Je ne regrette rien

It's all Minxs fault.

Well actually it is, and it isn't. Fault is also the wrong attribute, really, it was more a collision of circumstances. Firstly, I was directed at the Minx Compendium, which is a blog of girly mountain biker inspiration.  It contains tales of amazing things, amongst tales of simply pedalling. The combination lead me to muse much last night and I went to bed with ideas and aspirations whizzing around in my head. There were other things, of course, which contributed, which involved enthusing and much use of the words 'well why can't we?' or rather much of the sentiment embodied in those words, at least.

Fast forward to this morning and I saw a word I didn't want to see on my notes. I cried.

5 hours later, I discovered that the week I've booked off between old and new jobs because the next two weeks promise to be incredibly stressful as I try and squeeze 6 weeks work into 2, will be spent alone as he can't get leave to come and camp with me in fields of green near towns full of books.

So while I was packing my office up (long story, new roof on our portacabin, I currently work in a refuse depot, yes super glam I know), I started thinking. Better half and I had been talking about riding the Leeds Liverpool from end to end. It's 127 miles and we're pretty much exactly half way from either end. It's a known quantity, I love the view of life you get from the canal, I love the narrowboats, am fascinated by the engineering of the locks and the urban sprawl looks very different from it. My legs also don't hurt when I'm riding my bike, something which I must confess is quite attractive at the moment.

So I decided.

Thing is, once I've decided, well that's kind of it, really. So a vague plan is forming, lovely ladies are offering cake, and more importantly, many people are understanding why I want to do this without needing to know any of the background. And somehow, just knowing that there are people who think this is a perfectly normal sane thing to do means I am now viewing it as something perfectly sane and normal to do. Telling our admin girls what I planned to do was a bit of a bump back to earth but I think they too know why I want to and that even if you're not the sort of person who needs to ride/climb/hike/camp on something because it's there, perhaps there's an element of 'well I can see why you might want to but that's really not my idea of fun'.


I'll admit right now, it's point proving. It's utterly selfish. It is because it's there, but it's also because it's the first. I want it to be the first of many adventures, because I want to go on adventures. Recently, there has been a slowly growing realisation that there is a thin girl inside me trying to get out. I have a friend called Clare who does amazing things, who has run the Bob Graham Round in under 24 hours, who's run across mountains in the middle of the night and I know her and I know she is not super human, only super determined.  For years and years I've watched this intelligent smart woman bound up and down mountains, run the OMM and nearly dissolve and push herself the absolute limits of her capabilities. Slowly but surely a curiosity has been building in me too, wondering if I could do that but on a bike. So this is where I start to find out, I guess, whether I can ride 30 miles something a day, every day for 4 days and just keep going, through the inevitable rain. Maybe this is where I start to prove that fat girls can ride hard and fast too and that in the process of proving that, the fat girl will actually become thin.

All I need to do now is decide what to wear and what colour nail varnish I'm wearing :O)