From end-gaining to gaining the ‘End to End’
by Veronica Pollard
Last summer I cycled from Lands’ End to John O’Groats* on a folding bike. The distance was getting on for 1000 miles and this was achieved by cycling an average of over 70 miles a day for two weeks without a break.
This was an interesting ride for many reasons, but it had a special meaning for me because the original reason I got interested in the Alexander Technique was a tendency to get tension headaches as well as neck and shoulder pain every time I rode my bike for more than a few miles. Lessons during the ‘99 training course eventually helped me to get out of the worst of it as I pedalled around and I haven’t had a tension headache or neck and shoulder pain for years, even while doing day rides and leisurely cycle holidays.
So when a friend invited me along for an organised ‘End to End’ I didn’t really hesitate to accept. We were given a training schedule which suggested a certain number of rides and distances which should be covered each week, building up to weekend trips of the average daily distance. This changed my cycling habits completely and was a real lesson in goal-setting and what it can achieve.
From being a rather lazy, largely urban cyclist, I started going out with a local cycling group and looking for opportunities to ride longer distances. With friends I rode from Cumbria to Tynemouth on the C2C route and from Cardiff to Brecon on the Taff Trail and from Liverpool to Chester and back along the Wirral. I rode to Bath to join rides leaving from there and then rode back to Bristol afterwards. I was astonished at how easy it was becoming to ride long distances.
However the End to End was a real challenge. We had a constant and sometimes fearsome head wind every day except the last. The hills in Cornwall and Devon are steep and frequent and the distances covered every day were sometimes gruelling. However I had loads of time to notice what I did to cycle.
What I noticed was a tendency to deal with the beginning of a hill by a bit of habitual scrunching up of my neck. Almost as if this was going to help me get up the hill more quickly! Asking myself to stop this nonsense and to push the pedals more forwards (as if the revolution was on oval) rather than down made quite a difference.
I also noticed that at times I was hanging onto the handlebars as if I might lose them. I thought of Alexander’s papier maché dumbbells and experimented with using just enough force to control the bars – and no more! I also stopped sticking my elbows out.
Result? Well, the first two days I got backache.
But when that disappeared, nothing else bothered me (until the sixth day when I just had to buy a new saddle; but that was anatomical discomfort rather than muscular!).
After two weeks’ cycling, one amateur back massage, teaching six introductory AT lessons to some of the other cyclists, a 400 mile trip in a car, a night on a hard canal boat bunk and a four hour train trip – I had no aches or pains. Just rather large quads, and lungs that seemed unbelievably large and efficient.
I don’t know where I’d be today without the Alexander Technique, but I know I’d probably never have cycled along the north coast of Scotland with a tail wind, or seen Blackpool Tower looking like a toy from 30 miles away or found the Treacle Mine sweet shop in Shropshire or a Wild West post office and tea room in the lowlands of Scotland or been as glad to see the isolated Crask Inn after a morning of gale force winds and lashing rain in the Highlands. And that would have been a life somewhat smaller and greyer.
*Crossing Great Britain from Cornwall in the South West to the tip of Scotland in the North East.