The Great River Thames Charity Bike Ride

You may be wondering why we have decided to ride our bikes along the River Thames. I can’t speak for the others, but this is a short story on how the idea for this ride was conceived and my own reasons for wanting to do this.

It was in the long hot summer of 2010 that the idea for a charity bike ride started to formulate. I had done a couple of 5km and 10km charity runs before and found them to be a good challenge, but I wanted to do something different. I still wanted to raise money for charity, but perhaps this time the challenge would involve sitting down. Then it struck me; how about a bike ride?


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I had heard about this chap featuring on Stephen Merchant’s BBC 6 Music show who had decided to walk from Lands End to John O’Groats (LEJOG), seemingly on a whim and with little or no planning, and it was this that inspired the challenge in me. Clearly, riding the LEJOG route would be a challenge and one that I felt beyond me at this moment. I wanted to do something that either hadn’t really been done before or one that was well known, so I chose cycling the length of the River Thames as it was just about the right distance and had a defined start and finish, which was just the right kind of challenge that I was after.

I’ve been riding bikes since I was young and loved having a certain amount of freedom from doing so. Of course, there was a “brief” period of about 10 years of not using a bike, but still I thought I’d be able to just hop on and carry on from where I left off! Easy, right?

In that summer – long before David Walliams stole my idea and made it 10 times more difficult by swimming the length of the River Thames – I suggested it to my then housemate Andy Paterson, asking whether he thought 60 miles a day and 180 miles over three days was doable for us. He seemed a bit ambivalent about the idea initially, but decided that, yes, it was probably possible. Once I suggested the idea of the Thames ride, he was keen on it. That was the first team member signed up.

I then somehow forgot about the idea for about nine months, until Andy reminded me about it, and reignited my interest. The thought of wanting to do “something big and challenging” before my 30th Birthday in 2012 and being officially “old” had absolutely nothing to do with it! The idea back in my mind, I sought out other like-minded people – my very good friends Dave Foster and Andrew Shum. They were instantly keen on the idea, and all of a sudden the idea had legs. Over the following months, three of us bought shiny new bikes while the other was contented with a dirty old one. We embarked on a few practice rides and started to formulate a few ideas about what to do and whom to sponsor.

Now it’s 2012, it’s taken me nearly two years to get this idea off the ground, showing just how sloth-like I can be, but now the time is here I am really very excited about embarking on this journey.

Although the total distance may seem unremarkable, we aren’t particularly strong cyclists and each of us will have our challenges to overcome, making this event very worthwhile and one that we hope you will be keen to support.

Phil