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Oliver Schick
hippy
Norfolkbound
I've undertaken a fairly large challenge, as the subject suggest I am cycling 36,500km in 365 days. As a long time watcher/occasionally buyer of this forum, I thought some of you may be interested in this.
I started this challenge on January 23rd 2021, which means I am currently 81 days into the challenge. I'm doing a mix of outdoor and indoor cycling to cover the distance, all in aid of CALM charity. I've attached the link to the justgiving page if anyone is interested in this as this has all of my strava activities uploaded on, plus the reason why I'm doing such a challenge which I'll briefly explain below;
So, why am I cycling roughly 100km a day.. (Roughly by the fact I'm trying to ride more some days to allow for rest days)
In December 2015, I was struggling massively with depressing and attempted to take my own life. I completely cut myself off from family and friends, which made everything worse. I moved back to my family home after being in London for 3 years and started again. It's taken me 5 years to gain the confidence to talk about this period of my life, so I wanted to take on a challenge to help not only raise money for CALM but also awareness of men's mental health. The idea of the daily suffering that people go through when they're in those bad places is attempted to be replicated by the physical suffering I am going through when cycling each day.
https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/joel-mcallister
If you're interested, please have a look and follow my instagram account (Joel.J.McAllister) as that's where I post the most about this challenge, with the day to day total etc. I obviously am very limited with times so don't have any fancy youtube videos or newspaper articles as yet. Essentially it's me and my bike, as the most important thing for me with this challenge is to raise awareness of the struggles of mental health and to get people to talk. For me I am ashamed that it has taken me 5 years to talk about my struggles, it took me 2 years to tell my girlfriend so to get more people talking, this will be everything. I've already had 4 separate friends reach out to me about what they have been through/currently going through, which motivates me more.
SO the elephant in the room, yes I am using Zwift to clock up the indoor kms which does lighten the load but working a 8am - 5pm job and having pets, this does mean that I have a spare half an hour before going to sleep at night. I'll tell you now, doing 10 hours on the turbo in order to catch up the distance lost after a crash and being severely concussed.. Wasn't easy..
I could go on about this for a while so will stop here for the first post. Fire away any questions and I'll try and regularly update this conversation (as I can do this at work :) )