Moving on and Tom Petty

Well, I started out down a dirty road

Started out, (pause for effect) all alone

And the sun went down, as I crossed the hill

And the town lit up, the world got still ...

ok, so if I was a romantic, I'd take this version, apply it to my cycling career and run (ride) with it. [rewind] ok, I am a romantic, but in my case I started out with a dirty face in a dirty town with dirty mates. We all smoked, some more than others, and we all had bikes. Apart from me. I was 8 years old I remember, living on Camden Town estate.

Summers were hotter back then, and winters were whiter.
(cough, cough, no?)

I don't know who's bike it was but I used to race a roadbike around Cumberland Market, or the estate, taking the corners low and hard. Being timed against others. I even ran against them and did quite well, despite them being 5 years older.

Pulling bikes apart we'd use wet and dry sandpaper to remove the paintwork from frames and later re-paint them and put them together again. I was at Primary School, life was easy, fun, Noel Edmunds was on BBC Radio one every morning as I ate my cornflakes ...

Then suddenly, somewhere, my life stopped. There's a hole I can't find. There are pictures, still-lifes etched in my memory of rockconcerts, partys, a girlfriend, fights, booze, glue, but where did the easy go, the fun, where the hell did the bikes go?

When I Was fifteen I got my first bike. A BSA Tour de Britain in Orange. I bought cycle shorts and woolen jerseys and criss-crossed back and forth across London.I raced it down Marylebone Road to school everyday. One of very few (if any) that biked to school.

School breaks however meant dinner money spent on choclate and smoking off school grounds. By the time I left school I was on 20 a day. At 20 the bike long since stolen :( a present from my parents that only now saddens me. But it gave me a legacy, something for the future. Little did I know then what future, isn't it best that way?

When you're 16 you're Jimmy Cagney "Top of the Worlds Ma'!"

When you're 26 the worlds getting on top of you.

1990 Married, first born on the way and at last I finally managed to quit the cigs.
Took up cycling as a compliment to my new found zest for football.

Played often rather than well, got better with time ... and all the time cycling was there.`

2000: Now divorced, 4 kids, remarried with one more on the way and come 2002 one of my good friends and a footballer died from Cancer. Later that year I was facing the same fate!

In 2003 I beat the bugger. For now anyhow, no delusions there but that's another story, one that can be read here http://hem.passagen.se/gazzah

It was the start of something for me that I couldn't have imagined.

Just to rewind again, I started cycling again in 1989. I bought a bike and and did my first Vätternrundan (300kms) in Sweden the following year. I started following the Tour de France that year and little Greg LeMond won. I loved Big Mig when he dominated for five years yet obviously, the great hero of the Tour has to be LA. his first win of TdF in 1999 coincided with my 10th Vättern.

As I watched him win his fifth, I'd just completed my 14th with little training, chemo circulating in my veins and about 15kgs overweight.

The ride was just as important to my recovery from Cancer as the chemo, or the doctors visits, the radiotherapy and all the blood tests etc ...

It also gave rise to an idea. An idea I was to sit on for 4 years before the spark was ignited on a cold October evening 2007. 10 months later in 2008 Ride of Hope started outside a hospital in Lund and for 9 days and 1,250kms it forged its way north and east to the capital of Sweden - Stockholm. It raised a modest sum of 252,000sek. Mainly sponsor money, but money all the same to one good cause.
Childrens Cancerfund.

It's moved forward since then. Ride of Hope III will start on August 7th 2010.The route is the same, the cause is the same, it's name has a bit more status. I often get referred to as the 'Initiativtagare' = The 'Initiative taker' for Ride of Hope. I think I'd prefered to be called the Catalyst. Everyone that gets involved is an initiative taker. I lit the fuse sure, but they are the dynamite. Inbetween all the planning that goes into it, I long to get out on that road and just do it.

I'm not fast, I'm not pretty, but that doesn't matter. At 46 you take what you get and I have a lot: I have a fantastic wife who backs me up in everything. 5 beautiful girls, a rabbit and a hamster a home and a job. When Ride of Hope starts I'll long to see all the people that have helped along the way. I long to see them. Hope it will mean as much to them as it does to me to see eachother again.

The list of names is MASSIVE. It'd be like watching the credtis roll by for Lord of the Rings.

But unlike the credits of LotR, I remember each and every person that put a phone call into helping out on Ride of Hope, said "yes" to a deal, "ok" to a banner on their webpage, "no problems" to guiding us through their town ... etc, etc

My road is considerably cleaner today; No alcohol, no ciggs, lots of cycling.

The air here is cleaner than in central London. Life feels cleaner.

From the Tom Petty text above I have moved to The Hollies.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1KtScrqtbc&feature=related