An 83-year-old man hopes he has become one of the fastest octogenarians to cycle from Land’s End to John O’Groats raising more than \u00a310,000 in memory of his wife.<\/p>\n
Eddie McGourley, of Chester-le-Street, County Durham, said he was “elated” to finish his attempt to smash the record after getting the idea from a copy of the Guinness World Records book at the library.<\/p>\n
He completed the 1,000 mile journey in 11 days, arriving in John O’Groats on Thursday beating he hopes, a previous record by three days.<\/p>\n
McGourley is raising money for St Cuthbert’s Hospice in Durham where his late wife Winifred spent her final days.<\/p>\n
He said: “We’ve just finished a hard ride today and its just starting to sink in that we’ve done it. I’m a little bit tired.<\/p>\n
“Winifred would have been well chuffed. She was my manager when I was racing, she looked after me. <\/p>\n
“When I did good I got a pat on the back, when I didn’t do well I was told where I went wrong.”<\/p>\n
In his youth, McGourley, who is president of Houghton Cycle Club, was a successful competitive cyclist and was a North East champion three times.<\/p>\n
In 1970, he took part in the Milk Race where he was crowned King of the Mountains during for being the fastest cyclist on the hill sections of the course.<\/p>\n
McGourley praised his “absolutely brilliant” support team of five who helped him along the route, including friend Stephen Foster, 71, who rode alongside and “kept me going”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An 83-year-old man hopes he has become one of the fastest octogenarians to cycle from Land’s End to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":683338,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[4985,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-683337","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cycling","tag-cycling","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/683337","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=683337"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/683337\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/683338"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=683337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=683337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=683337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}