A daunting task

Most triumph over adversity films begin with a promising start, a build up as the main character works towards their goal, a turn for the worse as something goes catastrophically wrong and then a change in fortunes leading to the glorious finale.

Annoyingly, my story starts with me trying to recover from a chest infection*. After a day confined to bed, several days annoying everyone around me with a horrendous cough and a week away from my bike, I started cycling to work again yesterday.

Cycling home, feeling quite tired, I realised just how big a task four stages of the Tour de France is going to be (for more info see my previous post). I was cycling around 15km in one day - less than 10% of the distance I will need to cover in July... on consecutive days!

The way I see it, I have four options:

1. Performance-enhancing drugs;
2. Conceal a motor in my bike;
3. Give up, stay at home and hope nobody notices;
4. A lot of preparation and training.

Options 1 and 2 have been adopted by professional cyclists, but are not really cool. Option 3 has been used by plenty of people (myself included), but is probably not the right option for me this time. Option 4 looks like the winner.

I need to get to work!

Shout outs:
I am really grateful to everybody who is helping me with this. My first shout outs go to Hannah, Josh and Sarah - thank you so much for your very kind donations.

To anybody else reading this, please visit my fundraising page: http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/TomHoldaway. A donation of any size will help a lot and I will do my best to thank all sponsors in future posts. 


* leaving out the chapters in which I diligently checked that I could take the time off work before signing up and then took ages deciding which flights to catch, which I presume are going to be saved for the thrilling prequel.