Let’s cycle from Leeds to St Albans…

Eddie Izzard, Dylan Moran and Reginald D Hunter are playing an outdoors gig in St Albans, brilliant. What’s more my friend, Mat, and I got tickets, brillianter. Then we decided that we’d cycle there. Silly.

So this Thursday we’ll set off from Leeds to cycle the 210 (and a bit) miles from Leeds to St Albans. We even planned a route and everything (we’re not normally so organised). We reckon it’ll take us 2 and a half days.

Day 1, Leeds, West Yorkshire to Gunthorpe, Nottinghamshire – 90 miles
Day 2, Gunthorpe, Nottinghamshire to Harrold, Bedfordshire – 70(ish) miles
Day 3, Harrold, Bedfordshire to St Albans, Hertfordshire – 50(ish) miles

So anyway, if I’m super-organised then we may be using Mat’s phone to track the route and I’ll pop it up on here and you can all see how slow we went and how frequently we got lost.

Hurray! Cycling!

p.s. I went for my first long ride in a while on Saturday and got an incredible painful knee whilst riding, apparently this is either because a)my knees are all wrong or b)my saddle is slightly too low. I’ve raised my saddle and it has made things slightly better in the knee-department, the problem now is that my feet barely touch the ground and getting onto the bike is a bit of an acrobatic challenge. Ah well, I’m sure it’ll be fine.

Eddie Iz Awesome

It was Sport Relief over the weekend (as I think I mentioned below), in the build up to the weekend I watched a 3-part documentary about Eddie Izzard running 44 marathons in 50 days (or similarly ridiculous numbers). Here is a man who is a self-confessed non-runner, who hasn’t done any training to speak of who sets off to run a marathon a day, 6 days on, 1 day off for something like 7 weeks to raise money for Sport Relief. This all took place last summer and I have to say, slightly shame-faced, that I wasn’t really aware of it while he was doing it. I heard a few bits and bobs but the whole thing sounds so hugely impossible that I don’t think it really registered with me. However watching the documentary I was so bloody impressed with him I ended up texting the number that popped up at the end of each programme to donate (something I have never done before in my life).

He put himself through a pretty mega ordeal and dealt with it all with amazing humour and grace. I’ve never really been that aware of Mr Izzard as a celebrity/comedian/activist before – really my only awareness has been that my Mum and cousin both think he is funny and he voiced those recycling ads and was in the awful film version of The Avengers. I thought he came across so well in the programmes, however it was never entirely clear what his motivation was, obviously he is an ardent believer in what Sport Relief is doing but that alone doesn’t seem reason enough to run over 1000 miles all around the UK. The first programme seemed to hint strongly that he needed to do something like this as a bit of a journey of self-discovery, he visited important locations from his childhood (e.g. the house where his Mum died from cancer when he was 6) and he is obviously an incredibly determined bloke, maybe that was reason enough? I think I need to try and dig out some of his dvds, apparently his style of comedy is very Python-like, which would suit me no end. But suffice to say, Eddie Izzard is a legend and I am very much in awe of him.