A new start after 60: ‘I became an adventure cyclist at 65 – and rode from Mongolia to Scotland’ | Life and style

Len Collingwood, a medical nurse specialist in psychotherapy, retired on his sixty fifth birthday. He had made a cope with his spouse, Sally: she would prepare as a yoga trainer and he would “begin out as an journey bike owner”.

4 months later, he set off on a 13,000km cycle journey from Ulaanbaatar in Mongolia to Edinburgh, a lot of it roughly shadowing Marco Polo’s Silk Highway. No sooner had he began out than a snowstorm hit. He hid in his tent, carrying each merchandise of clothes he had packed. At -18C it was too chilly to enterprise exterior to cook dinner. He survived the subsequent 48 hours by consuming a “large bag of Snickers and Crunchies” his colleagues had given him when he retired.

So it’s a shock to listen to Collingwood say that he has by no means feared for his life. Besides sometimes when a automobile veered too shut, that’s. Certainly there have been days on that six-month journey when he couldn’t face the saddle?

“By no means. There’s all the time one thing to be inquisitive about,” he says. “And I’m very blissful in my very own firm.”

Collingwood has minimised his tools, typically utilizing suggestions from mountaineers. On very moist or windy nights, he would possibly sleep in a culvert. In 2018 he pedalled solo in a single-speed rickshaw from Edinburgh to Istanbul to earn a spot in Guinness World Information. “There are only a few information a person over 60 can break,” he says.

He turns 71 this yr. As we communicate, he’s perched on the ocean wall in Penzance, Cornwall, about to pedal to Land’s Finish to start the 1,407km journey to John o’Groats. It sounds arduous however he insists “it’s not a whole lot of effort. The gearing is so low, it’s only a matter of spinning the wheels.”

Nonetheless, they don’t spin on their very own. His daughter – like Sally, a yoga trainer – has urged weights to keep up muscle mass. He plans to start out within the autumn. His son, an ultra-distance bike owner, retains him in control on the newest expertise. They every got here to biking independently of each other. “If there’s a shared inspiration, it’s the standard bicycle that has the capability to allow the rider to journey huge distances quick or sluggish,” Collingwood says.

His mother and father by no means cycled. His older sister had a motorbike that he rode again when the handlebars have been larger than his head, all the time going “a bit additional down the highway, a bit additional”.

However the greatest affect, he thinks, was a Ladybird ebook on Marco Polo that he borrowed from Everton library when he was six. It was the incongruity of Italian garments and camels that caught Collingwood’s eye. The Guinness Guide of Information, because it was then, was one other favorite: “I’d go again and again it.”

Collingwood was a precocious reader, however grammar college was not a cheerful place for him. His household couldn’t afford the uniform and he felt conspicuous.

“I fell in with the rebellious crowd,” he says. At 12, he and his buddies purchased a motorcycle to journey across the fields close to his residence in Ellesmere Port, Cheshire. At 15, he began an apprenticeship in heavy mechanical upkeep. However when he completed, he felt a craving. “I wished to do one thing totally different,” he says.

The native psychiatric hospital, West Cheshire, was in search of nursing assistants. Spurred on by his studying of RD Laing, Thomas Szasz and David Cooper, Collingwood utilized and educated. He spent the subsequent 45 years as a psychological well being nurse with a specialism in psychotherapy and household remedy. “I’ve all the time been earnest of goal. If one thing is to be finished, it’s to be finished correctly.”

The job taught him resilience. “Folks go forwards and other people go backwards. The troublesome bit is managing the occasions when folks go backwards,” he says. “Don’t let the second spoil the entire thing.”

In Mongolia he acquired a dozen punctures within the area of an hour. However he mounted each until he was patching the patches.

Collingwood is planning new rides in France subsequent yr, and past that hopes “to unfold my wings additional. There may be peace on a bicycle,” he says. “The enjoyment is the precise doing of the exercise. Going additional means you’re simply doing extra of one thing you take pleasure in.”