Soreen World Record Attempt

Friday night saw the kick off a 24 challenge to establish a new World Record for “The greatest quantity of electricity generated by pedalling on static cycles for a period of 24 hours. (Electricity is measured in watts)”, spearheaded by Malt Loaf brand Soreen.

Inviting riders to book in on one of fifty wattbikes set up in the centre of Manchester Velodrome, the set up meant that around 1200 hours of cycling would be crammed into the 24 hr attempt (50 bikes x 24 hrs) if fully optimised. I, along with a bunch of riders from North Cheshire Clarion, stumped up en masse to have a crack at some of the sessions and to get the event rocking early doors.

Jumping on for the first session, I went for a warm up and averaged 183 watts output for the first 30 minute session at 5.30pm. I then had an unexpected half hour break and cranked it up for the second session at 6.00pm, achieving an average wattage of 222W and peaking around 360W when I pushed a hard gear for a couple of intervals.

The Wattbikes are great, I blogged about them previously here. This event was a great opportunity for you to measure your power output, whilst doing something for charity and contributing to a world record attempt. As it happened, around 3hrs into the challenge the record of around 12k watts was smashed and with the event still running at the time of writing this, it's already up to around 72K watts, so I can officially call myself a World Record Holder I guess.

It's a great initiative, good for the region, good for the brand. Few small improvements to mention if they do it again: -

1. E-mail confirming that you've booked on, didn't confirm your time, so if you didn't remember, you'd be stuck.
2. I booked a back to back session, 5.00pm and 5.30pm. Turning up, they had no record of this, thankfully I managed to grab a cancelled slot at 6.00pm. Everything was on paper. I wasn't the only one regretably.
   
3. The readings were all recorded manually. You just verbally gave your wattage. Wattbikes can be all fully hooked up via a network and data taken electronically. This would be better in the future as - with big prizes up for stake - anyone could have just lied when submitting their power output to win the prize. Can't see the Guinness Book of Record guys accepting the reliability of that, although I'm assuming the wattbike data will be downloaded and submitted.
   
4. It would have been great display the real time rider data. If the data was being captured electronically, you could see a leaderboard for most watts etc which would have been a real incentive on the day.
5. Thought they might have publicised it a bit better. Great event, shame that more people didn't know about it. They'd being posting on social media but were lacking some of the fundamentals for me like a hashtag to really bring the community of contributors together.
6. Spot prizes like a Soreen cycling top would have been brilliant. Rider with the biggest power in each session wins one.
7. Don't think the website was that well optimised.
   

On the positive side, it's worth mentioning the following: -

1. It was an interesting idea and - as a marketeer - a great alignment between potential market and brand, very newsworthy.
2. It gave a lot of people a free try on a Wattbike.
3. It was open to everyone, you could just book on, so very inclusive.
4. Soreen were donating 5pm for every watt generated, so on the basis that over 72K had been done before the event finish, that should mean £15K ish for the Christie Hospital.
   
5. THE RECORD GOT BROKEN, which is great for that to happen in Manchester and great for all those taking part. Well done to all the fellow record breakers!