The Kohler father son world records haul is now official: George Kohler and his 23-year-old son Josh have been awarded three Guinness World Records after completing an 18,000-mile bicycle circumnavigation of the globe. The pair set off from their home near Norwich on 29 March 2025 and returned 400 days later, having crossed Asia, Australia, South America and Europe.
The three records the Kohlers broke cover the fastest bicycle circumnavigation, the longest bicycle journey, and the most countries visited in a continuous bicycle journey, all by a father and son. According to Guinness World Records, their time for the circumnavigation stands at 399 days 5 hours and 52 minutes. When they arrived home, the pair were presented with their certificates on the doorstep, having left to the left of the front door and returned to the right.
A Target They Missed, and Records They Still Smashed
The journey did not go entirely to plan. According to Quad Lock, the Kohlers had originally set out to cover 30,000km in 365 days, while also raising funds for UNICEF. They finished in 400 days rather than the target 365, but the records they collected along the way tell their own story. The ambition of that original schedule makes the eventual achievement more understandable, not less.
The pair’s preparation for a journey of this scale went back several years. The Kohlers began long-distance cycling together when Josh was in high school, completing a length-of-the-UK ride in 2021 and a coast-to-coast crossing of the United States in 2022. ‘We had to learn to get our bodies used to doing long cycles,’ Josh said. Two years after that US trip, he put the idea of a global circumnavigation to his father, George, a chimney sweep. George’s response was short: ‘Perfect, why not?’
Kohler Father Son World Records: The Human Cost of the Road
Josh spoke to Southwest News Service about the physical and emotional weight of spending more than a year on the road together. The physical demands were expected. The emotional ones were not. ‘We definitely had a full range of experience over the year,’ he said. ‘Our bodies were tested day in day out, we were expecting the mental side of things to be tough as we anticipated long sprints.’
‘One thing we weren’t prepared for was the emotional challenges,’ he continued. ‘When you are with someone for so long, disagreements do happen frequently. We had one unwritten rule that we would never go to sleep on an argument.’
Alongside those pressures, the journey also produced moments that no amount of planning could have arranged. In a remote part of Turkey, a shepherd on a hillside called out and beckoned the pair over. ‘He had a pot on the campfire,’ Josh said. ‘We had eggs, bread and cheese, and we sat there. We wouldn’t speak Turkish, and he couldn’t speak English, but we had this incredible interaction with him.’ Elsewhere, monks offered food and drink, and in Serbia the pair had lunch with locals they had met along the route.
‘There were thousands of highlights on this trip,’ Josh said. ‘One standout moment is when we were cycling through a remote part of Turkey.’ The shepherd’s campfire breakfast clearly stayed with him as an example of what the road offers when the miles are hard.
For George, the return home carried its own weight. ‘The final day was extremely emotional seeing friends and family,’ he said. ‘People that I haven’t seen for years and years were there to welcome us.’
The Guinness World Records page for the Kohlers’ fastest bicycle circumnavigation by a father and son now carries the official time of 399 days 5 hours 52 minutes, the fixed marker against which any future father-and-son team will have to measure themselves.
