There’s no shame in occasionally succumbing to the beckoning neon glow of McDonald’s golden arches. Given the right set of circumstances – ie, hungover – nothing quite hits the spot like a large Big Mac Meal with a thick, creamy vanilla milkshake. The slovenly among us will often err on the side of the drive-thru option. And why not? A short 50-metre loop that allows the thick-headed diner to order and eat without facing the gaze of the general public.
Matthew Fairbrother is no stranger to the McDonald’s drive-thru. But his most recent visit was no bleary-eyed quest for sustenance. Fairbrother, you see, even after passing the menu 26,000 times in 24 hours, didn’t order a single thing – not a chip, not a sachet of ketchup, not a solitary gherkin. In fact, during his visit to this particular fast-food emporium, it was closed.
Fairbrother is the best customer McDonald’s never had. On Christmas Day 2025, the 21-year-old Kiwi zeroed in on a pair of Golden Arches close to his home in Christchurch, New Zealand, and proceeded to tap out what has to be the most nut-cracking Festive 500 the Rapha collective has ever seen. Twenty-four hours. A 25-second loop around the drive-thru. Five hundred kilometres.
“Yeah, good question,” Fairbrother laughed when I asked him about the thinking behind the ride. “I’m not too sure where I came up with the idea. It’s just been burning a hole in my head for a while. I had to scratch that itch and get it done. I worked out the only time it was possible was when McDonald’s was shut – and in New Zealand, that’s only one day a year.”
Ultra riders are, by their nature, slightly quirky. They enjoy the unknowns. And while Fairbrother’s McDonalds mission didn’t involve battling for survival in a remote corner of the globe, he still rolled in with a healthy dose of trepidation.
“I’d never been to this McDonald’s before, so I didn’t know how long a lap would take. I didn’t know what speed I could hold. The target was always 24 hours, but I didn’t know how far I’d get. Then, being competitive with myself, about an hour in I started doing the maths. Small goals came quickly. First it was 250 kilometres in 12 hours – tick. Then it was, OK, let’s double that.”
Five hundred kilometres around what is essentially a gastro-velodrome? Not quite. The drive-thru harbours a host of technical features that make riding less fluid than the boards — chief among them, two speed bumps. Two spine-jarring, derriere-destroying speed bumps on every single 25-second loop.
Fairbrother completed 2,650 laps.
That’s 5,300 encounters with those bumps. And, to make matters worse, he did the entire thing in standard, baggy cycling shorts. No liner. No chamois. Yes, you read that correctly – and yes, I asked twice to be sure.
“I think just being a mountain biker… yeah, I never really wear padded (bib) shorts,” he said. “I did have to get out of the saddle a lot though. I’m still, er, healing – can we say.”
Fairbrother averaged just over 15mph, recorded a normalised power of around 175 watts (“annoyingly I had to stop pedalling around two of the corners”), and finished with a total of 312 miles. He rode his Canyon gravel bike, complete with a Fox suspension fork and 40mm tyres. No special concessions were made for the venue. “It’s just the bike I normally ride,” he shrugged.
Recovery was mercifully straightforward and there was no Boxing Day Big Mac. “No, I haven’t been near a McDonald’s since,” he said. “It only took me a day to recover. Physically it wasn’t too bad – it was more the sleep. I took one day off the bike, then I was straight back into other missions.”
Other missions. The mind boggles. What’s next? “I’m not sure yet,” Fairbrother said. “I’m definitely open to suggestions though.”
I floated the idea of Everesting a multi-storey car park helter-skelter. But apparently, it’s already been done. Suggestions for Fairbrother in the comments, please.
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