Their story, in their words…
Our challenge was to complete a bike ride in the south of France from Toulouse to Trebes and back. This was around 310km overall and was incredibly challenging as the two of us had never cycled a distance that big before, especially not abroad.
The challenge started off smoothly with an early flight from Stansted. We arrived at Toulouse on a 10.15 flight and we took a bus from the airport to Toulouse at 11. Then we picked up our hired bikes and started our first day. We first achieved 86 km getting one of the longest hauls under the belt when we were the most rested. However, the intensity of challenge was increased as we did it during a heatwave which hit the whole of Europe on the last week in July. Meaning we were doing the cycle in temperatures of 35 to 38 degrees. Therefore the cycles each day took way longer than expected as we had include more water breaks and stops in the shade. The first day was extremely hard and the 86km took us over 7 hours to finally reach our first campsite. Nevertheless, the route was breath-taking as the path mostly followed a canal right in the southern french countryside with fields of sunflowers as well as many french villages.
On the second day the heat started to hit with us having to take longer breaks, but luckily we left the campsite at 7 so that we could cycle as much as we could before the mid-day sun hit. Near the end of the day 2 route we started going up an incline during the 37 degrees and had to take a long break as we were both about to pass out from heat exhaustion. Unfortunately, due to the heat exhaustion, we read the map wrong and realised we had gone 2 hours down the wrong path when we started again. Therefore we had to go back and were hours behind schedule and ended up cycling during sunset. Then as it was getting dark we couldn’t find the cycle path and had to risk it on the road to get to Trebes in the dark and luckily we made it to our campsite safely.
After the day 2 horror, we made sure we were extremely vigilant when reading the maps in following the cycle paths. The next 2 days went pretty smoothly but were very tough as we were quickly losing our energy but we had been going to bed early and waking up early to avoid the sun. The last leg of the cycle was untroubled as we were simply following the route which we had taken but backwards. We finally got back to Toulouse on the final day completely exhausted and returned the bikes with ease just before the bike shop closed.
Ultimately, it was a very challenging experience but we were extremely proud on our way back as it was like something we had never done before. We would definitely recommend anyone who has the chance to complete a challenge like this to do it as its very self-rewarding.
