Impossible, you’d think. No normal person would contemplate riding all the trails at the Golfie in just one day. No person who’d ever been there and ridden them, that is.

Only now Santa Cruz rider and Tweed-valley local Mark Scott has done it, ticking off the Golfie’s 44 marked trails, spanning nearly 150km of pedalling and 8,297 m of climbing, on one single ride. Well, you can’t say he didn’t know what he was letting himself in for. With some of the best mountain bike routes in the world ticked off, the latest edit from Santa Cruz takes you along for the journey. Honestly it’s a great watch.

The Golfie hosts some of the UK’s best riding, but you wouldn’t want to tackle all 44 of them in one day… Mark Scott did though

The statistics of Mark’s achievement alone are impressive. Innerleithen is steep, so there’s no soft pedalling right to the top. The hill rises to over 600m too, while the Scottish weather is famously unpredictable, as you can see in the edit.

But raw numbers tell only half the story, the trails range from mellow to EWS-level intense. And then there are those trails too hard, too steep or too slippy for the EWS. Mark had to ride all these, with ever increasing fatigue, and in various disgusting looking conditions. Including night. Like so many epic feats of achievement in cycling, the mental effort must have been the hardest part.

Riding on your own for 20 hours is no one’s idea of fun, but for this epic feat Mark had support from the mtb community

The edit starts with the final act. We see Mark in bits. “I’m pretty wrecked. Everything Is quite sore. I feel hungover. Everything is a bit sensitive.” If you’re not familiar with Mark, he’s a former World Cup downhiller turned EWS racer, and an Inners local.

Then the edit tells the story of the ride, totting up the elevation and mileage and counting down the trails left to cover. The best thing about the edit is seeing Mark experience the highs and lows of the journey, and how the riding community supports and encourages him. You actually feel like you can feel the pain he’s going through. Of course he makes it the end, with that many people watching he had to! But the edit tells us that it was a near-run thing.

Why is he so keen to do it? In Mark’s own words and perhaps inspired by Edmund Hillary, “to see if it was possible.”

The hard times

Top YouTube comments

@dwaco_films: The legend of Marky continues to grow. What an effort!

@euanbegbie: Absolutely crazy man! The golfie rules!

@LiveToRideMTB: Loved that Markey! Great filming, loved the style filming & editing. And enjoyed seeing the challenge unfold. Can’t wait to see more!