Lands End to John O'Groats for the Samaritans

In late April 2010 I plan to set off on my own 1100 mile journey from End to End. These things are impossible to put down you know... cave time, my wife calls it. Journeys or expeditions like this have a habit of morphing from one week, month or year to the next. I couldn't tell you exactly when this one gained substance, except that I needed to find something to fill the space left by my aborted idea to row the Atlantic. (Temporarily aborted, maybe.)

Well that's what happens in a fertile imagination. On top of such and such a mountain one day, amid the ocean waves another. Searching for the next available weekend to catch some serious freshair and blow a hole through the addled corridors of my brain. We're all into something. For me it's exercise. Exercise that goes on a bit...and a bit more. Oh, I forgot to mention the 3 peaks at the beginning. Lands End to John O'Groats with Snowdon, Sca Fell and Ben Nevis thrown in for good measure. It was never about the ends after all, but the journey. It was always about the journey.

The trans-Atlantic row was the same. The involvement with the Woodvale Challenge organisation provided the skeleton, but in the end it would have been about the journey. I am cometitive you understand, but challenges like these; challenges that last days or weeks are more about what goes on inside your head than whether you win or lose. How can you lose if you manage to row 3,000 miles across an ocean?

So how do you get from a cycle to a row or a row to a cycle? Well, simple really. At the early stages of our planning back in 2007 I started to look at a way of raising our profile and raising funds to cover the cost of the rowing boat and everything else that went with it. At a conservative estimate, if you join the Woodvale race, it's going to cost you £60,000 +, so we needed plenty of exposure. We figured that if we completed a few smaller challenges in the run up to the big one, then we would benefit in many ways at the same time. We would gel as a team, gain fitness, test our resolve and raise our profile. Lands End to John O'Groats was to be one of these challenges.