I might have a fat arse, but I didn’t get it by sitting on it

How I cycled 350 miles in 5 days … with the help of a thousand and one Jelly Babies

‘Have you ever thought of exercising? It might help you lose weight.’

Thankfully, few people actually say it out loud, but it’s a commonly held belief: fat people don’t take enough exercise; if they did, they wouldn’t be fat.

During my inexorable progress from a mildly chubby child to a properly overweight adult, I have walked 500 miles to Santiago Compostella, cycled 350 miles to Paris in 5 days, swum miles in cold water, worn out my fit-bit, and currently do all my London travel on a bike; I draw the line at cycling more than 8 miles to go out to dinner, because 8 miles home at two in the morning when I have drunk more than my fair share of the wine is a wobble too far.

I have medals, and a get-out-of-purgatory-free card to prove that it is perfectly possible to be fat without being lazy.

As today (yesterday) is the 80th anniversary of D-Day, I decided to repost a very old piece (edited) about one of my more gruelling bouts of physical exercise: cycling to Paris via WW2 battle grounds and cemeteries; 350 miles in 5 days.

Yes I know I’ve repeated 350-miles-in-5-days three times and we’ve hardly started, but I’d hate you to miss out on the chance to be very impressed.

Band of Brothers Bike Ride

It was a foggy day at the beginning of February when a friend told me  she had signed up to do a sponsored bike ride  – Cherbourg to Paris – in aid of Help for Heroes.

“What a great idea – I’ll do it too,” I said.

What??

I’m fat, I’m 50 and I sing Verdi. Nor am I into soldiers, wars or anything else to do with the Military.

But the information pack assured me that anyone of average fitness could do it. Well that was definitely me. As in ‘the average person couldn’t run for a bus if their life depended on it’.

And the military might not be one of my things but I do think that if our governments will insist on starting wars because they can’t think of a better game to play of a Monday morning, then the least we can do is treat the mangled wrecks that come back with as much support and respect as possible and not just dump them on the NHS waiting lists. So I instructed my friends to be enormously impressed and signed up.

I followed the 10-week training schedule meticulously – the gist of it seemed to be that if you move your legs faster then the bike moves faster. Sounds daft, I know, but amazingly it actually worked. Soon I’d progressed from taking half an hour to puff my way round the village to bowling my way along 16 miles at a stretch.

I also discovered the joys of skinny tyres. On the bicycle that is. My own remained resolutely agricultural.   

My daughter thought that I should have saved my money on the new bike and spent it on a first aid kit.

The cheeky monkey.

I was thinking more on the lines of a fully equipped cardiac arrest team.

  In April I went to the Isle of Wight with the same friend for some training:

“We’ll cycle round it a couple of times,” she said: “It’ll be great practise.”

I was full of hope and optimism: The Isle of Wight? Tiny I thought; a few miles end to end. Bound to be quite flat – the edges are all at sea level and you don’t get much flatter than that.

It turned out that the IOW has a circumference of sixty-two miles and holds the world record for packing more hills into each and every one of them than the Himalayas; I considered lawsuits.

We did it in a record time of twelve hours. Well, my friend did it in five but she is skinny and has muscles, so basically cheating.*

After only 2 weeks lying down in a darkened room I was completely recovered.

*If she’d been a different person, she might have pointed out that she has MS, but she’s one of the bravest and most courageous person I know, and it wouldn’t occur to her.

About a fortnight before the ride was due to start I was feeling pretty smug about how well training was going, until I turned my 10-week training schedule over and discovered another 10 weeks on the back emphasising the need for twice weekly, 50 – 70 mile training rides.

I lay down in a darkened room with a box of chocolates.

Then I heard the worrying news that Normandy was not, in fact, completely flat, and Paris would not be down hill all the way either. It was too late to send in the diggers, so I would just have to make the best of it.

And finally, with my panniers stuffed full of padded knickers, Boots’ entire pain relief section, and 45 packs of Dextrasol, it was time to go.

We assembled at Southwick Park, operations hub of the D–Day Landings, before cycling en masse to catch a ferry from Portsmouth 9 miles away.  At least, we started en masse, but after a 2-mile hill the masse was a tiny glint on the horizon and I pedalled along lonely as a cloud.

When we set out there were nearly 300 fit-looking, Lycra-clad people cycling (I was not lycra-clad; I am not built for lycra), many in the forces or ex-forces and I was really dreading it. Not only was I about to embark on 5 days of more exercise than I would normally pack into several years, but as far as I was concerned the Army et al was full of right-wing gits who liked shooting people. And I didn’t expect them to be particularly enamoured with a woolly-liberal, left-wing git like me either.

Well, I was quite right about the first bit: it turned out that Normandy, as well as being number one destination for invading armies 65 years ago, was quite keen to compete with the Isle of Wight on the subject of hills. It lost on frequency but won hands down on length and incline.

It was hard keeping up, especially as quite a few of the men had taken the phrase ‘calves of steel’ rather literally, and had a steel artificial leg from the knee down. It was obviously a great advantage, and they smiled and chatted as they whizzed along.

I gather having it blown off by a landmine in the first place wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

Or the fact that it felt like pushing on a lighted cigar: approximately 120 pushes a minute for around 8 hours a day for 5 days.

That’s 288,000 perfectly good winces gone to waste.

One of the best things about the trip was just how many sweets you got to eat. Every 20 miles or so, the organisers thrust mountains of chocolate bars, bananas and Jelly Babies at you. I think they were meant to share, but I didn’t take that idea too seriously.

The support team were fantastic: having someone to pump up my tyres, check my gears and twiddle with my saddle each morning had long been a favourite fantasy, and here it was, happening every morning for five days.  Nothing was too much trouble –on the last day, having left at 4.00am in order to get to Paris by the 2.00pm deadline, I had cycled 25 miles without so much as a cup of coffee. As I was struggling up a hill and wondering how I could possibly keep going, the support vehicle pulled along side and one of the team indicated the presence of a bag of Jelly Babies. She wound down the window to give hand-to-hand resuscitation. As I stretched out to reach them I wobbled precariously, almost falling off my bike and careering into the truck.

It would have been ignominious to die in pursuit of a bag of sweets but I put it behind me and pedalled determinedly on in pursuit of croissant. When I finally found an open café, I staggered in and half fell against the counter.

No croissant they informed me.

Then the lady saw my near-death state – I had been cycling for two and a half hours without breakfast – and rushed into her own kitchen, coming back moments later with a large piece of brioche with half an inch of butter spread on it.

And there are people out there who don’t believe in miracles.              

One of the days was dedicated to the Resistance and the role of women in WW2; we stopped at an airfield for a water-and-jelly-babies break, and a small aeroplane landed. Out of it came two elderly women, a slightly younger woman and an old man. The two women had been parachuted into France during WW2 as S.O.E’s.   Over 40 women in the FANY were sent behind enemy lines. The old man had parachuted into France with Violette Szabo, the WW2 heroine – immortalised in the film Carve Her Name With Pride – who was shot by the Gestapo in Ravensbrück concentration camp.  The younger woman was her daughter, who as a four-year-old had collected Violette’s George Cross from Buckingham Palace.   Later, I stood with a man who wept uncontrollably as he tried to tell me what it meant to him to have met Violette’s daughter.

One of the sites we visited was the Pegasus Bridge, where troops had been landed in gliders on a patch of grass about the size of a municipal swimming pool. The other side of the bridge was a cafe. We were met by the woman who owned it; she’d been a little girl when her parents had risked their lives to give the Allies intelligence, and their café and home was the first one to be liberated. She spoke of spending the night huddled in the cellar and her fear that her parents might be shot for spying before the Allies arrived.  And then she offered all 300 of us free drinks.

At another site, on the top of a 15-mile hill – well that’s what it felt like anyway (no, I did not get off and push) – I looked down at a beautiful green valley, filled with trees in blossom, cows and woods. There was a recording of Eisenhower describing the same place as somewhere you could walk for hundreds and hundreds of yards, stepping only on the decomposing bodies of the slain Poles who had defended the position.

We visited the American and Canadian cemeteries:

Aged 22, Aged 19, Known only to God, Known only to God, Aged 18, Aged 23, Known only to God… Acres and acres and acres of white crosses and stars of David filled with the remains of young, slaughtered men.

Each site brought home just how much bravery and blood it had cost to enable me to pedal alongside the beautiful Normandy beaches, living the life of left-wing, bolshie, bohemian Riley. It made me cry.

I cried an awful lot on this trip: all the dead men and women from sixty-five years ago, and all the  alive men and women in the forces cycling beside me: one young woman – she looked about 24 – recently back from Afghanistan, told me her little sister had been killed in Iraq. Another, older, rotund man who was always smiling and cheering people up, at the very end of the trip put on a T shirt with a picture of his son who had been killed in action 3 years before. He was proud of the fact that his son had died ‘so that other people’s sons don’t have to’.

It turned out I had been embarrassingly wrong about the people: instead of a load of right-wing gits, I found myself cycling alongside some of the kindest people I had met in a long time, and so brave.

There was one young couple – Abby and Harry Long: funny, kind, always supportive to everyone around them. Harry had broken his back in 2 places during training, and was paralysed from the chest down; he was doing the whole thing on a hand bike, going unaided up even the worst – would-it-be-cheating-to use-a-ladder – hills.

I was particularly glad he was there because on the really, really, really steep hills I OVERTOOK him. It was quite a triumph.

I kept being overwhelmed not just by the kindness, but the way it was delivered.  The lovely young men (all pilots) who would turn up next to me and cycle alongside for half an hour at a time, chatting and cheering me up no end  (well, they did the chatting and I would try and pretend I could still speak whilst cycling so fast) – eventually I realised it wasn’t random. It took me even longer to notice that when they had finished their support-a-Diva stint, they would tell me some improbably fast speed we had apparently been doing and then, instead of streaking ahead at great speed, they always found some reason to need to pop back to check something behind us. On the last day, when I was so worried about getting to Paris on time, after the first water stop I found Peter, a lovely ex-Army man in his 60s cycling beside me. Sometimes he pedalled alongside, and we had interesting chats about all kinds of things, in particular his voluntary work with disadvantaged teenagers, sometimes he cycled behind me, and I pedalled like mad to not get in his way, sometimes he went ahead for a little while, and I pedalled like mad to keep up. He always seemed to know exactly whether I needed a push, a pull or a chat. He also evoked in me an absolute determination that whatever happened, I must not let him down; it was a wonderful feeling and helped me push through any amount of exhaustion – and  discover strength I never even dreamt of.   After many miles, it finally dawned on me that he was going to stay with me for the whole of the remaining 50 miles into Paris to help me get there in plenty of time.   

You will be relieved to hear that I did my bit for the cause of nobility: I SHARED my Jelly Babies.

I even gave away my last one.

Once.

Well, once is quite enough, let me tell you.

When we finally got to the Arc de Triomphe they stopped the traffic for us to process up to it, and bands played, Generals spoke, more wreaths were laid and we sang the National Anthem and the Marseillaise very loudly. Also cried a lot. Then they closed the Champs Elisee to traffic and we rode our bikes down it.

Now that’s what I call a cycle lane.

Then we cycled to our hotels and had a couple of hours to remove all traces of Lycra, find our lipstick  and dress up for the final party on a boat.

I knew there was going to be a party; it had said so on the itinerary, but I didn’t know there was going to be an award ceremony.

There were a lot of awards and it was fun guessing who each one would go to.

“The next award is for True Grit.”

Harry Long, I thought,

“Lizzie Wingfield,” they said.

What?? Then I burst into tears.

I don’t want to boast but –

Of course I want to boast.

Boast, boast, boast.

Boast, boast, boast.

Not sure if that’s enough. May come back to it later.

For a long time I couldn’t understand it at all

Then I remembered the Jelly Baby. That last Jelly Baby, selflessly given up, leaving a completely empty packet, on a rainy, cold day, with 10 miles still to go.

It cost me everything I had.

I talked it over with Harry, and he agreed that I must have dug deep to do it.

He did get his own award: The Harry Long Real True Grit Award, which was pretty good considering he hadn’t given away a single Jelly Baby.

So there it is – I did it. I actually cycled the whole 350 miles from Cherbourg to Paris in 5 days.  Although exhausted, I am recovering well and hope to be fully restored by Christmas.

Not this Christmas, obviously.