Jools looks worried

Two days to go and the nerves are beginning to tell. They’re not helped by delving into End to End, Paul Jones’ excellent account of the various heroes, dreamers and unhinged nutters who have attempted to the break the End to End record.

Jones starts with a pair of late Victorian adventurers who completed the 874 miles between Land’s End to John O’Groats in 5 days and 10 hours. On an ‘ordinary’…in other words, a penny farthing! No gears, no artisan cafés, crap roads, barely any tarmac. My imagination just isn’t big enough to handle the notion.

Another gent who made the journey on an ordinary carried a pistol to deal with dangerous dogs along the way, and only managed to finish thanks to a lethal dose of cocaine which was administered about five hours from the finishing line. And that was in the 1880s! Plus ça change!

Jones gives lots of space to the amazing achievements of women End to Enders, who for a while at least, were close to parity with men. Heroines like Eileen Sheridan, probably this country’s great ever female cyclist, who did the trip in around 2 days and 11 hours in 1954. Or Pauline Strong, a supremely tough Liverpudlian, who dominated the scene in the 1960s.

Most of these endurance freaks went through physical and mental torment in their attempts to bust the record. Many of them began to hallucinate in the final stages of the journey, mistaking trees or telephone posts for cheering people, or seeing giant rabbits hopping across the road etc.

Hopefully, if any such visions appear to us, they won’t be the result of physical exhaustion. Unlike, Paul Jones, who also attempted to do the trip in giant leaps, taking A-roads in the depth of winter and almost getting sucked into the wheels of passing lorries, our dainty little 54 mile-a-day average will be a breeze. I said ‘hopefully’. Much respect to the current record holders (Michael Broadwith with 43 hours, 25 mins and 13 seconds, and Christina Mackenzie with 51 hours, 5 mins and 27 seconds) but theirs isn’t my flavour of craziness

Much respect too to Paul Jones for writing such an enjoyable and honest book. He comes clean about how cycling is an antidote for his depression, a pressure-valve in tense and confusing times, and how in the end, the time it takes you to do LEJOG is irrelevant – it’s the journey that counts. Right at the end, he thinks of all the great End to End heroes, but then decides it’s not about them: ‘It’s the thousands of other people who have traced this line on a map and done this thing, and lived purely and absolutely, both with joy and with staggering misery, in that time.”

Lordy lord! That’s going to be us soon!

Andy Morgan, Bristol, August 19th.