It was the worst Christmas ever.

Where shall we head off to this weekend? I know. Oxford. Across the Chiltern Hills. 65 miles. It'll be a breeze.

Having no idea what we were letting ourselves in for, one cloudy Sunday Clare and I packed our bags with plenty of lucozade, flapjack , and a map showing a few main roads, and set off for Oxford. For the second time in our short training experience, we headed down the length of the tedious Uxbridge Road all the way from Shepherd's Bush to Uxbridge, all the way fighting a strong head-wind, and onwards towards Slough. These first, extremely dull, 18 miles passed quickly and we were feeling really quite pleased with ourselves. Then the limitations of our road map became clear and, coincidentally, this was where the Chiltern Hills also began. We appeared to enter the Bermuda Triangle of the Chilterns, and in a bid to follow signs to Burnham Beeches (no such signs appeared), we seemingly cycled around in circles for who knows how long. All roads led to a place called Farnham Common; no matter how far we cycled, signs would insist that it was merely 2 miles away. The joy of freewheeling down enormous hills was crushed by the wince-inducing fear that we would reach the bottom only to find that we had gone the wrong way and would have to haul ourselves back up to the top. The comparative luxury of the certainty that we had gone the wrong way never appeared, however, and we blundered on blindly. We stumbled across Marlow, which was but a short-lived success when we again managed to go wrong and inadvertently spent extra time, energy, and miles on heading too far south towards to Henley.

Around mile 40 we met a friendly cyclist from a local club; we must have been looking particularly pallid and pathetic already because he quickly offered us some of his energy gels. We declined in favour of yet more trusty flapjacks. Checked cycling man's far more sensible map, and continued on our way towards Christmas Common, which my dad had already informed us was 'at the top of an enormous, very steep hill - good luck with that' (nothing like fatherly encouragement). He was not wrong. Not only was it enormous and very steep, the single track road up it ran through a dark gully surrounded by trees so that we had no way of telling where the top was, and it wound up the hillside offering hopeful corners that looked like each one 'really could be the top this time'. Clare and I crawled up the hill in the lowest of gears, at times going so slowly the momentum could barely keep our bikes from wobbling over. Every 10 feet we stopped for 30 second breaks in which to pant and grimace. During one such break I quietly suggest that I might just sod it and get off and push. 'NO!' yells Clare, 'NO pushing!' though her face seems to retract this fairly swiftly after seeing my murderous expression. I resist the overwhelming urge to fling my bike into the bushes and stomp off like a 2 year old, and we wobble on. Remarkably, we did finally reach the summit of this behemoth, and found new enthusiasm to leap over to the edge of the trees to look at the colossal hill that we've just climbed. It's less than impressive, as these photos show. But according to our reliable sources at Wikipedia, it is pretty damn big.

We plonked ourselves down on a log to have a well earned snack, when shortly, as if in a pork pie-induced hallucination, a colourful vintage tractor grinds up the hill, almost as slowly (surely not!) as we did but minutes ago, followed by another, and then a whole onslaught of the things. We wave to the drivers in a bemused fashion, simultaneously wishing that we'd got a tow up the hill and thanking our lucky stars that our painful, undignified ascent wasn't witnessed by all of these tractors in some kind of competition-of-the-slowest stand-off.

We sent a desperate text ('buy cheese!!') to the lovely Tor Saner who is now a mere 7.5 miles away in Oxford waiting to provide us with food on our arrival, and lumbered ourselves back on the bikes. A strange thing seemed to happen at this point, as we both appeared to have something wrong with our gears. We were both in easy gears normally reserved for getting a flying start at traffic lights, yet the pedals were barely going round. But no. This wasn't some sort of mysterious conspiracy, we had simply lost any strength that we once had in our legs. It was going to be a long 7 miles. About a mile outside of the city centre, I had a slight meltdown triggered by the sight of Clare speeding off into the distance ahead of me (in reality, she was probably going a glacial 8 mph compared to my 7, but things get blown out of proportion when you can't feel your legs and have eaten enough flapjack to feed a small army of goats.) All my brain could think about was how utterly impossible it would be to cycle all the way to Paris and why the hell did we think that we could do this. Clare did her best to cheer me up with a brief pep talk by the Oxford sign on a huge roundabout, followed by a tourists' guide to all the sites and sounds of Oxford that we passed. It was surprisingly effective at distracting my dazed thoughts towards anything other than how miserably painful everything was.

We arrived at Tor's excited about the cheese and the warm welcome. She was out. No matter though, she rushed up soon after, clutching promising-looking dairy products. Being the first time I'd met Tor, it was unfortunate that I was covered in sweat and lycra and only really capable of shoveling pasta into my mouth whilst staring at the space in front of me. I have yet to prove to her that I can do otherwise. Thanks for putting up with us Tor! And the irony is not lost on me that your name is a type of hill...