Race the Ship

Where the Idea Was Born

On my way home from Pulling Together Up Snowdon in September 2022, I was already thinking about what came next. I was in a wheelchair. I had just tore my rotator cuff on the way up and kept going. We had raised £20,100 for the Jubilee Sailing Trust. And somewhere on that journey home, the question formed: what would it look like to build something more prominent than Snowdon, but less about helping and more about a mixed-ability team working together as equals to achieve something genuinely challenging for anyone?

The answer arrived quickly. Race the tall ship SV Tenacious. 197 miles from Great Yarmouth to London. Any human-powered means, electric pedal assist where needed. Mixed-ability team. No performance categories. The same challenge for everyone.

There was one immediate problem: at the time I conceived this idea, on September 25, 2022, it was physically impossible for me to ride a bike or so I thought.

Building the Bike

I sourced a cheap, smaller-framed women's mountain bike and spent the following week modifying it. Shorter cranks so I didn't need to bend my knees as far. Over ten days of trial and error I discovered I was able to ride, in my own way. Getting on and off was still a problem. Walking any distance remained impossible. But moving forward on two wheels, in a carefully self-adapted configuration, was possible.

Cycling is one of the most adaptive sports in existence. That was the discovery that made everything that followed viable. If I could adapt a bike, I could prove the challenge was possible. If I could prove it was possible, I could get others to join.

8–12 September 2023

The race ran from 8 to 12 September 2023. The SV Tenacious sailed the Norfolk and Suffolk coast, then up the Thames to London. The team rode 197 miles in 4.5 days, tracking the ship along the coast and through the river approaches. The ship is faster offshore. The team is faster in traffic. The result across 197 miles was closer than it had any right to be.

Three months before Race the Ship, I had ridden 54 miles from London to Brighton for the first time since rebuilding from 19 years in a wheelchair. Race the Ship was not a logical next step. It was a deliberate escalation to prove that the multi-day format was viable, that the Prosthetic Physiology framework holds under accumulated load, and that the Lag Factor — never plan based on today's feeling, plan based on yesterday's data — is the correct model for multi-day endurance.

197 miles answered the question. Every day one decision had arrived as a day three consequence, exactly as the framework predicted. The system held across the full distance.

The Team

The mixed-ability team operated on the same principle that governs every Wheels for Tenacious event: no separate categories, no performance gap between disabled and non-disabled riders. The same route, the same conditions, the same finish line. The inclusion was structural, not symbolic. This is what it means to emulate voyage crew ashore.

Race the Ship was the proof of concept. Wheels for Tenacious was built on what it demonstrated.

What Race the Ship Created

Race the Ship established that mixed-ability ultra-endurance cycling works at serious distance. It demonstrated the voyage crew model ashore: teamwork, mutual support, and shared challenge across ability lines, without softening the event to make it feel inclusive.

The events that followed — Wheels for Tenacious Barry to Gloucester in 2024, the Cantii Way in 2025, and RideTogether 200 planned for September 2026 — are all direct descendants of the idea that formed on the journey home from Snowdon on September 25, 2022.