The pusher starts his count. Ten. Nine. Eight. You are standing over the top tube in a layby on the A10, feet clipped in, hands on the tri-bars, staring at a strip of tarmac that stretches flat and grey into the Cambridgeshire fen. Seven. Six. Five. The wind is from the north-east — a headwind out, a tailwind home, and you already know the first half will hurt. Four. Three. Two. Your thumb finds the side button on the Casio strapped to your left wrist. One.
Go.
You press the stopwatch and the start at the same time, and for the next twenty-one minutes — if it goes well, if the legs are there, if the roundabout is clear — the only number that matters is the one ticking on a plastic screen that cost you twenty dollars.
This is the ten-mile time trial. No cameras. No motorbikes. No commentary, no prize money worth mentioning, and no watch sponsor anywhere in sight. Just a rider, a road, and a clock that does not care who is looking at it. It is the purest test in amateur cycling, and it has been timed, more often than not, by the cheapest watch in the world.
The watch that sold a hundred million
The Casio F-91W was introduced in 1989. It weighs 21 grams. It measures 35.2mm across the dial, 38.2mm lug to lug, and 8.5mm thick. It runs on a single CR2016 lithium battery that lasts approximately seven years. It is water resistant — Casio says to 30 metres, though that is marketing optimism — and its module (the 593) provides the time, a calendar, a daily alarm, and a stopwatch accurate to a hundredth of a second.
It costs approximately $20. Sometimes less. It has sold, by most estimates, well over 100 million units since launch, making it one of the best-selling watches ever made and almost certainly the most common timepiece in the history of competitive cycling below the professional level.
Walk through the car park at any open time trial in Britain and look at the wrists. You will see Garmins. You will see Coros watches, Apple Watches, a few Polars. But somewhere in the mix — on the wrist of the fast man from the host club, or the woman who has been winning on this course since 2014, or the first-timer who drove forty minutes to find out whether they could break the hour for a twenty-five — you will see the F-91W. Cracked screen. Faded strap. Still running. Still doing the one thing it was built to do.
Start-house culture
The ten-mile time trial is not a glamorous event. Nobody in the watch industry has ever considered sponsoring one, and if they did, they would struggle to find a surface flat enough to put a banner on. The start is usually a layby, a farm gate, or a bus stop. The timekeeper stands with a clipboard and a stopwatch — sometimes digital, sometimes a proper mechanical one, handed down from whoever ran the club events in the 1980s. Riders roll up to the line at one-minute intervals. The pusher holds your saddle. The count starts from ten.
Everything that happens at the start of a ten is stripped down to the minimum. There is no warm-up area. There is no team car behind you. There are no radios, no directeur sportif barking pace numbers, no live data feed to a bus parked in the convoy. You have what you brought: your legs, your bike, your position, and whatever is strapped to your handlebars or your wrist. The time trial is the race of truth because there is nothing else to race against. You are finding out what you have today, and the number at the finish will tell you exactly that and nothing more.
I have talked about this on the podcast with riders who lived their entire careers inside this format. Matt Bottrill — a postman who became one of the fastest time-triallists in Britain — built his palmares on courses that most WorldTour riders have never heard of, on evenings that most sports fans never knew existed. David Millar and Ryan Mullen talk about the same instinct from the professional side — the inability to sit still while the clock is running. The reflex is identical. The scale is different. The clock does not know the difference.
The split at the turn
The Casio earns its place in a time trial for one reason. The head unit on the bars will give you power, speed, cadence, heart rate, distance, gradient, and a GPS trace that Strava will analyse into a dozen metrics before you've got your shoes off. The Casio gives you one thing: elapsed time. And in the middle of a ten, that is often the only number you actually need.
The out-and-back course — the standard format for a club ten — has a turn at the halfway mark, and the turn is where you look at your wrist. Not at the power number. Not at the heart rate. At the time. You know what a good split looks like on this course. You know what your PB split was. You know, within a few seconds, whether today is the day. The Casio tells you in digits. The rest is mental arithmetic at threshold, which is the cruelest kind.
Twelve minutes twelve at the turn, and you know you're on for a long twenty-four or a short twenty-five, depending on the wind and the roundabout and whether the right-turn filter lets you through without unclipping. Eleven fifty-eight, and your brain starts doing calculations your lungs have no interest in supporting. Twelve twenty-six, and you are already making excuses before the return leg has started.
The split is the moment the time trial becomes real. Up to that point it is effort and pacing and the internal monologue about whether you went out too hard. After the split, it is arithmetic. And the watch that delivers that arithmetic — whether it is a Garmin showing lap time or a Casio showing raw stopwatch — is the most important piece of equipment on the bike. Not the deep-section wheels. Not the skinsuit. The clock.
A culture of seconds
British time trial culture is the oldest continuous tradition in competitive cycling, and it was born, fittingly, in secrecy. In the 1890s, when road racing on the public highway was effectively banned, riders went underground. They started at dawn. They dressed in black. They gave courses coded names — F1, V718, E2 — so that the police could not find them. F. T. Bidlake codified the whole thing into an institution, and for a century the racing was solitary, secretive, and absolutely obsessed with the number.
That obsession has not changed. Club riders know their personal bests to the second. They know the course record on their home ten to the second. They know what the fast riders from the neighbouring club did last Thursday, and they know exactly how many seconds separate them from the next category boundary. A time-triallist does not think in minutes. They think in seconds, because a second is the margin between a good ride and a great one, and the sport has taught them to count every one.
The Casio fits this culture because it operates at the same resolution. It does not offer analysis. It does not suggest recovery protocols. It does not sync to a cloud and produce a graph. It counts seconds. That is what the sport counts, and there is a purity in the alignment. You press the button at the start. You press it at the finish. The number between those two presses is the truth. Dan Bigham — who accidentally mastered aerodynamics and went on to hold the Hour Record — would probably tell you the same thing. The tools can get as complicated as you like. The test stays simple.
The contrast
I wrote a piece recently about the watches that turned up at the Tour de France, and another about Richard Mille's six-figure wrist in the modern peloton. Those stories exist at one end of cycling's relationship with time. This is the other end, and it matters just as much.
Pogačar climbs the Tourmalet wearing $350,000 on his wrist. The fastest rider in your local club ten wears $20. Both are measuring the same thing — how fast they went, over a given distance, on a given day. Both will check the number at the end and know immediately whether it was enough. The currency is identical. The denomination is different.
What makes cycling unusual among sports is that this span — from the $20 Casio to the $350,000 Richard Mille — exists within a single discipline that is recognisably the same activity. The local ten-miler and the Tour de France time trial are the same test. One rider against the clock. No wheels to sit on. Nowhere to hide. The only variable is the level of talent, fitness, and equipment that surrounds the same naked question: how fast are you today?
The Casio answers that question. It answers it on a dual carriageway in Cambridgeshire at 7pm on a Tuesday, and it answers it with the same honesty that a Swiss chronograph brings to a Grand Tour prologue. There is no snobbery in a time trial. There never has been. The clock does not care what it costs.
The watch that stays
Head units have taken over the timing in competitive cycling. That is a fact, and there is no use pretending otherwise. A Garmin Edge 1050 or a Wahoo Elemnt Roam does what the Casio does and then does a hundred other things besides, and it sits on the bars where you can read it without moving your head. For racing, the head unit is the better tool. Nobody serious argues otherwise.
But the Casio stays. It stays because it does not need charging. It stays because it weighs nothing. It stays because if you crash and the crystal cracks, you lose $20 instead of $700. It stays because some riders have worn the same one for five, eight, twelve years, and the strap has the memory of every dawn ride, every commute, every training camp start beaten into its resin. The head unit is a tool. The Casio — the one with the scratched face and the yellowed strap — is a companion.
There is a version of cycling's clock story that belongs in a glass case in Geneva, and I've written about that one too. But there is another version that belongs in a layby on the A10, on a wrist that is about to press the button and find out the truth, and that version is worth at least as much.
Every personal best starts with a beep. The beep comes from a twenty-dollar watch. And the number it records — the one that matters, the one you'll remember in the car on the way home — is the same number that cycling has been counting since Desgrange rode the Buffalo boards in 1893. How far, in a given time, alone.
The Casio does not care that it is not Swiss. The clock does not care what it costs. And the rider in the start house does not care about anything except the next twenty-one minutes.
Press the button. Go.
For the full story of cycling's obsession with time, read Against the Clock. For the other end of the price spectrum, see Richard Mille and the Modern Peloton. And if you'd rather spend your seconds than read about them, join the Roadman community on Skool — where serious amateurs train to make every one of them count.
