Did the diet with Dickie work??

The results are in!  The post ride weigh in took place this morning and the results were  independently verified by an official (Janine).

First, a quick reminder that 2 weeks ago when we started this challenge, I weighed in at a rather hefty 83.5kg or 13st 2lbs in old money (ouch!)

10 days, 960 miles and 72,000 calories of effort later, I'm delighted to be able to reveal that post ride my weight has fallen to 83.0kg or 13st 1lb.  That's a massive 1lb weight LOSS. 

Which just goes to show that you can achieve anything if you set you mind to it.   Just another 7,000 miles to go to get down to my fighting weight of 12st 8lbs!

Dickie

Final Thoughts

Day 11: John O’Groats to….home

Cycling time: zero!

We’re on our long journey home now after a fantastic trip and thought we would sign off the blog with a few final thoughts and thankyous.

Let’s begin with the latter by thanking you all for your great support and interest in the trip. We know a lot of you have been following our journey very closely on this blog and we have all greatly enjoyed putting it together over a pint in the evening. We certainly haven’t been short of stories to tell and pictures to show and even videos. We also know that you were all avidly watching to see if your guess of our final cycling time was correct – ironically our final time of just over 64 hours was virtually an average of all the guesses we received.

Thanks must go to all of you who have offered donations to our chosen charity, Prostrate Cancer. We have now received well over £3,500 in donations, including well over £100 from complete strangers who stopped us in the street to dip in their pockets during our travels. It certainly seemed that the charity struck a real chord with people. One chap memorably started telling us about the treatment he was receiving, while several ladies told us how their husbands had struggled with the cancer. We are still counting our final donations but we expect to be very close to the £4,000 mark once all donations are finally collected.

A special thankyou too to all those riders who joined us at various points during the ride to pace us for a few miles. This was especially helpful during our epic day over Shap Fell from Preston when I think otherwise we may have really struggled, but in particular Greg’s humour kept us going! And a few other special mentions. Bev and Reggie for buying us a bottle of champagne for our final night’s meal; and Matt and Sacha for driving us to a great country pub on our second night when spirits were rather low after a very wet afternoon.

Finally we thought we would sign off with our own round-up of the various highs and lows of the trip. Goodbye all, and thanks for listening.

Best view: Remote northern Scottish highlands/Tintern Abbey, Wye Valley

Best hotel: Cherrybrook Hotel, Dartmoor

Best restaurant: Fiddlers, Dromnadrochit

Best pint: Monster munch, Dromnadrochit

Best breakfast: Ben Loyal, Tongue

Best cake: Coffee cake, Onich

Worst rainstorm: Gretna Green

Worst wind: The (long & winding) road to Kilmarnock

Worst hill: Princetown, Dartmoor

Stat box

Puncture count: Graham 4, Jim 3, Richard 2, Nigel 0

Dickie’s diet

Calorie burn: 72,000

Calorie intake: unknown

Result to be posted tomorrow once weigh-in has been completed…

We made it!

Day 10: Tongue to John O'Groats
Mileage: 74
Cycling time: 4hr 32m
Total mileage: 955
Total cycling time: 64 hours 15 mins 50 seconds

After 10 days of considerable highs (and a few lows!) we finally rolled in to John O'Groats at 4pm today where we toasted our endeavours in the sunshine with a bottle of champers and a wee dram of Dalwhinnie (thanks girls!).

However there was no easy ride in to JOG as we endured a very hilly first couple of hours, although the coastline scenery almost made up for the pain of taking on yet another hill! However our filling of scrambled egg and smoked salmon from breakfast kept us going (although Richard needed a push out from the traps - see video below) while the undoubted highlight of the morning was the awesome view from Bettyhill which overlooked fabulous Torrisdale Bay.

After finally finding somewhere for a coffee we pressed on towards Thurso where the hills finally subsided, and as the Orkneys came into view we knew we were closing in fast on our final destination and spirits raised. After meeting the girls for lunch in 'Le' Bistro in Thurso we had the final run in along the coast although at this point the wind decided to change direction right into our faces which meant we were made to work hard right to the end.
Just before John O'Groats we took a small detour to mainland Britain's most northerly point, Dunnet Head, which gave fantastic views towards the Orkneys and was well worth the small diversion, before the final straight run in to the finish where the girls were on hand to capture the moment on video.
Meanwhile, what about the news you all want to know - who has won our bottle of bubbly for coming closest to correcting our total cycling time? Well the winner, subject to final confirmation, was Hubert (chip) Connelly who predicted a time of 64 hours 12 mins 50 seconds - just three minutes outside our final figure. Well done Hubert but a number of you were extremely close to our final time, not least Janine's mum Eileen - Janine is particularly devastated as she says she would have got to drink the champers!
We're all a little tired to write much more tonight, but tomorrow we'll return with our final thoughts on the trip and our rundown on our favourite places and memories.