I was now 560 km in and without sleep for 37 hours. It there and then dawned on me: perhaps I was finally becoming the animal I’d for so long dreamt of being.

“How are you”, asked Tom. “I feel like I’m going to throw up”, I said, which was true.

Nearly meeting inspirational people, idiocy, crushed technology, fabulous volunteers, a most helpful Oxford bike shop man called Joshua. Fields, exhaustion and a distressed teenager.

My packing strategy wasn’t looking good for my plans to do the Transcontinental Race, where people hack their toothbrushes in half, just to save a bit of weight and room.