The last time I saw Steve Abraham, he had a gigantic sporting dream: to smash the world record – set in 1939 by Tommy Godwin – of the greatest number of miles cycled in one year. After Godwin set his total, he had to teach himself to walk again.
It seemed unlikely, not because he didn’t look as if he could do it – I’d been chasing him in a Skoda all day, from Stroud to Milton Keynes, and couldn’t get near him (this was partly traffic). It was because he was so modest: he would never even think of telling you what a legend he already was on the long-distance (audax) cycling circuit. Everything about him so unassuming: his spartan living room full of bikes, bare lightbulbs, another bike fancier making his dinner in the kitchen. That was at the end of January, and he’d been going since New Year’s Day.
On 10 January, Kurt “Tarzan” Searvogel, a different kind of beast altogether, set off on the same bid across America. Abraham quietly backed himself.
In March, disaster: a moped (“careless moped”, corrected one of Abraham’s admirers, who by coincidence lives on my road) hit him from behind. Abraham doesn’t go in for recriminations. “Oh, he stopped all right. It was me that fled the scene. It was either lose five hours in an ambulance in hospital when I was all right, or keep going when I wasn’t all right.” But he only got about 10 miles before the pain stopped him. So began an arduous process of one-legged recumbent cycling, total denial and bitter disappointment.
In January, I met him at the end of a 196-mile day. This week, I caught him at 7.30am, waiting for his breakfast to be ready, staring at his microwave with the intensity of a cat looking at a guinea pig. “I was just going to go one-legged, until the ankle got better, in Milton Keynes Bowl. But I just couldn’t do enough miles doing that. Hundred miles in a day was a good day. But I needed 200, so I was losing 100 a day, and I’d already lost thousands because I’d had 17 days not riding. I just couldn’t get quick enough.”
Naturally, he was back on the road before his ankle was strictly ready, and that didn’t go so well, either. “I went pretty well in June but I was trying too hard.” He ran himself into the ground, he said. And the record was out of the window. It is an epic tragedy, told in miles and a very neutral voice.
He must have been disappointed, surely? “Not really, because I knew that kind of thing could happen.” The microwave pings, and a swill of deep green vegetables is ready, the kind of thing the army would try to feed you in Day of the Triffids. He slices some hard goat’s cheese over it, and eats what’s left in his hand like a little block of wood. He’s changed his diet, and it’s been hard. “I had to adapt to it, that’s taken about three weeks. I was really slow to start with, it really slowed me down. But now it’s coming in, it’s really starting to work. I’ve been putting on weight for about 10 or 15 years, and now I know why: it’s all the wheat stuff I used to eat. Stuff that traditionally people used to say is good for you, pasta and that.” We were saying that in women’s magazines in 1995.
Anyway, in August, he started again. Tarzan will almost certainly take the record in January, and Abraham will have another seven months of cycling left, but he bears his rival no ill will. “No, I want him to get it. Because I still think I can beat him. He ain’t going to beat it by a lot. The most he’s going to beat it by is 1,000 miles.
Abraham originally said he’d set himself the challenge because work had given him a year’s sabbatical. Now he’s jacked in his job and will live on the cycling, through sponsorship. His friends and family still wish him well, he assumes: “Of course, I don’t know, I haven’t had a chance to talk to them.” He’ll be cycling through Christmas, indeed, looks a bit bemused by the question: he lost a bit of time when his diet changed and wants to be cycling 90 to 95 hours a week. Losing 200 miles to a bank holiday is just unthinkable.
He is so transfixed by his aim that I worry out loud about how he’ll feel when it ends. “Oh,” he says, unruffled, “there are other rides I want to do as well. Race across America, race round Ireland. The first thing I want to do after this is just go touring, not have to do 200 miles a day, stop in some of these cafes I keep passing. I haven’t ridden in the Welsh mountains for nearly a year. I’m not here to look at the scenery, I just have to do miles.”
“It’s like the opposite of the sprint,” he said in January, before the accident gave the remark its piquancy. “It’s really slow but it never ends.”
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