The Leading for Life Challenge

We made it!  Zi-Su and I tasted sweet victory and accomplishment today as we cycled up the final French boulevard towards the Arc de Triomphe. I can’t believe that is already over.

Click here to watch the video as we enter Paris.  We accidentally sent the memory card with earlier footage home in the support vehicle.  So, we’ll edit that together on Tuesday and let you know when it’s live!  And the final podcast is still in production — we’ll post the link on the blog soon!  (you can listen to all the previous podcasts here)

What a day!  As we left our lovely farmhouse accommodation this morning, we were greeted with a very long hill.  Unfortunately, this was the day when our legs were the most tired and sore.  After that hill, I think my quad muscles were in a state of permanent contraction.  But that hill brought with it amazing views of the French countryside.  We went up and down (again), in and out of quaint French villages, and started to see the sprawl of Paris ahead.

And thus began the adventure.

We had hoped to be to the Arc de Triomphe in time for a leisurely lunch before the rest of the team started the drive back to the UK.  Not so.

Our first misadventure took us into a housing estate which then took us through many back roads and cycle routes, one of which popped us out into a power plant with a sandy path which was deadly for the road bikes we were using.  After cycling through the industrial and strip mall bit of the Parisian sprawl, we climbed a rather large hill that took us into what started to look more like Paris.  At that point, we had a choice.  Go right (which was downhill) and what our instincts (and legs) wanted.  Or go left (which was uphill) and what the map suggested.  We went left and still regret it.  We started a climb up a hill that had me down in my lowest gears.  Shouting to our map reader that this better be the right way, I duly made it up the hill.  But wait – there was an even bigger and steeper hill to come that made all the boys drop to their lowest gear and made me cry (literally).  Who knew that Paris was in a valley.  And the worst bit was that when we came down the descent on the other side, we came to the junction that was just down the road from the point where we had made our decision to turn left.

Two hours later, we finally asked a pedestrian for directions to the Arc de Triomphe.  He asked, ‘The one in Paris?’ and was obviously concerned by the distance yet to be covered.  We were directed towards La Defense (an unslightly piece of modernist architecture) and ended up in a tunnel system where we couldn’t see where we were going and only had the option of coming off onto a main motorway.  So we pushed our bikes back through the tunnel system (after asking another person the way to the Arc) and finally crossed the Seine.

But when we crossed the Seine, we should have turned left.  But we turned right.  Not learning from our previous error, we ended up in a garden and had to ask someone else how to get to the Arc.

Finally, we saw the Avenue that would take us there and with the final destination in sight, we pedaled to the finish line.

The Arc is surrounded by a rather large roundabout with 5 lanes of traffic.  One of our team decided to go across but the rest of us thought that we could just carry our bikes through the pedestrian underpass.  As soon as we popped out on the plaza where the Arc is, we were accosted by several armed policemen and told (in French) to remove ourselves and our bicycles.  I headed down (shoeless) back through the underpass.  Zi-Su was required to cycle back through the 5 lanes of traffic.

But we’re alive and have finished the challenge!  We’ve got a day in Paris tomorrow and plan to climb the 1,650 steps to the top of the Eiffel Tower… or maybe we’ll take the elevator.

Thanks so much for your sponsorship and companionship on this journey.  We hope you enjoyed the ride.

If you haven’t already, you can still sponsor the challenge!  Please make you gift today at: