Julian Sayarer - Life Cycles--A London bike courier decided to cycle around the world. 169 days later, he came back with a world record.

I t didnt feel good there was no sense of achievement, the idea I was supposed to feel some kind of triumph only made me feel worse about the fact that I didnt. I broke a world record in the hope that it was going to make some difference to the world itself. My ride was the tree, falling in the woods with no one around to hear. One night, soon after my return, Id accidentally left my phone on, so that next morning the alarm went off and woke me with a start. It grew louder that same cheerful noise that so recently forced me awake after only 40 minutes sleep. Cold and wet it demanded I get back on my bike to ride another 150 miles or miss my flight, my finish. And there, in my bed in London, I whimpered at the sound calmed myself as I realised where I was that I didnt have to go anywhere.

I shot my mouth off. Still sleep-deprived and shaken, within a fortnight of my return, Id told everyone exactly what I thought of Kash dAnthe. Then more than ever, I couldnt believe how hed sold it all away. The beauty of the open road, the warmth of human-kind the way hed slapped a logo on it and sold the whole shebang to whichever bank would pay most. The mild-mannered folk of the cycling community told me I had it wrong, reminded me delicately that hed done it for charity. That was how I earned myself the moniker of angry young man. They put it my way as some sort of insult and all the time I racked my brains as to how it was that I was the only one so angry.

I returned to the same job, to the same life as before, and, with visions of the Gobi Deserts outward reaches still blowing through my mind, I went back to picking my way through the potholes and gnarling traffic of London. I thought of all those who had taken me in the Lemoines in Louisiana, Ray over on South Island I tried to piece the world back together, to make sense of the CCTV cameras, the apparently suspicious packages, the strangers who were just maybe standing too close to me at the cashpoint. I tried to make sense of it all and then, slowly, I stopped trying because the sad truth was it didnt make sense wed just chosen to live that way.

London swallowed me back in. I watched diggers with their caterpillar tracks crawling across rubble, destructive ballerinas with pirouetting scoops that tore down flats the same as Id once watched them do in Xian, China so that I wondered what they did with those whod once lived there. The deliveries made on my bicycle were all the same, still going to the same offices, the same receptionists scribbling their names impatiently on an electronic screen. One day I turned up at an architectural practice to collect a package going down to an international depot on the Old Kent Road. They handed me a long cardboard tube containing the plans for another structure in glass and steel on the other side of the world. I looked down at the tube in my hand, curious about its final destination, and there it was:

Pudong Shanghai

Inside of me something heaved, my poor heart gave a lurch, for Id cycled there, to the airport in Pudong itself 83 days if I remembered right. There I was back in London, my old job, my old bicycle leaning on a wall. I slid the tube into my bag with a sigh, climbed onto my bike and pedalled off. Making my way through the traffic, I watched the chain rumbling below, clinging to the teeth of the cog as they heaved it round, wheels turning and the asphalt moving below, my knees up and down everything just as before, that same scene Id taken in over so many countless hours, on my way around the world.

I noticed a few changes for my six-month before-and-after. For all that my life remained unchanged, London was a little different. Everyone had started drinking energy drinks, the things advertised all over the place, complete with promises of just how the drinker would feel alive again, and no mention of why it was they all felt so dead to begin with. Sugar was everywhere too coffee, yoghurt, you name it and any simple flavour had been made just another way of having dessert. On reception desks and beside doorways, hand sanitisers had made their way over from the US, alcohol-based solutions rising up with a fear of germs, the microscopic creatures that would guiltlessly destroy our lives if we werent careful. More of London seemed to have taken to cycling, forced into it by unaffordable public transport and long lines of stationary cars. Morning and evening, Lycra-clad commuters would eye me up for a race I left them to it. I rode the Dunwich Dynamo, a night ride of 110 miles, leaving from Hackney in the dusk of a Saturday in late June. Thousands ride it, and you follow the flickering trail of red lights through the lanes and woods of Essex and Suffolk, where candles gutter in jam jars to light the way. With the dawn you reach the sea at Dunwich, you strip, you dive in. On the coach home, all heads tipped to one side with sleep, I heard the girl behind me, talking excitedly to her boyfriend about dAnthe

And he rode 90 miles every day I think his record was 190 days or something it was on TV!

And I smiled slow didnt even turn my head, so that shed never have guessed the peculiar story the stranger on the seat in front kept secret. But stop me thats enough for now Im getting ahead of myself, starting at the end I should tell you how I got here.

I always rode a bicycle and I always loved that bicycle its only as clichd as it is true. The vehicle of novelists and poets, when I see an adult riding a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of mankind. Thats how H. G. Wells put it, and Im just one of many who find in the bicycle a mobile salvation, the ability to propel myself towards my own escape. As a child I rode near to my house, as a teenager I rode away from it, into the countryside, and once Id hit the countryside it was only ever my ambition to go further. I rode my bicycle to the disused quarry where I played with my brother, to my grandparents house 10 miles away, to school, and to the restaurants where I worked as a teenager. Eventually I was riding into neighbouring counties, into rides of 40, 50, 60 and 100 miles, chasing average speeds of 20mph. Occasionally I went too far, ambition beyond ability, so that my mother had to drive out and collect me, exhausted, from roadsides far from home.

I fell in love with the sport, with the Tour de France especially. Head over heels it got me, a sport played out across the roads of Europe, all of it, to the last metre, the most magnificent arena for the most magnificent of theatre. Though they may have their favourites, the crowds that flock to watch that race cheer each and every rider, to applaud the sport itself. The yellow jersey, the maillot jaune of the race leader, bears the colour of the Tour, of July sunflower fields beneath the foothills of the Pyrenees. The race begins with a prologue, a time-trial just some 15 kilometres through the streets of the departure town. When David Millar won the prologue in 2000, so leading for the Tours first stages, he wore the yellow jersey during those days and, at night, he slept in it. Thats what the yellow jersey means, its an honour, the culmination of fairytales and childhood dreams. Cycling gets stuck inside of you out of my childhood and into my adult years its been in me. I found it in the lanes of Leicestershire, endeavouring to go so far and so fast my rides finished with the pulse of my heartbeat tucked inside my skull at the base of my brain. That was what I aspired to, the barometer of my commitment, for I wanted one day to wear a yellow jersey, and I had learned that to extend your limits they had, periodically, to be surpassed. I had to get uncomfortable because