Here’s a photo of me thoroughly enjoying a bike ride with 700 other people. This is a rare snap at the beginning of the day – rare because there is someone behind me. He, and all his buddies, soon overtook me. We have only covered about 500 metres and I’ve already hit the wall (or, as we say in the trade, I have bonked, something that I thought was going to have more enjoyable connotations). Only another 70 miles to go!

This was probably the low point (early days, mind you) of my pitiful cycling career. Apart from finishing dead last, and suffering from hypothermia, it also proved to me that I was nowhere near as fit as I needed to be to cycle across my village, let alone the entire country. I had a clear choice: I could either continue unwaveringly with my rigorous regime of fatty foods and strong ales, in the hope that the benefits would eventually work their way through, or I could follow the much riskier course of putting in some extra training whilst switching to a so-called ‘healthier’ diet. Believe me, I did a lot of soul-searching as I considered the options with the help of two tubes of World Cup Pringles and a bottle of Amarone.

The results of my long dark night of the soul – rounded off with a couple of well-earned snifters of Armagnac after such an exhausting burst of cerebral activity – were immediate. First, I bought bigger, baggier cycling clothes so that the most obvious flabby bits no longer featured so prominently. Second, I entered another sportive: a 60-mile slog around Kent taking in such glorious scenery as Dungeness and Camber. And so it was that last Sunday, I flew away from the start in a blaze of burning rubber and Lycra static. My wise breakfast choice of an egg mayonnaise sandwich powered me through the first 15 miles, after which a flapjack and swigs of Powerade propelled me past several octogenarians and a stationary milk float (which, admittedly, later caught me up). Bursting through the bonk, I crossed the line in 3h50m, a new PB (although, in fairness, there hadn’t been an old PB). I was garlanded with certificates and medals, as well as a much-appreciated celebratory flapjack.

Which might have been it, except for the fact that I had promised myself to go out again the following day and cycle for at least three hours. Conditions were painfully different. Not only was it horribly windy, but I also discovered that muscles that had worked perfectly acceptably the day before had mysteriously withered on the bones and would not respond to the usual stimuli of Snickers bars and furious grunting. Three hours can be a very long time when you’re cycling into a headwind at the sort of speed normally associated with a mobility scooter. But...I made it. I got back home, dismounted and lay on the lawn in a twitching heap. The dog glazed my face in an effort to revive me, but he knew a lost cause when he tasted one.

The next day I felt fine – as long as I didn’t try and walk up or down the stairs, stand up or sit down quickly or turn my head more than 2.7 degrees. I have used a value-sized tube of nappy rash ointment and still the sit muscles complain whenever I so much as look at a photo of a saddle – but nothing can detract from the fact that I did two strenuous days of cycling without a call-out to the emergency services. And pain, after all, is good, right? Let me get back to you on that one, as soon as the codeine kicks in.