My Cycling Background

I had a pretty inauspicious start to cycling; I didn’t have a bike as a child.  I got my first bike when I was about 22.  I was visiting my brother in Cambridge and he forced me to buy a second hand bike, because that’s how you transport yourself in Cambridge.  It was a real gas pipe job, but it met my main requirement, cycling to and from the pub.  I don’t remember how I learnt to ride a bike!

After joining a small engineering consultancy in Epsom I discovered some like-minded beer loving people including my future husband.  Friday nights in the summer we would cycle from work to a pub about fifteen to twenty miles from the office and then stop off in about five pubs on the way back to the office and then somehow get home.  Not the safest or healthiest form of cycling.

After a couple of summers of pub crawls we thought why not extend the crawl to a whole weekend?  Hence long weekends in Brittany and Normandy, although the mileage went up including cycling to and from the ferry in Portsmouth and carrying all our clothes.

In 1989 the cycling got a little more serious.  Myself and nine of my work colleagues decided to do a charity cycle ride, but wanted to do something different to Land’s End to John O’Groats.  Instead we decided to visit every county in England, pre boundary changes in the 70s.  The counties included my birth county of Westmorland.  After 1000 miles in seventeen days and countless visits to charity shops we eventually raised over £7,000 for Imperial Cancer Research.

From this point on I became a committed touring cyclist.  I did some Audax rides and we regularly went on two week cycle touring holidays in the Alps, Pyrenees, Dolomites, Vosges, Jura, Black Forest etc.  Most weekends I would go out for 50+ mile bike rides.  Our honeymoon was cycle touring in New England.  On one day it rained so hard our camera got completely trashed.  No honeymoon photos.

In 2012 I was contacted by a friend from university, who on reaching fifty was keen to have a go at the Etape du Tour.   He asked my husband Steve if he’d join him, and Steve said that he would, but only if I did it as well.  Is this emotional blackmail?  I had to say yes.

For the first time in my life I embarked on doing some structured training to make sure I could avoid the broom wagon.  I enjoyed the training, although we had some tough days in the saddle especially when it was windy and wet in the winter.  I successfully completed the Etape, but I sensed this had whetted the appetite of my husband who was keen to do more continental sportives.  The Maratona in Italy, Liege-Bastogne-Liege, along with numerous UK sportives followed.  This year we did the Etape du Dales (gale force winds) and La Marmotte (extreme heat).

So as you can see I have no background in time trials, road racing or any form of competitive cycling.  We’ve never been in cycling clubs.  I am a social cyclist at heart, but I have discovered I have pretty good endurance and it is this I will need for the 30 day challenge.