At the finish line

We are now back from the India ride having successfully completed the hardest Truant ride ever with temperatures over 90°F (32°C) and humidity as high as 96% at times. You will find below part of the story of that ride.  If you supported us for this ride, many thanks, this is much appreciated ; we managed to smash our target and raised a whopping £605,479!!

After  over ten hours at the back of the plane we arrived in Kochi (Cochan) at 5 AM on Thursday morning, took a bit of lagged sleep and got up and set up our bikes (gel saddles, bar ends, clips, etc) and went for a short ride to get ready for the start on Saturday morning. We set off by 6.30 latest every day to avoid some of the intense heat and humidity. It’s a bit weird setting off on a long hot ride when normally you would be just going to bed in the UK! Over the 3 days l cycled 180km up hills totalling 7399ft – if you reckon Mount Snowdon is 3560ft l did 2 of those!! And on a bloody heavy mountain bike. Some of the guys did more, i had to curtail myself a bit to protect a knee i am getting replaced in 3 weeks time! The roads varied from totally ravaged to severely or partially pot holed to smooth and fast. We passed many villages and small towns – the area is heavily populated with the most friendly people imaginable. The roads through these were interesting – as they say in India, in the UK you drive on the left, in the USA on the right, but in India we go down the middle. Too true and with much honking of horns – but we survived, just . Amazingly we had no outbreaks of Delhi Belly on the ride, no dehydration problems and only one crash and she was fine, just a bit grazed. Guess it shows we are getting better at this! On the positive side it is a well known fact that beer contains salts which help against dehydration so we forced ourselves to devour over a thousand large cans of Kingfisher. Hard but it had to be done!

To date the Truants have cycled in Egypt, Cuba, Morocco, Cambodia and Mexico, so this was the sixth and most certainly the toughest ride to date l but I guess we are getting better with practice despite high average weight and age and generally low fitness levels. There were 35 men and 6 ladies on this, and included six fine Rookies. The total raised on this ride will be added to the £2,275,290 already given to our children’s charities –  Nordoff Robbins, Teenage Cancer Trust and ChildLine. Every penny of cost is paid by the Truants , every penny you give us goes DIRECT to Nordoff Robbins to be distributed

We will continue trying to raise funds until early January to try to make our target for India, and at that point we will send all our donors a link the the India Ride website which will not only have all the tall tales, stats, pics and comments , but also the magnificent movie of the ride which i promise will be well worth seeing

If you were kind and patient enough to read all this ……THANKS