5 Pro Cyclists Who Are Ridiculously Good Runners

The man is Michael Woods, and the two facts sit very oddly next to each other.

In 2005, as an 18-year-old in Windsor, Ontario, he ran a mile in 3:57.48. Two decades later it is still the Canadian under-20 record.

In July 2023, on the brutal volcanic ramp of the Puy de Dome, he won stage 9 of the Tour de France. He remains the only person to have done both.

Woods is not an isolated freak, either.

A small group of professional cyclists can run times that would win most local road races, and the reason why turns out to be more useful to you than it first appears.

But start with the strange part. Most professional cyclists avoid running almost entirely, and they have an excellent reason for it.

Why Most Pro Cyclists Refuse to Run

Running is high impact.

For a rider whose contract depends on being on the start line, an Achilles that flares up in January is a genuine financial threat.

It also does very little for the one number that decides bike races, which is sustainable power at the pedals.

On a straight cost-benefit reading, running is a bad deal for a cyclist.

The Bone Density Problem

And yet coaches still prescribe it, in small doses, for one specific reason.

Cycling is non-weight-bearing. Bone adapts to impact loading, and a bicycle never provides any.

The consequence is well documented.

A systematic review of cycling and bone health reported that roughly two-thirds of professional and master adult road cyclists could be classified as osteopenic.

A handful of easy winter jogs is cheap insurance against a problem that a career in the saddle quietly builds.

Which is exactly why nearly all the running in the peloton happens between November and January, and then stops dead.

That is what makes the five riders below so unusual.

The Five

1. Michael Woods (Canada): A 3:57.48 Mile

Woods set Canadian under-20 records in the mile (3:57.48) and the 3,000 metres (7:58.04) in a single season in 2005, and both still stand.

He also took the 1500 metres gold at the Pan American Junior Championships that year, and later ran 3:39.37 for the distance.

Then his left foot fell apart. Recurring stress fractures, two unsuccessful surgeries, and a final race in 2007.

He took up cycling at 25 on a cheap bike his parents bought him, turned professional in 2013, and went on to win a World Championships bronze medal, a Vuelta stage, and that Tour de France stage on the Puy de Dome.

He retired from the WorldTour at the end of 2025 and immediately announced plans to point the same engine at triathlon, gravel, skimo, and trail running. The runner never really left.

2. Mathieu van der Poel (Netherlands): A 33:41 10K

Van der Poel is one of the greatest bike racers alive, and he barely runs at all. A Marathon Handbook review of the Strava profiles of all 184 riders in the 2026 Tour de France found just 14 logged runs on his account, ever.

Out of those 14 runs came a 10K best of 33:41, which is roughly 3:22 per kilometre, plus a 16:48 5K.

That is a time most club runners chase for years, produced by a man who does not train for it.

The explanation is cyclocross, where running through mud with a bike on your shoulder is simply part of the job.

He entered the Valencia Half Marathon and then did not start. Running fans have been quietly disappointed ever since.

3. Cameron Wurf (Australia): A 2:36 Marathon, Eight Days After Kona

Wurf is the strangest athlete here by some distance.

He rowed for Australia at the 2004 Olympics, became a professional cyclist, and then in 2020 signed for INEOS Grenadiers while simultaneously racing as a professional Ironman triathlete.

He owns the fastest bike split in Ironman history, 3:53:32 at Ironman Texas in 2025, at an average of over 46 kilometres per hour. He then ran a 2:50 marathon off the back of it.

But the genuinely ridiculous part came in late 2024. Wurf finished seventh at the Ironman World Championship in Kona, running a 2:50 marathon to close out a 7:51:26 day.

Just over a week later he lined up at the New York City Marathon and ran 2:36:22.

Read that again. A 2:36 road marathon, on a hard course, on legs that had swum 3.8km, ridden 180km, and run a marathon eight days earlier.

4. Jimmy Whelan (Australia): A 1:01:37 Half Marathon

Whelan spent seven years in professional cycling, four of them at WorldTour level with EF Education. He won the under-23 Tour of Flanders in 2018 and rode the Giro d’Italia.

Across those eight years, by his own account, he ran roughly once a week.

He retired at the end of 2024. In October 2025, less than a year later, he ran the Valencia Half Marathon in 1:01:37, an average of about 2:54 per kilometre, which put him 13th on the Australian all-time list.

He now runs up to 190 kilometres a week, has a professional running contract, and has said openly that he is targeting a sub-60 half marathon, a marathon around 2:08, and an Olympic team.

His own explanation is the one worth sitting with.

Eight years of 30-hour training weeks on a bike built an aerobic ceiling, and a tolerance for suffering, that his running is now quietly cashing in.

5. Emma Pooley (Great Britain): A 2:44 Marathon and Four World Titles

Pooley won Olympic silver in the time trial in Beijing in 2008 and became world time trial champion in 2010.

She was a distance runner first, and only moved to the bike when a running injury got in the way.

She retired from professional cycling on 3 August 2014.

One month later she turned up at Powerman Zofingen, the long-distance duathlon world championship, and won it on her debut.

She broke the course record and beat the second-placed woman by more than half an hour.

Then she won the title again in 2015, 2016, and 2017.

Her marathon best is 2:44. In 2021 she became Swiss champion in 50km trail running and won the 100km Ultra Tour de Monte Rosa outright.

The Honourable Mentions

Michal Kwiatkowski is arguably the most committed runner in the current peloton.

He has a 1:39 half marathon and, unusually, keeps a running habit going in-season, which almost nobody else does.

Tiesj Benoot has a 1:36 half marathon to his name. Remco Evenepoel has covered 15km in 1:02:32, but says plainly that he stops running once the season starts, because the injury risk is not worth it.

Meanwhile Tadej Pogacar and Jonas Vingegaard, the two best riders on the planet, have almost no running on record at all. The best cyclists in the world got there by riding.

Elite crossover talent is a bigger club than most people realise, and it is not limited to the peloton. Plenty of famous names quietly run mile times that would embarrass most amateurs.

What Runners Should Actually Take From This

The Engine Transfers. The Tissue Does Not.

The pattern across all five is identical. A very large aerobic base built on a bike transfers to running far better than most runners assume it will.

What does not transfer is tissue tolerance. Whelan has warned that a professional cyclist can pick up a serious tendon injury in as few as two off-season runs, because the legs arrive with the engine of an elite athlete and the impact tolerance of a beginner.

That cuts both ways, and it is the single most useful idea in this article. When you are injured, your aerobic fitness is far more durable than your tendons, and it can be defended on a bike while the tissue heals.

Which is why structured bike training is the most underrated tool in a runner’s kit, and not just a consolation prize for the injured.

Use the Bike the Way They Use the Run

The pros run in winter to defend their bones. Runners can invert that logic exactly.

Two easy bike sessions a week let you accumulate aerobic time without accumulating impact.

It is the cheapest available way to raise your training load without raising your injury risk, and it is what a smart hybrid week actually looks like.

The catch is intensity discipline.

Cyclists new to running ruin it by running their easy runs at threshold, and runners new to cycling do precisely the same thing in reverse.

Easy has to mean easy, in both sports, which is the entire point of training properly in Zone 2.

The Uncomfortable Conclusion

Woods explained his own switch at 25 in blunt terms. He had been one of the best runners in the world, and he could not see a good reason why that same engine should not make him one of the best cyclists in the world.

He was right.

And Jimmy Whelan is now running that experiment in the opposite direction, in public, with the entire peloton watching.

The engine is the engine. What you point it at is a choice, not a fate.