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Below is the history and reasoning behind the crazy Geneva 10000 Challenge please take the time to read it I'm sure you will enjoy it.
The Geneva 10000 Challenge
In August last year, 64 year-old Barbara Wade became aware of pains in her midriff. After a couple of weeks, she went to her GP. Tests revealed inoperable cancer. Six days later, still at home with her family, she died.
Duncan Biggs is married to Barbara’s daughter, Sarah. He spent much of those six days at Barbara’s house and in the aftermath of her death, as shocked as everyone else in the family, he asked himself what he could do to mark his mother-in-law’s passing. More and more often, it seemed to him, cancer was touching the lives of family and friends. Surely there must be ways of sparing people like Barbara the news that all of us dread. But how?
Duncan is a can-do guy. He has a voracious appetite for physical challenge. A decade ago, he cycled from John O’Groats to Lands End in just nine days. He’s surfed his way around the world, played basketball for East Devon, and thrown himself into a number of other sports. In 2005, after a savage training programme, he competed in the British Indoor Rowing Championships and won the gold in the men’s heavyweight 30/35 category. Duncan, in short, isn’t a guy for whom quitting is an option.
Weeks after Barbara’s funeral, Duncan’s young family and a handful of friends spent a week on holiday near Geneva, in Switzerland. The weather was kind, the scenery spectacular, and there was ample opportunity for a little light exercise. Like swimming in Lake Annecy. Or running in the stillness of the dawn. Or hiring a bike and exploring the further reaches of the local cycle paths.
Back in Exmouth, where Duncan works as a central heating engineer, the jolt of adrenalin from a morning coffee break gave him the big idea. That week in France had been superb and one day he’d like to go back. By racing bike. To raise a lot of money. For Cancer Research.
He did the calculations in his head. Exmouth to Geneva is around 800 miles. With some intensive training under his belt, a decent cyclist should be able to sustain an average speed of 17 mph. Twelve hours in the saddle would clock up a daily total of just over 200 miles. In just four days, therefore, he could be back by the lake. Job done.
He texted Rob Williams, one of many close friends who would – it turned out – be sharing this adventure. Rob took one look at Duncan’s calculations and told him he was insane. 200 miles a day is eighty more than professional riders on the Tour de France are expected to achieve. Duncan’s plan, in short, wouldn’t work. “That was the clincher for me.” Duncan says now. “The moment someone tells me it’s impossible is the moment I get stuck in.”
Duncan hit the internet. Annecy, to his delight, hosted a much-publicised marathon around a lakeside course. Add a 14.6 kilometre swim from one end of the lake to the other, and you were looking at an extremely personal – and utterly unique – triathlon: first the four-day sprint from Exmouth to Geneva, then (next day) a nine-mile churn down Lake Annecy followed by a full marathon.
Imagining the effort he’d expend, and the way a project like this might put a smile on people’s faces, Duncan anticipated no problems raising a significant sum of money. £10,000 to Cancer Research, he thought, would be fitting memorial to Barbara’s passing. And so the Geneva 10,000 Challenge was born.
Duncan, like most of us, is an innocent in the world of fund-raising but the sheer insanity of what he was proposing touched a nerve amongst friends and contacts. His best mate, Vince Ewing, thought it was a top idea. Vince works at the Mercedes Benz dealership in Exeter and put the word around. Within a month, thanks to Partridge Cycles and Giant themselves, Duncan was looking at a £1200 Giant TCR racing bike, on loan for the duration of the challenge. This, says Duncan, came as a bit of a relief. “To be honest, I hadn’t devoted much thought to exactly how I was going to get to Geneva. In fact I didn’t even have a bike.
Next to step up to the challenge was businessman and ex-Army ski-instructor Nick Sprague. Nick’s company, Frobishers Juices, makes and sells high-end fruit juice. Frobishers are already a lead sponsor for Exeter Chiefs rugby union team but Duncan’s commitment caught Nick’s imagination and he quickly pledged a year’s supply of Cobell juices plus a cheque for £1000 the moment the Challenge was complete. More support came in from the Brightsea Print Group and the Cotswold Chair Company. This thing was definitely on.
By now, Duncan had begun serious training. He’d settled on 4th September 2011 for the start of his epic journey south, exactly a year after the holiday that had seeded the Geneva Challenge in the first place. Unless he devoted huge chunks of the next ten months to heads-down preparation, he’d be lucky to make it beyond Dorchester.
The first problem was swimming. The water in Lake Annecy is warm but there’s also a lot of it. “When I went in on holiday I managed about 75 metres before it totally freaked me out. I just panicked. It felt so deep. It was windy, too, and all the buoys were clanking around. I was out of there in a flash.
Exmouth Swimming Pool isn’t Lake Annecy but slowly, length by length, Duncan began to work on his stamina. As three kilometre, sixty minute swims became routine, he felt a growing confidence. “Regular training turns you into someone else. Problems dissolve. You feel you can do anything.”
With Christmas approaching, life in the Biggs household had been transformed, setting a pattern for the busy months to come. Duncan rolls out of bed at half past five. His trusty Giant awaits him downstairs. Thanks to a stationary Turbo trainer, which turns the bike into a stationary exercise machine, he can pedal to his heart’s content without leaving the kitchen. By seven’o’clock, he’s done a brisk thirty miles. Minutes later, he wakes Sarah up with tea and a slice of toast.
Fitting this intensity of training around the routines of normal domestic life is, says Duncan, all-important. “We’ve got two little boys, Samuel and Owen. Like me, Sarah has a full-time job. So there has to be a way of minimising the impact of The Challenge on us all.”
At eight, Duncan leaves for work. By five, he’s back in the house. Evenings, after seeing Samuel into bed, he alternates between swimming and running. Five laps of a local Exmouth circuit give him a solid eleven miles a night. An hour and a half at the swimming pool nudge him towards four kilometres. Weekends he reserves for 80 mile bike rides, the hillier the better. Mile by mile, kilometre by kilometre, his body has begun to change.
At first, the weight loss was dramatic. He lost a stone and a half before Christmas. “To be honest, that was too much. I knew I had to hit a certain weight, just to give myself the strength and stamina to carry on. Too thin, and you just end up permanently knackered.”
Duncan is now 15 stone, perfect for his 6’ 2” height, and has never felt better in his life. He eats six times a day – a heavy emphasis on cous-cous, pasta, rice, chicken, tuna, and sausage in a tomato and basil sauce. He’s become a huge fan of cold porridge with spoonfuls of golden syrup and sometimes adds a couple of vanilla choc-ices to keep his spirits up. He drinks nothing but water – as much as five litres a day – and has a couple of naps at noon and six’o’clock. “I’m always aware of a slight feeling of fatigue” he says. “It just never goes away. My thighs and calves are permanently sore. Just touching them hurts.”
To anyone half-normal, this is alarming stuff but Duncan hasn’t got much time for what he regards as minor irritations. “When I was doing the indoor rowing, the training was brutal. You’re trying to get down to close to six minutes for two kilometres on the machine. That means you’re pushing your body to the absolute limit. The pain is beyond belief. Your body is awash with all that lactic acid. It hurts in ways I can’t describe. What I’m doing now is different. I’m kinder to myself. This is the marathon, not the sprint, and I can’t afford to conk out.”
Conking out, like failure, isn’t an option. Rob Williams happens to be a homeopath, insisting on weekly consultations to rein in Duncan’s wilder impulses, and on training runs Duncan now wears a heart monitor and settles himself at a steady 135 beats a minute. Most of us trickle along at half that pulse rate but Duncan says his training schedule is doing its job. “I feel completely different. It’s a really fantastic feeling. Committing a year of your life to helping other people gives you a real sense of direction.”
The small print of the challenge Duncan has set himself matters a great deal. Running through the winter dark, he has plenty of time to plot every detail of the journey. A support vehicle will accompany him south through France, driven by his father-in-law, and he’s had plenty of offers of company on various stages of the challenge. Nick Sprague will share one of the cycling days, as well as co-running the marathon that follows with another friend, Simon Brace. There may be more fellow athletes to come. But what if these guys can’t keep up?
“That’s not an issue” Duncan insists. “I’m in this thing 100%. I’m not waiting for anyone. Of course I’m glad to have company but that kind of compromise just won’t happen. I have a schedule and I’m keeping to it every inch of the way.”
This iron sense of resolve badges the entire project. Here’s another example. Once Duncan got down to detailed planning he realised that the road distance from Exmouth to Geneva was 66 miles short of 800. But that was the challenge he’d set himself in his original text to Rob Williams and so he’s added a picturesque little loop at journey’s end that will take him through four alpine passes before the final descent to the finishing line. Cheat and settle for 734 miles? Never.
The sheer physical scale of the challenge Duncan has set himself is daunting enough. But what – inevitably – goes with it has come as a surprise. The whole point of riding to Geneva, after all, is to write a cheque for £10,000 at the end of it.
“At first, I assumed that fund-raising would be easy. It’s not. Some key people have been really generous, really supportive, and even the young apprentices at work have put their hands in their pockets for the Challenge, but you can stick up a million posters and go on a trillion radio shows and not very much else happens. I don’t know whether it’s the recession or what but fund-raising from a standing start is really, really hard.” Tougher than the Challenge itself? “Definitely.”
As the days begin to lengthen and Exmouth drags itself out of the coldest winter in living memory, Duncan Biggs is pushing himself harder and harder. Distances he’d thought impossible just months ago are now a routine part of most evenings. And a bespoke triathlon still regarded by many as daft is – increasingly – something he looks forward to.
“You play mind games with yourself” he says. “Just now I’m concentrating on getting fitter than I’ve ever been in my entire life. Cycling to Geneva, and all the rest of it, will be just another holiday...with a bit of extra activity thrown in.”
So there are never moments when you get a little nervous? A little daunted about what you’ve taken on?
He frowns a moment, then grins. “Of course there are.” He says. “But then I talk to Barbara and after that there’s never a problem.”