TIME SINCE DEPARTURE: 286 Days

Primary Objective: To cycle from London to Cape Town via the Middle East.

Secondary Objective: To Climb Mount Blanc and Mount Kilamanjaro.

Pre-Planning

Planning

Live like Dan

I have always gone against professional medical advice preferring the 'it'll be alright' method of recuperation. This, unsurprisingly, has led me to do some monumentally daft things while my body wasn't really up to it. I've run marathons with stress fractures in my shins and ankles; I've played game the day after separating my shoulder, the list goes on. However, with my most recent injury it was made abundantly clear (in two languages-I was playing rugby in the south of France at the time) that snapping my medial and anterior cruciate ligament was a serious matter. So much so that I was even persuaded to let them operate-something I have avoided like the plague for the fear of weakening the joint (quite ironic in the end!). The operation was a complete success and I'm rather proud of myself for sticking to the rehab schedule and not flying up through the weights in my usual 'superman syndrome' way. The thing with not playing rugby and using the gently, gently slowly, slowly technique for rehab it does free up an inordinate amount of time for getting hideously drunk and coming up with ludicrous ideas for challenges. One such challenge was to have a beer in every pub in the Frog and Rosbif chain in 24hrs; this was completed with 2minutes to spare having crossed three countries, 1000's of miles, four cities and a time zone. This culminated in a friend of mine running ahead of me to the last pub through Paris on Nuit Blanche (busy night) closely followed by a random German, who I'd met in a pub and persuaded to drive, and me hobbling after the two of them two weeks after my operation.

Another thing idea popped into my head whilst on this pub crawl was from a conversation I'd had the year before with a friend Tom Hopgood. He'd been traveling through South America when he met a guy cycling through South America. This got us thinking that we, two relatively able bodied chaps could do something similar. After a few more beers this had developed into cycling from London to Cape Town through the Middle East. At the time we had dismissed it as his career was just starting to take off and I had other plans. When this idea popped back into my mind I again dismissed it-I had after all just had a serious knee operation. However; this time it wouldn't go away and when I was told that cycling is the ideal rehabilitation for this type of injury I was sold. I don’t think the doctors meant 10,000 miles across terrains varying from the Alps to the Sahara-but my mind was made up.