Yesterday it was Glasgow, (well Paisley) today the world as Globe Cyclist, James Bowthorpe felt the Lance effect. No sooner had Lance alerted his 1.7m followers to James' quest to ride around the world in record time and raise money for Parkinson's in the process than the Globe Cycle website experienced a surge in traffic and his following on Twitter trebled within hours – with hundreds of people re-tweeting messages about him.
“Twitterati, check out @globecycle. James is riding around the world (yes, the planet Earth) to raise funds to fight parkinsons. Noble man.”
After laying down 170 mile day on the bike James responded “I am honoured to be mentioned by @lancearmstrong , many thanks to him. I will write a blog 1st thing telling any newcomers whatsup. Sleepnow”
Bowthorpe is currently 144 days in to his ride with 25 to go. He has covered 14,000 miles since setting off from London at the end of March and is currently north east of Springfield… not there's a thought. His route now takes him up to Boston then across the Atlantic to Lisbon, on to Spain through either Madrid or Seville (so that he has ridden through the antipodes) up through France and then back to Britain probably making shore at Plymouth and riding back to London from there… hey, wonder if he'd stop in Bath on the way?
James is riding a Santos Tourers equipped with Gates belt drive and a Rohloff hub, 14,000 miles in and as you'd expect the Rohloff seems to be working perfectly and the belt drive seems to have confounded the doubters too – apart from hitting a wombat in Australia and dinging his back rim James has had no mechanicals worth mentioning, for 12,000 miles he went without a puncture in his front wheel too (only the damaged rim caused him problems at the back) so a thumbs up for Schwalbe too.
The power of Armstrong is such that within hours of his tweet Globe Cycle HQ was dealing with media requests from around the world with news organisations eager to find out more about his mission which he now looks odds on to complete in record time breaking the record Mark Beaumont.
James has now raised £48,244.38 towards his target of £1.8m for Parkinson's Disease Research with most of the money likely to come in the final days of his trip.
If you want to support James you can follow his progress at his site www.globcycle.org or via his twitter fees at www.twitter.com/globecycle or see his progress in real time via the gps tracking site
www.whereintheworldisjames.com.
Plucked from the obscurity of his London commute back in the mid-Nineties to live in Bath and edit bike mags our man made the jump to the interweb back in 2006 as launch editor of a large cycling website somewhat confusingly named after a piece of navigational equipment. He came up with the idea for road.cc mainly to avoid being told what to do… Oh dear, issues there then. Tony tries to ride his bike every day and if he doesn't he gets grumpy, he likes carbon, but owns steel, and wants titanium. When not on his bike or eating cake Tony spends his time looking for new ways to annoy the road.cc team. He's remarkably good at it.