Nick Latimer put all the fitness he’d built up from short 10 mile time trials to good use by riding the end-to-end in 7 days with cycling buddy Simon Hearne. 130 miles per day was a bit of a shock to the system and for the last few days of the ride pretty much every bodily part hurt – knees, back, neck, thighs, quads, calves, feet, wrists. My stomach was ok, but when we arrived in John O’Groats at 7.30pm after a monster 135 mile day into a fierce coastal headwind and discovered that we couldn’t have a photo next to the famous sign because they take it down at 5pm to stop people dodging the £10 photo fee I was almost sick. So you can add stomach to the list too.

The ride was monstrously hard, the prevailing wind let us down as we faced a headwind for 6 days out of 7, and our bodies were pushed to limits they’d never even contemplated before. After 7 days (54 hours, 38 minutes and 13 seconds in the saddle), 908 miles (average speed 16.6mph), and 13,133 metres climbed (who knew how hilly GB is – that’s 1.5 times the height of Mount Everest) we rolled into John O’Groats broken men. Since the end of the ride I’ve been experiencing some pretty nasty muscle cramps, to the extent that the longest I’ve managed to stay on a bike without being forced off due to pain is 8 minutes! It was a great ride though, and all for charity too. If anyone’s interested in a blow-by-blow account of the ride, go to http://bloodsweatandtyres.blogspot.com/

And for anyone wishing to give to a good cause, we did the ride for Beating Bowel Cancer (http://www.justgiving.com/NickandSimon) and the Haemophilia Society (http://www.justgiving.com/simonandnick)