A lot of the Wye valley route after Tintern proved to be fairly flat, easy riding, but after crossing the river just before the hamlet of Mork the road began to climb. The gradient was not steep but, after what felt like a long day’s riding, I found it quite tiring. Seeing that I was flagging a bit Ollie commented on a couple of occasions, “not far now Mick”. I was starting to feel like the proverbial child who asks, “are we nearly there?” To be honest the last hour or so of any day’s riding, when your legs are beginning to tire, is tough and requires mental determination as much as physical strength in order to complete the day’s stage. As I dragged my flagging body and painful legs onwards, I got to thinking that finishing has always been a problem with me.
I am one of those people who gets an idea and then pursues it with considerable determination and singlemindedness until it is almost in the bag, then something else tends to take over, making a successful completion tricky. I begin to lose interest, my mind latches onto another idea and I am eager to get going on this new project with equal determination and singlemindedness. Of course, undertaking a project like LEJOG does not lend itself to such thinking or action. You have to complete each day’s ride and, what is more, do that for fourteen days before you finally come to a halt and experience the enormous, and it is enormous, sense of achievement of an epic journey completed. So, when I am on a ride and beginning to flag, some words of encouragement are very welcome; thanks Ollie.
One thing amongst many that LEJOG has taught me is that finishing well is a vital constituent of any task and it challenges my rather manic desire to leap quickly onto the next thing without properly tying up the loose ends of the task in hand. In short, it helped me to recognise a character weakness and gave me an opportunity to put it right and the hope that I might be able to apply what I have realised to other situations in future.
Eventually, having climb quite a long way above the river Wye, catching glimpses of it every now and again trough gaps in the trees, we reached a T junction, turned left and the bridge over the Wye hove into view. We hit the first significant traffic since Bristol and, having crossed the bridge, ground to a halt at a set of traffic lights. When the lights turned green in our favour we pressed on and in a short while, cycling through the small but picturesque town of Monmouth, we came to the hotel, our destination for stage four, which was situated on the outskirts of town. Once we got ensconced in the hotel and downed the obligatory protein drink (yuk!!) we set off to find somewhere to eat. There was, as it turned out, quite a lot of choice. A certain amount of faffing then surfaced, arguments about where to eat and what to eat, until Sam lost patience with what was beginning to feel like terminal indecision and took matter into his own hands decreeing, like some benevolent dictator, the location of a restaurant which could accommodate us all. Personally, I was so tired I was losing the will to live and so was more than happy to run with his insistence and back him up when voices, by now somewhat feeble through lack of sustenance, were raised in objection. As it turned out the restaurant, though packed, provided us with an excellent meal and a good choice of beer. What more could a knackered cyclist want? So thus replete, fortified and all arguments forgotten we headed back to the hotel for the night.
As I climbed into my bunk that night, I thought to myself, “four days done, only ten more to go!” But before the enormity of the task ahead could dominate my thinking I was, mercifully, asleep. “And there was evening and there was morning, a fourth day” (Genesis 1, slightly modified)
Ezekiel's Wheels 