In 2018 my company’s London office proposed an offer in the company-wide Slack channel: ride a bicycle from London to Paris in 24 hours in a fundraising effort for the British Heart Foundation.
If Slack had a crickets functionality, it would have been triggered based on the responses the message received.
I had taken up bicycling in my adult years not long after moving to Austin, Texas. My brother and I drove from Eugene, Oregon over the course of 2-weeks, and once we arrived in Texas, we only had the single car we had shared as teenagers. Aside from the heat, cycling in Austin at the time was not a terrible mode of transport as far as American cities are concerned, so not long after our arrival we purchased a couple of bicycles (my brother’s would be stolen a couple years later).
I rode my trusty steed to and from work, eight or ten miles round trip each day. At the time, I valued the “coolest” looking bicycle I could afford, which wasn’t much, and not yet being motivated enough to build my own, I purchased a used ten speed that I thought would attract all the other twenty-something babes.
Not long after I arrived at work one day, one of the girls I worked with kindly pointed out that I was riding a girl bike. Oh well.
Not long after, and still commuting to work via bicycle, I began attending organized (in the loosest sense of the word) bicycle rides with the Social Cycling Austin crew. In those days, the rides were more about drinking everything in site and surviving the ride home rather than building cardio endurance; it was truly a motley sight to behold, a windswept, sun burned horde on all manner of bikes frankensteined together, different music from multiple bluetooth speakers blaring among the parade of glow sticks and spoke cards, men and women in banana suits riding headlong into traffic and on highway shoulders, dogs and children towed in trailers used to block intersections so we could all pass, local businesses refusing us quarter so instead we sat among the mosquitos and crickets in public parks and parking lots, our bikes piled maniacally high and each of us drenched in sweat, cheap beer, and from swimming pools typically accessed by jumping fences then racing home like our bones were dust.
Alas, by 2018 those days were behind me. While I was not a novice to biking, a quick calculation on Google revealed the 300 km distance to be over 180 miles. In 24-hours. My previous high score was a little over 200 miles when I rode from Austin to the Gulf of Mexico in Port Aransas, Texas. But that was over a span of about 36 hours, and included a full night’s sleep in a hotel.
The London to Paris ride would not include a period to recharge, but rather a short boat ride across the English Channel where we could eat and potentially sleep:
Nick Montrose 