Best day of the ride for several reasons. Principally an early morning revelation that seemed to put everything about the trip into a new perspective for me, and to offer up the prospect of switching off the washing machine and enjoying the remaining days.

Tom’s friend Andy was waiting for us as we finished our breakfast in The Dalesman. Andy is, at least to a puny city type like me, a big lad and a great bike rider. Climbing the first little hill in town to pick up Rob and beginning to weigh up the prospect of dropping behind both Tom and Andy throughout the day, I was struck, as if from nowhere, by the liberating realisation that Tom is, or has the full makings of, a really great cyclist. Looking back at all the people who have joined us so far on the ride, I can’t think of a single one who Tom hasn’t kept pace with at the front of the group, despite his extra 5kg of luggage and the hundreds of additional miles he’s got in his legs by now. He’s a stone lighter than me, strong and wiry from a lifetime of climbing cliffs and has a cyclists attitude, pushing every pedal-stroke hard and riding every trip flat out whether it’s 7 miles or 70.

What a relief. I’m none of those things, so why bother with the churning anxieties about keeping up? I could feel the weight lifting from my shoulders and, for the first time since Day One, I rode the distance with what felt like a smile on my face.

We climbed imposing Cumbrian hills, hammered memorably down the sides of river valleys, dodged cows, spotted ostriches and had Indonesian pasties in the Ravenhouse Stores, Kirkoswald. Andy is a generous and funny rider, helping to fix minor mechanical problems and, I suspect, never really stretching his legs out more than he needed to.

Along with my new and highly satisfactory settlement regarding my place in the riding pack came the realisation that, despite my current undertaking, I’m probably not cut out to be a cyclist. I recall Bill from the Bike Shed in Exeter telling me that during his Lands’ End to John O’Groats ride he, “felt himself changing into a cyclist”. It’s one of the things i’ve been looking forward to experiencing myself. I realised today that it’s not going to happen. Instead of getting stronger and better, I’m pushing on as best I can and hoping to make it to the end. I’m pretty disappointed about that, but at least i’ve learned something.

I have burning lactic acid pain in my legs now after only the shortest of stops and it’s taking longer and longer to clear. I have also to report a worrying deterioration down the back of the cycling shorts. Not sure quite how i’m going to get back into the saddle in the morning.

I think I’m on the way to concluding that this trip is about it for me as far as cycling goes. I’ll carry on, and hopefully stay strong, but I sense i’ve gone about as far as I can take it now. No jokes about taking it further by riding into the sea of Scotland and making for Orkney.

Stunning scenery. Huge valleys carved by ice. The famous Vale of Eden Drumlins. Deep, dark forests stretching over the horizon. And when we arrived, a fine B&B complete with a talkative Vietnamese Pot-bellied Pig. Then I fell for a joke about a cleaner who couldn’t hoover.

Like I said, a good day.

585 official miles down. Think we’re well over 600 though.

If you’d told me as a kid, or at any age to be fair, that I could get up in the morning and  ride my bike to the Lake District, I’d have recommended psychiatric treatment. Actually,  I’d more likely have stared at my feet at mumbled something barely audible and almost certainly meaningless. Not a very confident child.

Not a very confident grown-up this morning either. Determined to get up early and get breakfast out of the way leaving plenty of time to digest, it took me 25 weary minutes to chew through my bowl of porridge. This felt like the most sluggish start to the day since waking up in Stockling on Monday morning. Mum, Tom and I talked about how the tiredness and its elusive flipside, the energy, come in unpredictable phases. I recalled how whacked out i’d been finishing last night and bit down on the fear that today could be worse. This was supposed to get easier as we went.

Rarely can a broken bike have given anyone such a confidence boost. Wheeling out of Mum’s garage it seemed like my back wheel was sticking. It turned out that the bottom of my brake lever had sheared off, forcing the brake block against the wheel rim. Suddenly last night’s dramatic dip in zip seemed explicable. I couldn’t find the part on the garage floor so it surely must have come away before the end of the ride. No chance of any bike shops being open at 7am, but the web pointed us to the Orange Apple in Longridge, 40 miles into the day’s trip. I set off with a big, relieved smile on my face, and no rear brakes.

The riding was good. Picking through the streets where I grew up, starting by climbing hills I feared when a schoolchild (Thornton Road! Par Brew!) which turned out to be little more than slight changes in gradient, then joining together the post-industrial towns that make up the western fringe of the Manchester/Salford conurbation: Tyldesley, Atherton, Horwich. Now the buildings were red brick instead of local stone and then, just as suddenly, we were up in the hills approaching the West Pennine Moors, and the stone started to return.

We picked up Rob in Rivington and rose and fell through (sharp) hill country, heading to Blackburn, Preston, the Lakes. Hearing the cream-churned North-West accents was another almost embarrasingly simple filip. My own started to return, and half way through the day I surprised myself by using two syllables for the word ‘here’ where in the South West one would suffice.

Heading up a hill 30 miles in, my front tyre started to swell. Rob came alongside, pointed his magic finger at it, and it exploded. We changed the innertube straightforwardly, but only when freewheeling downhill past Tom, who was watering the hedgerow, did I realise that I’d forgotten to reconnect my front brakes. The keen cyclists among you will realise that no front brakes plus no back brakes equals no brakes at all. Luckily the hill was empty and fairly short. Not sure what I would have done otherwise.

The chap in the Orange Apple was fantastic, dropping everything to fix my brakes, Rob’s cranks and then recommending several cafe-stops for the second part of the day. He also recommended Longridge’s own ‘Old Station’ cafe for lunch, which was fine advice.

The second half of the day was long. The scenery changed and the speed picked up as we edged to the lower Lakes. The three of us spent large parts of the afternoon cycling alone, including one 13-mile stretch into Kirby Lonsdale. During the hour it took me to get there I saw neither Rob nor Tom who had both boosted ahead at their own favoured paces. The washing machine started up again. Why am I behind? Why are they ahead? Have I gone the right way? Are they fed up of me trailling all the time? Why am I behind? Why am I in worse shape than the two of them? Why have I been left behind?

When I arrived the whole Rainbow family were waiting on the roadside verge, complete with a great welcome banner that Tess and Kitt had hand-painted. Along with the Williamses and the Kennedys, the Rainbows are as close as I get to having a second family (don’t panic Currans, you’re real family – actually, do panic). Spending time with them is effortless and fun, but today seeing them waiting and waving flags made me miss Jo more.

Rob stepped out at this point leaving Tom and I to plough on to Sedbergh, a long slog made slightly more difficult by the reception we’d had in Kirby, which felt like it should have been a finish line. We got there, but the day in all seemed to have taken much longer, and much more out of us than it needed to. Much like this post, i’m sure you’ll be thinking.  

513 miles down.

Waking up in a misty country idyll, we set off towards the heart of industrial Lancashire. From Jez and Katie’s to Mum’s house, in other words.

80% of the ride was fantastic. I had no pain to speak of and started to get the sense that my body might be adapting to riding every day. The legs felt ready, or at least resigned, and to bit where they joined the rest of me felt pretty well moulded to the saddle.

In theory this was one of the easiest days of the trip. Long enough, at 82 miles, but with just a couple of climbs at the start and nothing but rolling countryside the rest of the way.

Jez and Tony were riding with us and seemed gleefully excited to be making the trip. Tony managed to maintain most of his smile through the various technical glitches his (let’s just say ‘twice as expensive as anyone else’s) bike threw in. Watching him tinker kept the rest of us smiling too.

The climbs were fine and soon done, after which the miles started to roll by. The terrain was forgiving enough to allow long conversations and catching up with two old friends was worth any effort the trip might have demanded.

Tea stop in Malpas. Can’t recall the name of the cafe but it had impressive collections of both ceramic snails and septuagenarian cyclists, this latter group seemed attracted to Tony’s carbon fibre Cannondale, succeding only in irritating him rather than making his gears work.

The stretch through Cheshire was the best 20 miles of the whole trip so far. It felt like we were flying along on a magic carpet, and brought me as close as I can remember to the pure pleasure of childhood riding, pedalling and pedalling and pedalling and just going and going and going. All great. Tom was enjoying himself too, as far as I could tell, although when we talked about this being the easiest day and I, pedalling harder to go faster, said, “perhaps we shouldn’t be pushing it so much,” he replied, “are we?”

Lunch was an enormous picnic laid out by Mike and Shirley, my in-laws. It’s been one of the revelations of the trip the extent to which friends and family seem genuinely excited by what we’re doing. Mike’s been texting advice when we’ve taken wrong turns, watching our progress on Endomondo, and i’m surprised how much messages like those help. They managed to feed us well, encourage us, explain GPS technology and, along with everyone else who tried during the day, fail to fix Tony’s bike.

And from that point the day started to fall away from me. We said goodbye to Tony and Jez in Lymm and met my brother Stu, who had ridden out from work in Manchester to meet us in Irlam. The people who have come out to ride with us have been a really important part of the experience so far, so it was great to see Stu pulling up on his single-speed bike, keen to ride the only 5 miles of the trip that he could possibly get to. However, from the moment we set off I felt my energy really start to flag. As we got closer to Mum’s, Tom and Stu disappeared farther and farther into the distance, with Rob only held up by the terrible potholes in the unclaimed road over Astley Moss. I couldn’t believe it. A great day and now, riding through the streets where I grew up, I couldn’t find the energy to catch my brother and ride home with a smile on my face. It seemed as if the last 5 miles sucked both the strength from my legs and the joy from what had been a great day. I found it hard to recover and as the day ends i’m wondering again whether I have what’s needed to get to the end of the trip.

430 miles down.

Don’t forget, if you’d like to use our trip as an excuse to give to the Disasters Emergency Committee, you can here: http://www.justgiving.com/rob-lejog. What’s more, Environ UK will match the total donations.

Best day of the ride so far. We set out in showers and within ten minutes of leaving Ross were drifting up and down alongside the river, beginning to climb alongside the Welsh Border. Having trailed this day as the one where we rode the length of Wales, we were only actually out of England a couple of times, which seems a shame when reviewing the map, until you look at how furrowed the contours get for the cyclist who drifts too far West.

It was beautiful. The sun came out, the countryside opened out before us and, of the first real stretch of time, we started to see landscapes and villages we weren’t at least passingly familiar with. At times it seemed as if houses from suburbia, complete with immaculate lawns and ornate fence posts, had been scattered randomly across empty countryside. Rather than moving through a succession of hamlets and villages, we just seemed to pass either houses or farms.

I’m not sure why I enjoyed today so much. On paper it was the shortest day, estimated at about 67 miles, but it took us a long time. Somehow the progress just seemed to happen at the right pace. It felt like we were really riding, the aches and pains were lifting, and we were going to be able to do this.

We had a couple of bracing climbs to make, which came up by surprise. At the top of the first Rob announced that nearby lay the highest golf course in England, prompting the obvious question: why couldn’t we ride by the lowest instead? We thought we’d done our work for the day but the second hill brought us a further 300ft higher than the first. Sometimes these hills seem almost pleasant to get up, other times they’re crippling. If I could work out why, perhaps this whole enterprise would be easier.

We had a great lunch in Bishop’s Castle, having been greeted by a cycling family who squealed, “Bet we’ve gone farther than you today!”. I don’t like to upset kids, but sometimes it’s unavoidable.

On to our friends Jez and Katie, who relocated to the wilds of Shropshire from Manchester some time ago. We arrived in Leighton, having arranged to meet Jez outside what looked like the major local landmark. Still, it was uncomfortable to find myself pacing up and down sweating profusely outside the village school, dressed in a bright yellow, skin-tight, semi- transparent t-shirt.

Some confusion trying to find Rob who we’d cut loose a couple of miles back after his tyre exploded. Luckily we got to him before the vultures.

So part way through a sweet, warm evening with Jez, Katie, Ben, Charlie, Tony and the Rainbows, i’m moved to write at length about friendship, family and how Summer evenings like this can really seem to bring those things together perfectly. But it’s 9.30, I’m knackered, so fortunately for you I won’t bother.

343 miles down.