TITLE="All I need">I’d love to tell you where I got the idea from, why I decided to embark on the biggest physical challenge I have ever undertaken, but I can’t. It’s not that it’s a big secret or anything; it’s just that I don’t know where it came from, at what point it entered my brain or in fact why it entered it at all. I’m not a cycle fanatic out to prove myself, although I do cycle around town a lot; I wasn’t escaping a job I hate, though I was working and neither was I running from a mid-life crisis, though arguably at the age of 37, I am heading towards one. I’d love to be able to say to you, it was because I was trying to find myself after being rejected by a long-term lover, who ran away with my five children, but I wasn’t. Maybe if I announced how I was overcoming a fear or fighting the inner negativity, by cycling in a huge great circle, it would be considered a clever marketing ploy, but I wasn’t.
Does there have to be a reason for doing something exciting? Must I lie to sex my story up, leaving the reader wondering what all the fuss was about, or is it enough to have a tale of adventure, which is honest and real in a part of the world that is in itself full of history and outstanding beauty. Can’t we just do something for the sake of it, because it’s a good idea and because life is short? I mean blink and the nurses are changing your colostomy bag, and shouting into your ears for the twentieth time what your own name is. Maybe there should be books out there with titles such as, ‘My Life In An Office For 50 Years’, or ‘Shit! Why Didn’t I Do That, Before I died’. Perhaps if there is a reason for this adventure, then that’s it!
