

“I think that’s another thing that sets me apart is being able to do this because I have a very active mind that likes to think through things. And so it’s actually very pleasant for me to have all that time to think through life things. I do a lot of math to keep myself busy and I like being active like that, so I’m doing, ‘How much do I need to eat?’ or ‘How fast do I need to go to get this time?’ or ‘Have I had enough electrolytes?’ or ‘What’s my average speed for the past hour?’”

Sleep really isn’t an option when he’s chasing a record. He got as much rest as possible and cut out caffeine 10 days before Sebring. He took caffeine again every few hours during the night portion of the ride. He’s had to train his stomach as much as his muscles. He consumed 700 calories an hour in liquid form, no solid food, during the race.

“The most difficult part of ultra-distance races is overcoming the auto-quit trigger your brain has at so many points — whether that’s the desire to eat or sleep, or to keep going after attaining certain goals," he said.

Lefthand has found a recipe for success.

He shattered course records at the Hoodoo 500, an ultracycling race in southern Utah, and the Race Across the West, an 862.8-mile race from Oceanside, California, to Durango, Colorado, with more than 45,000 feet of elevation gain. Both of those were on upright bikes. He also holds world records in other outdoor and virtual indoor races.

Last August, Cruzbike approached Lefthand about racing a recumbent bike. He wasn’t interested until the company explained it can be more comfortable, less stressful on his body and potentially faster because it’s more aerodynamic than an upright bike. The learning curve was steep but he figured how to balance on his back and through trial and error adjusted the frame to fit him.

“Every cyclist knows it’s fun to go fast,” he said. “It’s really fun to just cruise, and this bike you can just go fast in a comfortable position and that’s really fun.”

In addition to the front-wheel drive recumbent bike, he’ll ride his road bike and his gravel bike in what he a calls “A-goal” events this year.

Bike-life balance

As a husband to Bailey and father of two boys, 5-year-old Leland and 3-year-old Theodore, Lefthand finds balancing family, work and long-distance cycling isn’t easy. His training rides were mostly early in the morning or late at night. His therapy practice takes a lot out of him emotionally.

“He’s in this place where he’s helping people out of dark holes, and then the second half of the week he’s on this completely other side of the spectrum, going after like the craziest thing you could do. And that’s a really hard thing to live in — in between," Bailey Lefthand said.

Lefthand now has sponsors who pay him for appearances at events and to use their products. But he’s always looking for more. He’s pulling back on being a therapist to make cycling his primary source of income for the next few years.

“It’s kind of gotten to the point where it’s like, this just feels right and it feels like the opportunity is there. And it’s just as, I think, helpful to people because I do like being in a helping field where I’m helping people work through their issues, where this kind of inspires people to go out there and push themselves and see what they can accomplish,” he said.

“I never thought I’d be able to do this. I just kind of happened into it. And I think that people have that in their life, something that they don’t know that they’re good at or that fits them or suits them. And we just kind of get in ruts and do our same thing, and if we kind of branched out maybe we’d find something that would set us free a little bit.”

And it will be a family affair. “We decided early on that if we were going to chase it seriously, that we were going to do it all together,” said Bailey Lefthand, who crews for her husband in his races while the boys cheer on their dad.

So, in February the Lefthands and their two boys along with all their gear piled into a Ford Transit camper van and trailer wrapped in an orange and blue Cruzbike logo and headed for Sebring, Florida. They were on the road for 18 days, with some sightseeing along the way.

Recording-setting ride

Lefthand rode the 24-hour Bike Sebring event in 2025, setting an American distance record of 576.19 miles on a standard time trial bike, shocking race organizers. A year later, he wanted to hit at least 600 miles on the recumbent bike. Was Strasser’s record in sight?

About six hours into the race, Lefthand felt pain in his arch. He tried to ignore it. But cramping in his calf and knee followed. He determined it stemmed from the position of his cleat on his clip-in pedals. It was probably only a millimeter or two off. After texting back and forth with Bailey for 30 minutes about the parts he would need to fix the problem, they realized they didn’t have them.

Fortunately, others at the event working like a NASCAR crew were able to swap out his pedals while he changed shoes to get him back on the road. In all, including that “long” stop and nutrition breaks, Lefthand was off the bike for only 14 minutes during the 24 hours.

The relief only lasted an hour or so. And while his calf ached, his mind started making different calculations. Maybe 560 miles was enough. No one was going to top that on this day anyway. He went 576 last year. But 600 was only an hour away. He’d done so many training sessions. Was he going to give up now?

“And so I was like, ‘You’re going to bike to the end, I guess,’” he said.

Lefthand didn’t set a new world record, but finished at 612.37 miles, an average speed of 25.5 mph. His last full lap was his fastest of the day at 28.4 mph.

“It’s just kind of another testimony to myself that you can do more than you think,” he said. “When you think you’re done or you think you don’t have anything left in the tank, you can go past it.”

Oslund expects nothing less. “Knowing Mathew personally, I know he is capable and will not stop until he rides over 600 miles on his upright bike in the near future: I’m thinking Bike Sebring 2027.”

And so, no doubt, is Lefthand.