Welcome to the tales, trails, and tribulations of my attempt, as a total cycling novice, to complete the entire route of the 2010 Tour de France...thats 3600 km / 2236 miles in 20 days with just 2 rest days, taking in the Alps and the Pyrenees – rumoured to be quite hilly!



Lance and Jake .... seperated at birth

What follows is both an attempt at keeping myself sane during the 3 week ordeal, a journal to remind myself never to do this sort of thing again, and a means to try and raise some cash for the William Wates Memorial Fund. Any contributions would be hugely appreciated and will be a real boost for me throughout the Tour.
For more information please go to ...

Thursday, 15 July 2010

Done, down, over and out...

Well I made it! Quite how I will never know....but rather similarly to the pro-riders it seems it was largely thanks to a heavy reliance on drugs, not wanting to let my sponsors down, and that I had bragged to far too many girls to back out at any stage.

Since climbing the Tourmalet for the last time on stage 17 the tour has slowly wound down. Distances have got shorter, the terrain has got flatter and the pace has got slower. I have to admit to having a mixture of feelings as we neared Paris. Joy and relief were met with a sense of loss and apprehension. The questions that were fired back and forth throughout the peleton seemed to summarise what we were all feeling...What am I going to do on Monday? How do you top this?

I am now back in London and I don’t like it.

I keep wanting to fill up imaginary water-bottles and my eyes our peeled searching for fluorescent arrow signs that have been guiding me for the last three weeks. My legs are tingling with a sense of unease and my bum cant seem to get comfy on my soft office chair.

Does Lance Armstrong go to a shrink post tour? Or is that why he keeps coming back?
The only solace has come from the enormous amount of congratulations I have received, the vast amounts of guilt-free alcohol I have consumed, and the knowledge that I don’t have to squeeze into festering lycra at 6 in the morning.

There is always a rather excessive use of the phrase ‘life-changing experience’. This was not the birth of a child, a loss of a limb or a win at the lottery. But it has started a no doubt life-long fascination with the Tour, a new understanding of quite how incredibly tough these pro-cyclists are, and the knowledge that my pain-threshold is much higher than I ever thought it was.

Will I ever be getting on a bike again? Of course...I have a race on Sunday. Reading is not quite the Pyrenees but I can’t help myself.

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