How redundancy sparked a cycling obsession

There’s one particular section of the profile Tony Ives wrote to accompany his blog which is more revealing than the rest.

Just above the list of his favourite films, which includes Pulp Fiction, The Third Man and The Truman Show and next to the description of himself as a “late 50 something bloke with time on his hands, a tolerant wife and a lot of hobbies”, there’s a space reserved for occupation.

It reads simply: “Stopped chasing money”. A few years ago it would have said: “Highly paid executive in the construction industry”. But then came the recession.

“I was made redundant,” says Tony, sat in the front room of his home in Acaster Malbis near York. “I was 53-years-old and it was just the start of the downturn. Like most people my first thought was, ‘Right, I best start looking for another job’. I was fortunate in the sense that I came away with a decent financial package, so there was no panic, but I’d worked all my life and there was never a thought that I wouldn’t be back working five days a week.”

With significant experience and contacts, it didn’t take Tony long to find consultancy work as a trouble shooter for various blue chip companies. It was, he says, intellectually stimulating, but there was a nagging thought at the back of his mind.

“I just knew it wasn’t something I wanted to do long-term. Then one afternoon I had what you’d call my Damascene moment. I was working from home and there was a guy painting the house. I couldn’t concentrate and that’s when it hit me. I thought, ‘What am I doing just sat inside. Life is too short to spend the best part of it staring at a computer’.”

While most of us have exactly the same thought at some time or another, Tony was in the position to do something about it and what he decided to was cycle.

“For years I’d gone on a week’s cycling holiday by myself,” he says. “I always loved it and when it came to an end I always wished I could stay a bit longer, ride a bit further. I remember thinking, ‘Well, if that’s what you want to do, why not just go and do it’.”

In fact the more he thought about it, the more he couldn’t think of one single reason not to follow his dream. His two daughters were grown-up, he was financially secure and could afford to not work for a while and when his wife raised no objections to him disappearing for a couple of months, there was just one last thing to decide - where to go.

Tony eventually settled on Europe and in the summer of 2010 he spent two months cycling across France, Spain and Portugal.

There were days when it rain so hard he could only see a few feet in front of him, there was the time he got eaten alive by mosquitoes and the night he turned up at one campsite to find it was also home to a circus. However, for every minor setback there were a hundred happy memories and when Tony arrived back home in Yorkshire he was determined that first epic bike ride wasn’t going to be his last

The following year he took another two months to cycle through the Italian Lakes to Milan and later this month, when he gets on his bike to ride 3,500 miles across America, it will be his most ambitious trip to date.

“I honestly can’t wait,” says Tony, who has planned the route which will take him from Yorktown in Virginia in the East to the West Coast and San Francisco with almost military precision. “People ask what I get out of cycling. I tell themt it’s a sense of freedom, the kind you just don’t get in any other way. I just love the feeling of the sun on my back and being out there alone is really exhilarating.

“After Italy and Portugal I knew I wanted to challenge myself to an even longer ride, but I still wanted it to be somewhere relatively civilised. I didn’t fancy the idea of trying to conquer some remote jungle on two wheels, so that’s how I ended up coming up with the idea of riding across America.

“I’m sure there will be a few incidents along the way. I’m prepared for inconsiderate Kentucky coal trucks, wild dogs snapping at my heels, the long stretches of vast featureless corn fields of Kansas, the ascent up the Rockies and the heat of the Nevada desert, but it’s the sheer variety of landscapes that I’m looking forward to.”

Tony heads out to America at the end of this month and having already booked his return flight, he knows that he has to be in San Francisco by the end of September. He’s carefully plotted every overnight stop, but he knows there are some things you can’t plan for.

“On one trip I was nearing my destination for the night when suddenly the road ahead was closed. There was no other way round, so I grabbed my bike and scrambled down a hill covered in gorse,” he says. “Then there was the time I arrived in Leon, but my bike didn’t. It eventually turned up the next day but just those little things can turn everything on its head.

“I’ll be averaging 65 miles a day and yes, I hope there will be some time for a little sightseeing on the way, but really it’s all about the ride.”

While some cycling obsessives lavish thousands on their bikes, Tony says his is not particularly special and set him back £600. Inevitably, he travels light and the only real luxury he packs is an iPad.

“I use it really for the sat nav,” he says. “I do sometimes listen to music - I am partial to a bit of ACDC - but when you’re cycling these distances you need a clear head.

“People ask, ‘Don’t you get bored or lonely?’, but there honestly isn’t time. There are so many things to think about from making sure you don’t miss a turning, to working out whether you’re on track to get somewhere by nightfall and where the nearest laundrette and supermarket are.

“Being out there on your own is what I really love about cycling. There’s no other feeling like it.”

It’s something he tries to convey in his blog, which as well as being a record of his travels is also a way of keeping in touch with his family back home.

“I will buy myself a mobile when I get out to America, but calling home can be difficult just because of the time difference,” he says. “I try to let them know I’m still alive every two to three days. It’s easy to be quite selfish when you are away from home exploring a foreign country, but I do try to remember that my wife might well be having a crisis of her own back here.”

Tony admits that not everyone is in the position to pack their bags for two months every summer he says cycling has given him the perfect work-life balance. “If I hadn’t have been made redundant, I am pretty sure I would have just kept on working at the same pace I always had,” he says. “Before the recession I had a pretty enviable life, but now it’s perfect.”

Tomorrow: John Redman reveals how the Tour de France in Yorkshire inspired him to walk away from a successful marketing company and start a cycling business.