I thought I’d write a quick blog to explain GlobeCycle to anyone who has just joined in.

My name is James Bowthorpe, I’m from London in the UK. I volunteer at a Parkinson’s Disease (PD) research clinic based at King’s College London in the Institute of Psychiatry. I started this work more than 2.5 years ago to get experience in a clinical setting for medical school applications; I chose this clinic because my grandfather had PD and I wanted to find out more about the disease.

After a year or so I started to understand the work a bit better and it finally dawned on me that there was a great need for it to be properly funded; it has gotten by on a shoestring budget for several years. The doctors that lead the research are working constantly at funding the next 5 years of work, and I decided last year that I wanted to help by taking on the hardest challenge I could find. The world record for fastest circumnavigation of the globe had just been broken, with many saying the new record was “unbreakable”. I decided that this would be the thing to do to raise 1.8million GBP.

I am over 14,000 miles into the 18,000 mile challenge and I will break the record by at least 2 weeks. I have just started to up my mileage from around 120 per day to 150 in an attempt to make it back to London on the 13th September. This would have me break the record by closer to 4 weeks. I have said from the outset that the need to fund this groundbreaking work properly is reflected in the speed and urgency of my record attempt.

I have already passed through France, Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Iran, India, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia New Zealand and Canada. I then cycled down the west coast of the US to Los Angeles where I started to cross the country. I am following the TransAm route (as mapped by the Adventure Cycling Association) to NYC where I will have a rest day. I will then fly from Boston to Lisbon, Portugal, where I start perdalling again, through Portugal, Spain and France; a quick ferry across the English Channel and the final miles to my starting point in Hyde Park in London.

You can see where I have been at www.whereintheworldisjames.com; this is a live GPS tracking site (20 minute delay if you are trying to find me with it!) where GPS tagged photos appear on my route where they were taken. You can follow me on Twitter from this site and also view my YouTube channel (needs updating!). The overall site for the challenge is www.globecycle.org where you’ll find this blog and also more information about GlobeCycle (PDF’s for media), the work that it is supporting and how you can help by donating.

Thats it for now; I hope to keep updating tthis til the finish line, but at 150 miles per day I’m sure you’ll forgive me if I’m a little lax!

Thanks for following, J

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 19th, 2009 at 12:49 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.