I've been a cyclist all my life. My parents met through a cycling club.
My childhood - well, maybe when I've worked through the associated
traumas I'll write more about that some other time, but it involved being cold and wet a lot and going a lot of places none of my peers had ever heard of. I measured out my
adolescence in gradually improving 10 mile time trial times. Through my
twenties I tried and mostly failed at most sorts of racing, and
organized a few races as well. I worked as a courier in London for a
time. I revived my university club for a while, and managed to be
British Universities' 100 mile time trial champion (against fairly
modest opposition) before going and racing (at a very low level) in
Italy for a short while. I didn't get around to getting a driving
licence until a couple of years ago.
Then in 1994 or so I got a job in Brussels as a
translator, and it all started to fall apart a bit (although I was one
of the city's few cycle commuters for a while). With a sedentary job
and then self-employment, plus a family to make at least a vague
semblance of looking after, with the added distraction of the Internet
(yes, that's YOU people), I didn't get out often enough to maintain a
comfortable level of fitness, and besides there was suddenly a vast
amount of bike racing on the telly to watch, races I'd only ever known from
press reports in pre-Eurosport England. That wasn't all bad, because
watching Flemish TV didn't half bring on my Dutch, which accounts for a
fair proportion of our business these days. But it took cycling from an
active to a passive pastime.
We moved back to the UK in 2003,
not least because of the better educational provision here for my
younger son Daniel, who has Down's Syndrome. I joined a local club and rode a few local cyclo-crosses very slowly, but still
without really getting away from the computer enough.
This
spring, a family friend of rather limited experience decided on the
spur of the moment to see if he could move up from his 8-mile commute
to do the End-to-End, Land's End to John O'Groats. Despite my
scepticism, foul weather and a number of misadventures, he managed it
in impressively good time, leaving me, the self-identified "cyclist"
who had actually ridden a total of about 40 miles all year, mostly in
600 yard chunks doing the school run, somewhat bemused. And, it has to
be said, challenged. On 21 May, the fifth anniversary of my father's
death, I decided to put in to the management for permission to attempt
a ride that would be both even more ill-prepared, and of course a bit
longer: from my current home town of Nottingham to Rome . On the other hand, self employment does allow me a bit more
flexibility, not least in choosing to go when the sun is shining and
there isn't a headwind blowing. At least to start with. As long as I've
mended all the computers that we managed to break in the interim first,
anyway. So here I am. The bike's set up, and departure is scheduled for next Sunday, 10 am by the lions in the Market Square.
Oh,
and this is of course not all for my benefit, so I am accepting, and
indeed asking for, sponsorship on behalf of the Down's Syndrome
Association, via my justgiving page.
I've pulled this writeup straight from my blog for the ride, which is
thoroughly bad form really, but I thought under the circumstances it
was a reasonable thing to do. Such updates as I can manage from out on the road will be on that blog page.