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The difference between the two bikes was startling. The riding position, weight, power transfer, handling, suspension, and feel, were everything I thought they ought to be on a 'proper' mountain bike. At the time I had no idea why, but I fell in love with my new bike almost immediately and started more and more technically low-level adventurous rides, mostly by myself, and for longer and longer distances exploring vast tracts of North Wales. The idea of riding 100 miles in a day crept in from somewhere and I committed to it on the MTBBritain forum hoping it would drive a training program that would enable me to get to grips with the more technical aspects of off road riding (including gear changing, at which I was still hopelessly incompetent) and improve my riding fitness to a sensible level. 

The next series of events were so unlikely that it would take a year to explain how they came around, but, to cut a long story short I ended up doing a Downhill Skills Course with Nigel Page, got a long leave of absence from work, agreed to go long distance road touring with my girlfriend, and failed to get a set of maps sent from the USA for the Continental Divide Mountain Bike Trail' Nothing startling there you may think, but somehow all these happenings conspired to produce a rather odd reaction.

I had been riding a bike for less that 6 months, had no off-road skills, no mechanical knowledge, no real endurance fitness, no training, no helmet (still), and no idea of what I was doing, when from somewhere I made the statement that I was going to try and ride 1200 miles from Lands End to John O'Groats, off road, in 22 days'Marvellous Idea!!!!!! Luckily Julie is probably marginally madder than a box of frogs and seemed to think the idea was excellent and more than worthy of a great deal of suffering. She declared that our summer holiday was set; we set a date, and (I) promptly forgot all about it. Monday was our Lands End leaving day and the Thursday before prompted a brief comment from Julie, 'Aren't we supposed to be leaving from Lands End on Monday?'. I was immediately forced into committal action, 'Er, yesssss'. Silence. The problem was that I still hadn't unpacked from a three week motorcycle race in Lapland a week previously and had spent most of the last week in bed asleep.

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Cycling from one end of the country to the other was not exactly uppermost in my mind, but I didn't want to appear too incompetent. I knew I had to think fast because Julie was clearly not going to be put off by my indecisive pauses for long, and if I wasn't careful I would probably be spending the next three weeks doing myself irreparable damage. Another question fired my way, 'So, have you booked the accommodation and stuff? Where are we going to stay? Do you know the route'?'. What could I say, it seemed only a small white lie would suffice to extract me from this one, 'Er, yes?'. Luckily Julie knows me rather too well and immediately began probing my fine set of 'Lomax Plans', only to discover what she had suspected all along. There weren't any. She seemed a little upset by this but I reasoned that we still had three days before we had to leave to go South' 

My mechanical knowledge of bikes was so limited that I didn't know enough to put together a sensible spares kit, so that was that sorted. I wandered down from the bedroom to the garage and poked at the bike, it LOOKED ok' I thought about my normal motorbike preparations before a rally. Most of them revolved around engine servicing and electrical preparations'. but the Cannondale didn't have any. I turned it upside down and span the wheels. Ah Haaaa! A dodgy wheel bearing! I put the bike into my car and drove it to my LBS. For the princely sum of £4.10 two new bearings were fitted and I felt vindicated. The bike preparation phase was over. Time for a quick look at the route. T Minus two days'

Multimap is a marvellous thing. 75 pages of cut down maps later and a rather dubious drive into work to print two sets of double sided colour copies saw us with our route finalised. We had loosely based it upon a route used by James Spencer and David Broddle, detailed on their excellent website. 

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