Wednesday 7th September 2005

Greenwich

Wednesday afternoon had finally arrived. In a few hours, I hoped that my bike and I would be scrounging a free lift to London for my very first charity cycle ride; the Pedal-to-Paris.

The event was in support of the Royal British Legion (RBL), a charity I'd never really supported before other than buying an occasional plastic poppy in November.

I'd found out about the 300-mile charity cycle ride in August 2004 but that only gave me 1 month to train before the annual event in September, which even by my standards seemed foolish. I took the safe option and decided to enter the 2005 event.

I could have chosen to take part in any one of the many charity rides from London to Paris, but I'd heard so many positive things about the RBL ride in terms of organisation. I figured by signing up, I would be giving myself a goal to aim for; to ride 280 miles from London to Paris in 4 days. So I decided to get serious and get some miles under my belt.

Training was going well but it meant I was clocking up most of the miles on my own (which lets face it, if you've only got me to speak to, can get a bit dull), so I decided it was time to find a riding partner. I thought I was fortunate when around Spring time, I'd managed to get in touch with a local cyclist called Jim, who was also seeking a riding partner to go out with on weekend jaunts through the beautiful Berkshire countryside.

The intention was for us to go out on a regular basis and stick to a respectable weekly mileage. We managed neither. I'd always heard that the key to good training is consistency, but the only consistency we managed on our rides was to chin-wag for the entire ride like a couple of old dears, and to have a compulsory 1 hour cake stop.

As the charity ride was now less than 24 hours away, now was not the time to be worrying about the ride itself or whether all the recent training with Jim would have any long-term negative effects. Now was the time to relax, and pray that I'd remembered to pack enough Vaseline for the trip.

Living sixty miles outside London, I knew that my best option for travelling to the start of the charity event would be to stay at a hotel in Greenwich the night before and cycle to the ride early after breakfast the following day. With this in mind, I'd put a begging email out to people in work asking for a free ride from work that evening, hoping that my replies would come from Londoners offering a free taxi ride somewhere into the big city on their commute back home.

Two of my work colleagues Matt and Treena, very kindly offered to give me a lift all the way to Greenwich, and the true generosity of their offer became apparent when I realised that not only were they going to drop me off at the doorstep of my hotel, but they didn't even live in London. This generous couple were offering to drive my bike and I through the rush-hour traffic (for many hours as it turned out) just to 'spread some good karma' as Matt put it.

Three hours after leaving work, and after a near grid-locked journey that should have taken just over an hour, we pulled into the drop off zone at the Holiday Inn Express in Greenwich. Feeling very guilty about wasting their evening, I quickly jumped out of their Freelander with my rucksack and the various pieces of my road bike, and the farewells began. Grateful that they had finally got rid of their extra passenger, they sped off into the night for that well-earned meal they'd been promising their rumbling stomachs for the last couple of hours.

I reassembled the bike under the watchful eye of another cyclist, Ben, who was loitering outside the hotel entrance.

"Are you Pedalling to Paris too?" I said worryingly glancing down at his huge well stocked army backpack.

I had always assumed that as a last resort, I might be cycling the near 60 mile journey from work to Greenwich and therefore I was travelling as light as possible. Firstly, I didn't pack my waterproof gear with me; If it rained on the trip, I was planning on getting cold and wet. Secondly, I only packed one change of kit; If I needed clean kit, I'd wash out the smelly kit in the sink. Studying Ben's rucksack, I was now beginning to feel inadequate and very under-prepared for the trip.

We went through the formalities and checked our bikes and ourselves into the hotel. As we had both opted to keep our bikes with us in our rooms that night, we wheeled them from the reception and headed for the lifts. Ten minutes later, after finally working out how to bend each bike into a shape small enough to fit inside the lift, we made our own way to our rooms; my room being on the 5th floor and Ben's on the 7th.

As it was already 9:00pm, we arranged to quickly drop the bikes off into our rooms and meet back in the foyer. This would be our last chance to go out for a slap up well-balanced and nutritional high carbohydrate meal before the trip started. However,as we'd spotted a McDonalds a few hundred yards down the road, that seemed to be a better option.

Fully fed and watered, I returned to my hotel room for an early night, and I discovered that I'd made another error. I remember being in a rush when I was doing my final packing that morning and I'd just thrown my 'reserve' shades into my rucksack. I was forced to pack my 'reserve' shades for this trip as I'd already broken my proper cycling glasses in a similar incident of heavy handed forgetfulness. My spare 'reserve' pair now lay in front of me in a number of pieces.

Knowing how skilled I was at DIY and fixing things, I went down to reception for help. I explained my predicament to a member of the night staff and he kindly disappeared into an office on the hunt for some Superglue. He eventually came out apologetic and empty handed but armed with a cunning plan. He suggested he check the 'lost property' box to see if anyone had lost a pair of sunglasses. Now at this point in time, I wasn't going to be picky, and would have worn anything that the kind fella presented me with.