Fastest Woman to Cycle Around the World, Jenny Graham's Record Journey

I'm Jenny Graham and I hold the Guinness World Records title for being the fastest

women to circumnavigate the World Buy Bike. The journey took 124 days and 11 hours

I learned to cycle when I was a kid so four or five and then it was only five

years ago that I entered my first race and it was an endurance race and from there I just started

sort of building up these miles and finding out that actually I've got quite a good sort of diesel engine and I can keep going so I'm never going to win in a sprint race but I can I can keep riding all night and I enjoy that sort of like big miles of thing so I started my trip in Berlin at the Brandenburg gates in Berlin and then I headed east so went across

Europe, into Russia, Mongolia and China. And then I flew down to Australia, across Australia, New Zealand, south to north, and then flew

up to Anchorage before coming down the Rocky Mountains and right the way across Canada

to Halifax and Nova Scotia, and then back into Europe where I come up through, you know, Portugal

Spain, France, Belgium, Holland and then into Germany to get back to the Brandenburg gates

The trickiest part was going across Russia. East of Moscow there was the Trans Highway and the traffic was just crazy Like crazy so many tracks I never ever seen so many trucks there in my whole life

And they were just coming flying past you and there was no room for cyclists and it was just so dangerous

So I decided to cycle at night at that point. It was like the safest thing to do is turn my night and today

So I'd ride until like 8 in the morning, find somewhere to sleep through the day and then get back

on the road about three in the afternoon and I did that probably for about 1200 miles just to get out of the really busy section

So I chose to take on this record and supported. So when I set off from the start line that was it, I was on my own

So I carried everything that I needed to fix myself, to fix my bike, to feed myself, to sleep at night

I had no other, like no one out there supporting me. I had no van or, yeah, no bed at night and things like that

So I just carried a really basic toolkit that I felt that would get me on the road

and I can ride a broken bike for a really long time until I find a bike shop

And that was my sort of theory that would work for me

But it meant that when I was in between bike shops and things went wrong

like I'd ran out of oil or I think I might have left my oil somewhere

and I went through sun cream on my chain and I went through oil from sardines

like the sardine oil, just to, like, just to keep me going, just to keep me going until the end

That's just crossing between Mongolia and China. So there a space of no man land that you not allowed to cycle over So these lovely people up to Maryland bikes up there I a little bit worried about it

So the first wildlife encounter that I came across that really shook me

was when I landed in Australia and I faced the kangaroos. It's like these fellas are massive

They're like huge big kangaroos. And they were jumping along beside me and I was like, I've not really thought this through

Like, kangaroos didn't even come into the equation. You know, I was worried about snakes and I was a bit worried about bears, but kangaroos

So when I told my son that I was going to do this, he was like, well, of course you're going to do this

You know, he'd seen what I'd been putting into my riding and what I'd been putting into my endurance cycling for such a long time

Like he saw the Saturday nights where you're going off to your bed at 8 o'clock, you've just done a 12-hour ride and you're a completely

exhausted and he'd seen all the behind the scene stuff so for him this wasn't

out of the blue he was like yeah you got it yeah that was really nice to have so this is my

round the world bike it's uh called little pig it's a steel frame shand's bike so it's hand

built in scotland he's got a few special features on it um like for instance the front wheel so

on this wheel it's got a dynamo hub in the front for I would need like a good sort of 10 hours of

riding to be able to charge a battery pack so that was like my main source of charging I have try bars and drop bars so it meant I could go down on the drop bars or I could be up on the hoods or I could be up on the armrests or I

could be on the tri so that was that was lots of lots of different positions for me. Up here

was my cockpit and this is where it was all happening. I'd have my phone mounted here, my GPS here

two bike computers here like clocking my miles all the time and I'd have my spot tracker so

that was like hooped up to a web page so anybody could log on and see if I was there and I'd also

have water bottles under here and the all-important bear bells would stay up there too so I was jangling away

and I'd fill food these full of food both of them full of food so the final push-in to the Brandenburg gates

was pretty special. It was like 36 hours I was riding for. I'd gathered some friends by

that point. You know, I had folk riding with me and recording it and it was a really

fun, sociable kind of time. Sometimes I'm just like washing the dishes at home and then

it comes into my head and I'm like, oh my goodness, I can't believe I actually hold the

record for riding around the world. Get like proper chuffed about it

Thank you