Lachlan Morton, former World Tour professional and now ultra-distance racing legend, is sitting in a brightly-coloured, plastic paddling pool filled with ice water. His wife, Rachel Peck, after helping him take off his shoes and socks, runs her fingers through his hair before fetching him something to eat.
“You look a little zooted,” she says with a gentle laugh; a hollow-eyed Lachlan raising a smile before responding, “I’m fucked, mate.”
This particularly poignant scene—towards the middle of his record breaking circumnavigation of Australia by bike—is just one of many in the recently released film The Great Southern Country that underscore Rachel’s supporting role in helping her husband cover 14,210 km in just shy of 31 days. A fascinating balancing act of managing the logistics of a record attempt with the perfectly understandable concern of seeing a loved one push themselves to the very limit of their endurance.
“What’s funny is you can’t put your arms round them and complain how what they’re doing is so fucking hard. Because they’ve got to do exactly the same thing the next day. So there is this requirement to hold things together.”
And holding things together appears to be Rachel’s forte; her film persona suggesting she is just the right kind of personality—calm, quick to laugh and always ready with a smile—that you would be happy to spend a month with, on the road, cooped up in an RV. The nice girl, I suggest, that’s referenced in her Instagram bio?
“People that know me well,” Rachel explains with a laugh, “know that I can be, not a bitch, but pretty goofy and not exactly normal. So I just thought describing myself as nice would be funny.”
Recently returned home after her Antipodean odyssey but with another flight to catch in the morning for a trip to Mexico, I’m guessing there’s not really such a thing as a typical day?
“Things kind of happen in blocks. We’ll be in one place for three months or so, and then we’ll be somewhere else. But when we are back in the States, a typical day involves me working from home as a graphic designer. But that’s all mixed up with some hiking, Pilates, or a run as a way of getting out and about. And I love to spend time with Lach when he’s at home. We love to cook together and just hang out. Home is our downtime because when we’re away on a trip, there’s usually a lot happening.”
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With this mention of her graphic design career, Rachel is quick to acknowledge her father as encouraging all her childhood creative endeavours.
“As well as a passion for music, he had a huge collection of graphic design and cartoon books. Things like Robert Crumb—which I guess was pretty inappropriate for my age back then—but I loved all that stuff.”
Growing up in Sydney, the urban environment meant Rachel never developed a particularly strong connection with nature. And it was the move to Port Macquarie as a teenager—coincidently where Lachlan grew up—that proved to be her first introduction to a more rural setting.
“It was quite a shift from city living where the sound of passing cars would lull me to sleep. The nearest thing we got to a traffic jam in Port Macquarie was cows crossing the road.”
High school proved problematic; worries over not being able to get into university not helped by Rachel skipping class. Begging her parents to put her into a private school—with the sole purpose of getting good marks—as she attended her first classes, Rachel noticed this quiet, retiring young man.
“That’s where I first met Lach but we never actually hung out or spoke much. Just the occasional passing encounter until, on my friend’s birthday, she insisted I go out to celebrate. I said I couldn’t because I had to revise for an exam but she’d stolen another girl’s ID and was insisting I agree after all the effort she’d gone to. So we went out and I bumped into Lach and that’s when we finally started to talk and get to know one another.”
Spending all their holidays hanging out together, things came to a head when Lachlan had to leave for the States to join his racing development team.
“I found that a bit of a shock,” Rachel reminisces, “and I think he was nervous about telling me. Because I only found out two weeks before he was due to leave. And my initial thought was maybe he didn’t think what we had was that serious. But he was emailing me constantly from the team camp and we’d talk over Skype so it was clear our relationship was important.”
“We had a couple of years with huge stretches without seeing each other,” Rachel continues. “Sometimes up to six months when we were balancing his race schedule with my university studies. Which is really funny because now, if he’s away for two weeks, we’ll be complaining it’s too long.”
Maintaining their relationship at the opposite ends of numerous time zones, Lachlan had now moved to Girona, Spain, where Rachel joined him for a holiday.
“It was obvious when I arrived that he wasn’t doing very well. It seemed to me that he was struggling to find a deeper purpose than just race results—feeling quite isolated from the other World Tour professionals—and questioning whether he really wanted to keep racing. So I was really feeling for him and asked what would make it better. And he came right out and suggested I be there with him. Figuring that I could still work remotely, I said okay, I’ll do it.”
A leap of faith, as Rachel now describes it, but one that immediately prompted Lachlan to call his brother Gus to tell him the news.
“What was I thinking?” Rachel quips with a laugh. “It was a case of, oh wow, I guess we’re actually doing this. But when I got back to Australia at the end of my holiday and told my family and friends, I don’t think people really believed I would go through with it until I started selling my furniture.”
Marrying when they were both 22—Rachel playfully refers to herself as a child bride—life soon settled down to a mix of freelance projects and race-day spectating from the finish line. An ever-so-slightly arm’s length connection with Lachlan’s professional career that was turned on its head when the Australia record attempt was first mooted.
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“The project kind of grew organically. Partly because Lach is given a lot of freedom and encouragement by his team EF Education-Oatly with regard to choosing his calendar and the things that he does. And Lach being Lach, he likes to do something quite epic at least once a year. So we had all these ideas floating around until we finally landed on Australia. And then I said that I’d like to join him on the record attempt in a support role. Because when would I ever get to see Australia like that otherwise?”
Because of the time involved in circumnavigating a whole country, Lachlan was keen to build a team he would feel super comfortable with; the first person on his list being his brother, filmmaker Angus Morton.
“I knew that if Gus agreed to film it,” confirms Rachel, “Lach would definitely be up for giving it a go.”
Watching the resultant feature-length film—cleverly balancing shots of Lachlan on the road with his support team’s daily duties—it very quickly becomes apparent that plans had to be constantly adapted on the fly. And that Rachel’s own routines—and especially her sleeping—gradually shifted to match Lachlan’s ride schedule.
“What was funny—because everyone else had these very defined roles—was that at the beginning of the trip I really thought I’d just keep myself busy helping out wherever I could. Tom Hopper was the mechanic and also drove the RV, Graham Sears was the coach and kept on top of all the numbers, Gus and his crew were filming, Karter Machen was taking photographs, Athalee Brown was on physio and massage. But then almost from the off, I became responsible for booking each night’s accommodation, figuring out where Lach was at any given moment, what the wind patterns were and how that would help or hinder his progress. So there I was, acting as the logistics manager, until the final week when I added Lach’s PR manager to my list of things to do. By that point—and I think you can see it in the film—he was super sleep deprived but I was telling him he had to talk to this or that journalist. And all that meant I had to research which towns we would pass through that would have cell reception.”
Referencing the inevitable tiredness that accrues from riding an average of 450 km a day—and acknowledging the inherent risk involved in racing bikes—I’m wondering if Rachel found these emotions difficult to manage or whether she was simply able to trust and believe in Lachlan’s abilities to be okay?
“I totally trust Lach’s decision making. But that only carries you so far and there were so many other factors beyond his control. And towards the end I was starting to feel really nervous about the trucks and the traffic. To such an extent that, in the final few days, I couldn’t shake this feeling of nervousness and I was sleeping less than Lach.”
Not that there weren’t plenty of laughs along the way; Rachel posting a series of very entertaining Instagram reels that suggested some of the stopovers were a little rough and ready.
“By the end of the first day we were in a different state. So that blew my mind because we were moving at warp speed. And then as soon as we got north into Queensland, most of the camping sites were unpowered and the facilities were limited to say the least. I was convinced that I would get bed bugs and did question whether a prison cell would be more comfortable. Some of the places where we stayed didn’t have windows, others did have an air-conditioning unit but it was dripping onto the bed.”
All part and parcel of life on the road, I suggest, and soon forgotten when Lachlan did finally roll to a stop with the accompanying sense of elation that the challenge was done and dusted?
“You know what’s funny? There wasn’t any sense of surprise because I always knew he’d break the record. I never doubted that for a second. But there was a little hint of sadness because, whenever he finishes these types of endurance rides, it can feel quite anticlimactic. Not in a this sucks way, but unlike other sporting events where there’s a podium and a big party, Lach just wants to go to sleep.”
As to the question of what next, Rachel does mention in the film that this might be her last big adventure before starting a family.
“Going on this record breaking journey together, it brought home to both of us how great Australia is. It’s always been in the back of our minds that we’ll move back there at some point. But after finishing the trip, maybe that will happen a little sooner than we thought?”
Not that Lachlan doesn’t have other, non-cycling talents, I suggest with tongue firmly in cheek, referencing a potential future in comedy with his CEO sketches. Wearing a shirt, tie and an oversized suit, the spoof promotional video he presents for the Pretty Great Instant coffee company he fronts, sees Lachlan deadpan a bleeped-out Big Fucking Sale before Rachel’s off-camera correction—that’s Black Friday Sale—can be heard.
“The operation is me, him and the big suit,” she qualifies with a broad smile. “So Lach is my victim for all that. There’s a lot of me begging him to put on the big suit before bossing him around for a few hours.”
This explanation of Rachel’s creative control over Lachlan’s CEO alter-ego is momentarily interrupted by what sounds like construction work in the next room. Which makes sense as Rachel had previously asked to bring our call an hour earlier and prompting me to ask about her concept of home. Born and raised in Australia before spending time living in Europe and now resident in California, is it people, places or belongings that anchor her to one particular location?
“It’s definitely not belongings,” she answers immediately with an upward glance to take in the room. “The way we move around makes me so indifferent to owning a lot of stuff. To such an extent that we’ve lived in this house for over a year and it’s shocking how little furniture we have. And Lach is like me but even more of a minimalist. But to answer your question, Lach feels like home. And for me, that’s enough.”
Which brings us nicely to their recent 10 year wedding anniversary. And whether, after all the adventures, travels and relocations, they’re still the same two people that met and fell in love?
“I think so for sure. Because the more time we spend together, just the two of us, the more we develop this very small gang mentality that reflects the freaks that we are. And that only keeps on getting deeper and deeper. The way we talk and are with each other when we’re alone almost has its own language. So I guess you could say that we’re pretty codependent.”
All photography by Karter Machen / kartermachen.com
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