What You’ve Missed About Charity Bike Rides

There’s a back­lash hap­pen­ing against char­ity bike rides. I’m not sure why. For me, it’s a way of try­ing to give in a time when you often feel like you’re doing an awful lot of taking.

Every couple of months sees the announce­ment of yet another heroic long-distance solo bicycle odys­sey, pit­ting man against the ele­ments across the world’s great land­masses for months or years on end. Each of these pro­jects is a noble one. Undoubtedly they will involve huge per­sonal chal­lenges — men­tal far more than phys­ical. These riders are often set­ting them­selves tar­gets they don’t under­stand them­selves. Three years ago, I was in exactly the same situ­ation myself!

But as far as their audi­ence is con­cerned — the lib­eral, intel­lec­tual, act­ive, environmentally-aware crowd to whom they reach out for sup­port — it’s old news. It’s been done before. Even this demo­graphic reacts to whim­sical trends, and char­ity rides are on the way out. A default response emerges, usu­ally cri­ti­cising one aspect or another of the idea, almost as if the mis­sion was noth­ing more than fash­ion­able posturing.

But no two jour­neys are ever the same, and the real motiv­a­tion — usu­ally a deep and per­sonal one — is often upstaged by what is sup­posed to be media-friendly spin for the pur­pose of attract­ing the audi­ence in the first place. This is dif­fi­cult for the non-cycling, non-travelling audi­ence to grasp.

I think Mark Beau­mont implanted a false notion of a long bike jour­ney into the minds of a very large audi­ence through his 4-part BBC doc­u­ment­ary. He set out to plough through the miles and break the world record for cyc­ling the world, and he did so by ful­filling all of the Guin­ness cri­teria — on the planet’s highways.

His object­ive differed to prac­tic­ally every other cycle tour­ist out there. But I no longer expect the pub­lic to under­stand that. Someone said to me that I should expect my home­com­ing to be a huge dis­ap­point­ment. I’d arrive back in Eng­land after years on the road, full of enthu­si­asm to tell people all about the adven­tures, only to find that nobody would under­stand what I’d been through in that time, des­pite all of my best efforts.

Maybe the human mind is ill-equipped to ima­gine con­cepts on the scale of a trans-continental bicycle jour­ney. In an evol­u­tion­ary sense, why would we have needed to develop such a capa­city? Prim­it­ive humanoid indi­vidu­als who expen­ded their men­tal ener­gies on under­stand­ing and exploit­ing their local sur­round­ings would undoubtedly have fared bet­ter than those who stopped to perch on a rock and con­tem­plate the stars.

Nowadays we have to make do with this lim­ited equip­ment when try­ing to com­pre­hend things on a global scale, and often we fail. I still find it dif­fi­cult to com­pre­hend the scale of a bicycle jour­ney of sev­eral years, even though I’m kind of in the middle of one, but at least I now know how it feels to live a day of that life — and, indeed, it’s a life that should be lived day by day, as a tar­get the size of Planet Earth hanging over­head is simply too monu­mental to live with.

The point that is missed more than ever, though, does not relate to the fun­drais­ing tar­gets of a given ride, or any of the mes­sages that the rider hopes to com­mu­nic­ate through the trip. Yes, these may suc­ceed to some degree, but I believe that the more import­ant bene­fit of such a ride lies in the future, long after the brakes have been applied for the last time. A lone, ground-level jour­ney of sev­eral years can­not fail to change some­thing in the jour­ney­man — in the way he sees the world, with all its beauty and imper­fec­tion — and inspire him to live life more respons­ibly in the know­ledge of all he has seen.

This is a life-long gift, and it will rub off on those around him — maybe only gradu­ally, and maybe not in any immediately-visible way, but in the course of a life­time, more good will emerge from this than from any one-off char­ity fun­drais­ing effort.

(Of course, if you do wish to donate a small amount towards help­ing vul­ner­able inner-city kids get their lives back on track, I’m sure they’d thank you very kindly for doing so!)

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