A coffee can be the greatest idea!

The idea was sparked, as the title suggests, by coffee with a mate… It was simple really, I rode over in my new recumbent trike to catch up with a mate for a coffee. Eventually, we got around to chatting about goals or more to the point the lack of them.  Hadn’t gotten around to setting any since I finished the Kokoda Trail.

My mate looked at me then looked at the trike, looked at me again, and simply said why don't you ride this around Australia. It was quickly refined to the 4 most extreme points of Oz (W, S, E, and N, in that order) due to the enormous distance between Cape York and Steep Point.  Riding across the top of Australia would have created too many difficulties with our timing and The Wet Season.

Cross to The 2019 Great Vic Bike Ride, which feels such a long, long time ago now, and yet crossing that fifth-day finish line is burnt into my brain… crossing that finish line, after cycling 30 kms into an absolutely horrendous headwind really did make me question whether or not I was mad enough to do this, but I'm here now telling you, that I’ve done it.

The year or so of preparation.

We had a lot of help from other ‘people’ to get this mammoth mission underway. Like opening separate accounts (a silent thank you) to setting up the4points.org website thanks to a friend’s help (who very unfortunately suffered a stroke earlier last year ‘23). We had other things like fundraisers to raise the funds/costs of the trip. It might not seem much to you or really to me, however, when you count the time, each little thing that you have to do on a day-to-day basis, it all adds up. 

The training during lockdown, The pro’s and the cons of it.

God dam lockdown, all I'm going to say is that it was not a very nice time for all. A lot of people's mental health suffered. For me, it was OKAY due to me having a routine and essentially riding a lot of the time. In some ways , repeating the same path, road, or hill made me more resilient (I’ll get to that word in a minute) due to when I get to the actual riding I would be free, new stimuli, and new environments, that was my theory anyway.

Know that the word resilient, in my mind, is overpopulated, too overused, in some ways it’s in the same boat as “inspiration’... That’s a temperamental topic, where do you draw the line on inspiration? That's for another blog.

The con of COVID was in essence I needed to stay motivated and as they say, you've got about a 8-12 week window until it becomes old material and you need some new stimuli and not being able to go anywhere outside the 5 kms made that  hard but not as difficult for me as it was for many many others…

The execution, from when we started the journey to finishing it, felt like an eternity. 3 years in the making, due to the aforementioned Covid and the crash I sustained during the ride and the rehab it took to get back to an acceptable level to be able to ride again as well as deal with the camping and general mobility issues. This was both mental and physical. The crash happened around 3500 kms into the journey from Steep Point just north of Adelaide. Let us just say we took a miniature hiatus… Then we recommenced  on the 4th of December 22’ heading from Melbourne to Wilsons Prom, to accomplish something, to give it/us meaning.  This was pretty much a year after I got hit.  So much rehab. So essentially the moment we reached  that 2nd Point, there was such an amazing feeling of reward for effort. This feeling told me that I wanted and needed to finish what I/we set out to do many months prior.

We again left on Friday the 24th of March ‘24 (terrible choice of days) and reached the tip of Cape York on my 30th birthday, one birthday that won’t be forgotten for a long time to come! That 5 or so months of travel, pretty much riding every day, having high and low points on a day-to-day, hour-to-hour basis is a little bit difficult to describe.  Just know, it was hard, for all of us!

When we reached The Tip we still had to get back down South to complete  that little (about 800 kms) section from Adelaide to Melbourne. This was where instead of cycling  that distance back in ‘22,  I was catching a ‘PRIVATE JET BABY!’ with the RFDS.  Thank you Flying Doctors.

The final day (22nd of October ‘23) brought tears to my eyes…. So many emotions, memories, people, all flooding past behind my sunglasses. The feelings for me were cemented, and engraved in my history. 

So why was it important to me?

Well, me having a stroke made it important to me, not just ‘yer let's raise some awareness’ it was more. Developing strategies to implement, improve, decrease the risk for existing or new people that have strokes.

The second point, My inclusion in school was great, however, there were some limitations, like at lunchtime my mates would head off to Maccas and I just wouldn't have the capacity to make it there… That is why while I was doing the4points.org ride I thought of no better way of promoting inclusion than through riding!

However being an advocate and wanting to do all this is one thing but actually setting it up, doing all this, it wouldn't have been possible without the Supportive Network that I have, that's why I’ve been saying ‘WE’ most of the time in this story.

It all started with a simple coffee (well, oat milk, flat white, half a sugar, and not too hot), and it really did. You might think there's got to be more to it but it was really that simple. If you don't believe me, get me to do a Keynote on it, I'll explain it to you, step by step, that's my job now!