Gorgeous weather (perhaps a bit TOO gorgeous, as sunburn and dehydration were always options) combined with lovely scenery, fresh air and interesting company to make this a very enjoyable three days. On the minus side there were the loooong days in the saddle, with the knowledge that for every lovely downhill stretch, when one could just cruise along and enjoy the scenery, there was a dirty great hill to be climbed just around the corner.

Southern England has its share of hills, of course –Turners Hill, notably, got the better of me when I was forced to get off and push while fitter team-mates stood at the top uttering encouraging shouts. But the first few hours in northern France lulled the hill-hater into a false sense of security with a fabulous 30-mile stretch of flat, smooth cycle track – before the hills started to kick in. To my delight even some of the hard-core cyclists in the faster teams, whom I’d admired as super-heroes, had to get off and push when we got to one particularly perpendicular stretch through a pine forest.

Our previous training sessions had made the 45-mile ride to Newhaven on Day 1, and then  the 55 miles from Dieppe to Gournay on Day 2 seem, if not exactly easy-peasy, at least manageable. But the mammoth 78-mile trek into Paris on Day 3 was always going to be challenging – the furthest I’d even cycled in one day previously was 50 miles.

There’s a lovely bit where you come out of the forest and see Paris spread out below you on the plain below –  the thought that you’re “nearly there now” puts extra energy into your cycling. In particular, when we reached the Seine after a ride through some really pretty villages, I felt we were pretty much at journey’s end. In reality, this was rather the equivalent of reaching the Thames at Richmond or somewhere – there was still a good two hours to go, first through the suburbs then through the scary city streets at rush hour.  Interestingly, the French are more tolerant towards cyclists than the British seem to be –passing motorists give you a wider berth and if they beep you it’s more likely to mean “bon voyage!” than “get off the road, you two-wheeled twerp!”

The journey was not without incident. On one occasion we were riding single file along a track at the side of a busy road, when a car slowed down and the driver wound her window down and shouted at us. I assumed she was jocularly yelling “oy, yer back wheels are going round!” – except in French – but a colleague who understands spoken French better than I explained that what she was really yelling was “oy, yer mate’s fallen off – half a mile back!”

Poor Claire had taken a flyer after bumping into the kerb, and had to be scraped off the road and bundled off to l’hopital to have some stitches put in a nasty cut on her chin, where her face had met the trottoir. Luckily – and pluckily – she was able to rejoin the group later in the day, complete with bandaged chin (looking, one wag remarked, like the love-child of Bruce Forsyth and Jimmy Hill).

In the meantime another colleague was temporarily put out of action when his saddle fell off. Then I got a puncture – and brake problems. Then someone’s chain came off – three times. Other teams had similar problems. Luckily, the mechanically adept team leaders were able to fix the wounded bikes, while the support teams, following in vans to feed and water the ravening hordes of cyclists, were on hand to cart the wounded humans off to hospital.  

I remained injury-free – not even a strained fetlock! – and boasted thighs like steel girders by the end of the trip.

There is still time to make a donation as sponsorship for this event and even small amounts are welcome, as they all add up. We all had to pay for our trip separately, so all the money donated on here goes direct to the charity, which will spend it on some worthwhile projects that help local communities.

THANK YOU