I was saddened this morning by the news that Brian Lambert, cyclist extraordinaire, had died in Masterton Hospital.
Brian was one of the most remarkable men I ever knew. He died, aged 70, still holding the record for the quickest bike ride ever between Auckland and Wellington: 19 hours, 59 minutes and 27 seconds. He had extraordinary willpower as well as stamina and in his later years refused to allow Parkinson’s Disease to keep him off his bike, despite repeated falls.
I first met Brian when I bought our son a mountain bike from his Masterton shop in the early 1990s. After moving to the town I got to know him better and went on several group mountain-bike rides that Brian organised. He was first and foremost a road cyclist, but that didn’t stop him enjoying a challenging off-road excursion.
On one such trip organised by Brian in 2014, a group of us rode the Heaphy Track. His illness was already well advanced – he’d been diagnosed 12 years earlier – and he crashed repeatedly, finishing the two-day ride covered from head to toe in bruises and abrasions. “Take me out and shoot me,” he said after one gruelling day’s ride. But he bounced back and within a day seemed fully recovered. He was a man of indomitable spirit.
Brian Lambert (with bloodied knee) on the Heaphy Track, 2014.
I bought several bikes from Brian over the years, including an Avanti Competitor mountain bike that was the best bike I ever owned and possibly even the best purchase I ever made.
I'm still reminded of him almost every time I ride the Specialized road bike he sold me - not so much because of the bike itself, but because of the leather Italian seat he later persuaded me to buy. It was expensive, but insurance money paid for it after the previous seat was munted in a pile-up during a race in the Whangaehu Valley.
Brian reckoned it was the best seat available and naturally I believed him. It's still on my bike, but I've always found it a bit uncomfortable and it took me a while to figure out why he recommended it. It's an unusually wide seat that would have suited Brian perfectly because (how can I put this delicately?) Brian's bum was a lot more ample than mine. I guess I'll have to keep it now as a memento, despite the discomfort.
I wrote about Brian in the following story for The Dominion Post, published in 2011 and headlined The Unstoppable Brian Lambert. He will be mourned by Masterton’s large cycling community.
Brian was one of the most remarkable men I ever knew. He died, aged 70, still holding the record for the quickest bike ride ever between Auckland and Wellington: 19 hours, 59 minutes and 27 seconds. He had extraordinary willpower as well as stamina and in his later years refused to allow Parkinson’s Disease to keep him off his bike, despite repeated falls.
I first met Brian when I bought our son a mountain bike from his Masterton shop in the early 1990s. After moving to the town I got to know him better and went on several group mountain-bike rides that Brian organised. He was first and foremost a road cyclist, but that didn’t stop him enjoying a challenging off-road excursion.
On one such trip organised by Brian in 2014, a group of us rode the Heaphy Track. His illness was already well advanced – he’d been diagnosed 12 years earlier – and he crashed repeatedly, finishing the two-day ride covered from head to toe in bruises and abrasions. “Take me out and shoot me,” he said after one gruelling day’s ride. But he bounced back and within a day seemed fully recovered. He was a man of indomitable spirit.
Brian Lambert (with bloodied knee) on the Heaphy Track, 2014.I bought several bikes from Brian over the years, including an Avanti Competitor mountain bike that was the best bike I ever owned and possibly even the best purchase I ever made.
I'm still reminded of him almost every time I ride the Specialized road bike he sold me - not so much because of the bike itself, but because of the leather Italian seat he later persuaded me to buy. It was expensive, but insurance money paid for it after the previous seat was munted in a pile-up during a race in the Whangaehu Valley.
Brian reckoned it was the best seat available and naturally I believed him. It's still on my bike, but I've always found it a bit uncomfortable and it took me a while to figure out why he recommended it. It's an unusually wide seat that would have suited Brian perfectly because (how can I put this delicately?) Brian's bum was a lot more ample than mine. I guess I'll have to keep it now as a memento, despite the discomfort.
I wrote about Brian in the following story for The Dominion Post, published in 2011 and headlined The Unstoppable Brian Lambert. He will be mourned by Masterton’s large cycling community.
In 1984 Brian Lambert rode a bike from Auckland to Wellington. In 19 hours, 59 minutes and 27 seconds. It’s a record that still stands.
It would have been slightly quicker if his bike hadn’t slipped on a greasy railway line that crosses Aotea Quay just one kilometre from his goal, throwing Lambert off. And it would have been quicker still if his support team hadn’t unthinkingly consumed all the food they’d bought at Taumarunui, leaving Lambert with only fluids to get him from Wanganui to Wellington.
They hadn’t bargained on all the shops being closed when they rolled through Wanganui at 5am, he explains, and after that his stomach was no longer in a state to digest solids.
It was an epic ride for which Lambert prepared by going on 290 km solo training rides. Starting from his home town of Masterton late at night, he would complete a loop that took him north to Woodville, through the Manawatu Gorge, south to the Kapiti Coast – where he would stop at a mate’s place for breakfast – and back home via the Akatarawas and the Rimutakas.
For variety he would sometimes do the route in the other direction. When the former Olympic Games cyclist Neil Lyster, in a car, came across a bicycle light piercing the darkness near the lonely summit of the Akatarawa road in the middle of the night, Lambert jokes, “he didn’t have to guess who it was”.
On the wall of Lambert’s bike shop there’s a photo commemorating his Auckland-Wellington ride. It’s the sort of achievement that has made the Masterton man, now 56, something of a legend in cycling circles.
It’s years since he rode competitively – a 1989 Nelson-Christchurch race, which he won in just over 14 hours, was one of his last triumphs – but he continues to cycle recreationally, both on the road and on mountain bikes.
For the past 10 years he has taken part in the stamina-sapping 106km Rainbow Rage mountain bike race from St Arnaud to Hanmer Springs, and every year he rides the 42 Traverse – a 46km route through wild bush country in the Central North Island.
Twice in the past three years he has travelled to France with a group of fellow enthusiasts to ride part of the Tour de France route. On the toughest climbs in the French Alps, he still leaves some of his companions in his wake.
Okay, you might say; he’s just another very fit 56-year-old. But what makes this all a bit unusual is that in 1999, Lambert was diagnosed as having Parkinson’s Disease – a chronic degenerative disorder, caused by a deficiency of the hormone dopamine, that typically causes stiffness, slowness and tremors.
He first noticed something odd when his left leg began twitching during a training ride up the steep Limeworks Hill, east of Masterton. At first he attributed this to an accident on his mountain bike on the Wairarapa coast the previous week, when he hit a sheep and dislocated his shoulder. But when the problem persisted, he visited a specialist. The diagnosis was immediate.
He realised then, with hindsight, that the symptoms had been evident much earlier. In 1990, he had won two veterans’ titles at the national road cycling championships. The following year, he couldn’t even complete one lap of the same event. He noticed that his training rides didn’t seem to be making him any fitter or faster, that he was tiring more easily and taking longer to recover after each ride.
For several years now Lambert has been under the care of Wellington neurologist Stuart Mossman, an authority on Parkinson’s. Happily, Mossman is also a keen cyclist. It was he who invited Lambert to join a cycling trip in France in 2005, confident that the Masterton man was up to it and knowing they had a support van in case of emergency.
Lambert relates that on last year’s 1500km Tour de France ride from Paris to Marseilles, again with a group that included Mossman, he beat half his companions up the 2600m Galibier Pass, finishing the 18 km climb with a sprint.
And he’s still going. On Wellington’s Anniversary Day last month, he was part of a group that completed a punishing six-hour mountain bike ride in withering heat in steep Wairarapa hill country.
Another member of that group, Martinborough winemaker Clive Paton, describes Lambert as an inspiration. Paton knows only too well how debilitating Parkinson’s Disease can be – he watched his father suffer from it for 15 years – and marvels at Lambert’s ability to “ride over the top of it and carry on”.
Like many accomplished sportspeople, the unstoppable Lambert is not entirely helpful when you ask what drives him. He simply says it’s a great feeling to be fit and active. “You might feel scungy at the start of a ride, but you always feel better at the end.”
Mossman describes him as a hero. He confirms that Lambert rode up the Galibier pass like a steam train, leaving two cycling companions “wobbling all over the place” in his wake.
It’s the nature of Parkinson’s that sufferers have good days and bad days, says Mossman, but on good days Lambert is able to out-perform most healthy people his own age. He says there is some evidence that physical exercise is beneficial to people with Parkinson’s, though it has not been well studied.
Personality and attitude can also be important in how people react to the illness, Mossman says, although ultimately “you can’t fight the chemistry of dopamine deficiency”.
Lambert is quietly proud of his achievements, but he’s no boaster. A naturally reticent man with a quiet, wry wit, he speaks slowly and quietly – more so since his illness developed. On the frequent group rides he organises, he’s content to be just one of the bunch.
He says he started riding as a boy in Masterton because it was good way to get around and it gave him independence. He gave it away for several years when he worked on a diamond drilling rig in the Australian Outback but picked it up again when he came back home, entering the Dulux seven-day race from Auckland to Wellington in 1974 and finishing a creditable 26th. He competed in three Dulux events and thinks his best result was 15th.
A thickset man, heavy-boned, he admits he doesn’t have the ideal physique for a cyclist – least of all on hills. But he makes up for it in stamina and mental grit.
And though he never made the top rank of New Zealand cyclists, his endurance rides command respect. In 1984, the same year he set his Auckland-Wellington record, he finished second in an 800-mile (1300km) preliminary qualifying event for a planned race across America.
The race consisted of eight laps around a 100-mile circuit in California in temperatures that ranged from searing heat to near-freezing point, and took him 54 hours. But when he returned to the US to take part in the main event, the sponsors had withdrawn and the promised prize money had evaporated. Faced with the expense of competing and no reward at the end, a frustrated Lambert came home.
Cycling was starting to seem like an unpaid job, he says – and besides, he had a wife and four children to consider.
Lambert opened his bike shop in the mid-1980s and has since seen cycling boom in popularity to the point where 12,000 people take part in an annual ride around Lake Taupo. He has had staunch support from his wife Barbara and recently managed, after 35 years, to coax her into joining him on tandem rides.
Of his illness, he says the symptoms have become steadily worse. Drugs help control the symptoms, though they can’t treat the cause, and medication can create its own problems, such as drowsiness. In the long term, stem cell research holds out the best hope for a cure.
He says he has to be careful not to overdo things and to ride at his own pace. “I’m only as good as my last pill,” he says with a grin.
It would have been slightly quicker if his bike hadn’t slipped on a greasy railway line that crosses Aotea Quay just one kilometre from his goal, throwing Lambert off. And it would have been quicker still if his support team hadn’t unthinkingly consumed all the food they’d bought at Taumarunui, leaving Lambert with only fluids to get him from Wanganui to Wellington.
They hadn’t bargained on all the shops being closed when they rolled through Wanganui at 5am, he explains, and after that his stomach was no longer in a state to digest solids.
It was an epic ride for which Lambert prepared by going on 290 km solo training rides. Starting from his home town of Masterton late at night, he would complete a loop that took him north to Woodville, through the Manawatu Gorge, south to the Kapiti Coast – where he would stop at a mate’s place for breakfast – and back home via the Akatarawas and the Rimutakas.
For variety he would sometimes do the route in the other direction. When the former Olympic Games cyclist Neil Lyster, in a car, came across a bicycle light piercing the darkness near the lonely summit of the Akatarawa road in the middle of the night, Lambert jokes, “he didn’t have to guess who it was”.
On the wall of Lambert’s bike shop there’s a photo commemorating his Auckland-Wellington ride. It’s the sort of achievement that has made the Masterton man, now 56, something of a legend in cycling circles.
It’s years since he rode competitively – a 1989 Nelson-Christchurch race, which he won in just over 14 hours, was one of his last triumphs – but he continues to cycle recreationally, both on the road and on mountain bikes.
For the past 10 years he has taken part in the stamina-sapping 106km Rainbow Rage mountain bike race from St Arnaud to Hanmer Springs, and every year he rides the 42 Traverse – a 46km route through wild bush country in the Central North Island.
Twice in the past three years he has travelled to France with a group of fellow enthusiasts to ride part of the Tour de France route. On the toughest climbs in the French Alps, he still leaves some of his companions in his wake.
Okay, you might say; he’s just another very fit 56-year-old. But what makes this all a bit unusual is that in 1999, Lambert was diagnosed as having Parkinson’s Disease – a chronic degenerative disorder, caused by a deficiency of the hormone dopamine, that typically causes stiffness, slowness and tremors.
He first noticed something odd when his left leg began twitching during a training ride up the steep Limeworks Hill, east of Masterton. At first he attributed this to an accident on his mountain bike on the Wairarapa coast the previous week, when he hit a sheep and dislocated his shoulder. But when the problem persisted, he visited a specialist. The diagnosis was immediate.
He realised then, with hindsight, that the symptoms had been evident much earlier. In 1990, he had won two veterans’ titles at the national road cycling championships. The following year, he couldn’t even complete one lap of the same event. He noticed that his training rides didn’t seem to be making him any fitter or faster, that he was tiring more easily and taking longer to recover after each ride.
For several years now Lambert has been under the care of Wellington neurologist Stuart Mossman, an authority on Parkinson’s. Happily, Mossman is also a keen cyclist. It was he who invited Lambert to join a cycling trip in France in 2005, confident that the Masterton man was up to it and knowing they had a support van in case of emergency.
Lambert relates that on last year’s 1500km Tour de France ride from Paris to Marseilles, again with a group that included Mossman, he beat half his companions up the 2600m Galibier Pass, finishing the 18 km climb with a sprint.
And he’s still going. On Wellington’s Anniversary Day last month, he was part of a group that completed a punishing six-hour mountain bike ride in withering heat in steep Wairarapa hill country.
Another member of that group, Martinborough winemaker Clive Paton, describes Lambert as an inspiration. Paton knows only too well how debilitating Parkinson’s Disease can be – he watched his father suffer from it for 15 years – and marvels at Lambert’s ability to “ride over the top of it and carry on”.
Like many accomplished sportspeople, the unstoppable Lambert is not entirely helpful when you ask what drives him. He simply says it’s a great feeling to be fit and active. “You might feel scungy at the start of a ride, but you always feel better at the end.”
Mossman describes him as a hero. He confirms that Lambert rode up the Galibier pass like a steam train, leaving two cycling companions “wobbling all over the place” in his wake.
It’s the nature of Parkinson’s that sufferers have good days and bad days, says Mossman, but on good days Lambert is able to out-perform most healthy people his own age. He says there is some evidence that physical exercise is beneficial to people with Parkinson’s, though it has not been well studied.
Personality and attitude can also be important in how people react to the illness, Mossman says, although ultimately “you can’t fight the chemistry of dopamine deficiency”.
Lambert is quietly proud of his achievements, but he’s no boaster. A naturally reticent man with a quiet, wry wit, he speaks slowly and quietly – more so since his illness developed. On the frequent group rides he organises, he’s content to be just one of the bunch.
He says he started riding as a boy in Masterton because it was good way to get around and it gave him independence. He gave it away for several years when he worked on a diamond drilling rig in the Australian Outback but picked it up again when he came back home, entering the Dulux seven-day race from Auckland to Wellington in 1974 and finishing a creditable 26th. He competed in three Dulux events and thinks his best result was 15th.
A thickset man, heavy-boned, he admits he doesn’t have the ideal physique for a cyclist – least of all on hills. But he makes up for it in stamina and mental grit.
And though he never made the top rank of New Zealand cyclists, his endurance rides command respect. In 1984, the same year he set his Auckland-Wellington record, he finished second in an 800-mile (1300km) preliminary qualifying event for a planned race across America.
The race consisted of eight laps around a 100-mile circuit in California in temperatures that ranged from searing heat to near-freezing point, and took him 54 hours. But when he returned to the US to take part in the main event, the sponsors had withdrawn and the promised prize money had evaporated. Faced with the expense of competing and no reward at the end, a frustrated Lambert came home.
Cycling was starting to seem like an unpaid job, he says – and besides, he had a wife and four children to consider.
Lambert opened his bike shop in the mid-1980s and has since seen cycling boom in popularity to the point where 12,000 people take part in an annual ride around Lake Taupo. He has had staunch support from his wife Barbara and recently managed, after 35 years, to coax her into joining him on tandem rides.
Of his illness, he says the symptoms have become steadily worse. Drugs help control the symptoms, though they can’t treat the cause, and medication can create its own problems, such as drowsiness. In the long term, stem cell research holds out the best hope for a cure.
He says he has to be careful not to overdo things and to ride at his own pace. “I’m only as good as my last pill,” he says with a grin.
1 comment:
That's a wonderful obituary Karl. I think all of us ageing but active would like to go down fighting like Brian. Not to detract from his extraordinariness.
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