“Imagine trying to cycle up a hill in your hardest cog, with a rucksack full of bricks,” says Charlie Burrell, describing the sensation of riding a fixed-wheel penny-farthing. “It sort of feels like that.”
If anyone would know, it’s the 40-year-old. On Sunday, the shortest day of the year, Burrell rode his penny-farthing for 101 miles dressed in a Santa costume and wellington boots. He began at Brighton Pier at 8:30am, and hoped to return by sunset around 4pm. Instead, his loop of Sussex’s bridleways led him on a gruelling 12-hour slog, compounded by rain, potholes, darkness, and a spectacular over-the-handlebars crash.
As Burrell speaks to Cycling Weekly two days on, he’s sitting in bed recovering. How did he find the ride? “If you’d asked me that after I finished, I probably wouldn’t have replied to your question,” he laughs. “But today I can say it was a good experience.
“I look like an old man when I’m walking. Even sitting on my bed, my backside hurts.”
A driving instructor by trade, Burrell grew up a keen racing cyclist. The penny-farthing he used on Sunday is his own, purchased from a man in East Sussex for just short of £2,000. He previously rode it from London to Brighton – around 75 miles – “and that was painful,” he says. His latest challenge, he decided, would be his toughest to date.
The idea came as a charity fundraiser. So far, Burrell has raised £1,900 for two organisations: People Against Parental Alienation and Finley’s Touch, a local children’s cancer charity. Writing on his GoFundMe page, Burrell explained the ride would be a way of honouring the children, “the real fighters”.
“Even on my toughest mile, it will never come close to the battles thousands of innocent children face daily,” he wrote. It didn’t take long before those tough miles arrived in his winter solstice ride.
Plotting the route, Burrell decided to avoid busy roads, opting instead for car-free country tracks and repurposed railway lines. “I thought it would just be nice gravel pathways,” he says, “but, for some of it, I was off-roading.”
Around 30 miles in, Burrell ended up in a heap on the floor. The moment came when he was crossing the Downs Link, trying to pass a fallen tree by mounting the grass verge. “I slowed right down, and I didn’t make my mind up in time whether I was going to get off the bike or cycle around,” he says. “I went over the handlebars, and ended up landing on the floor upside down, hitting the ground quite hard.
“Luckily there were no kids around to see Santa crash,” he adds with a laugh. “I wasn’t hurt, but my penny-farthing ended up upside down. I’d put two bottle cages on the front the night before, and because of that crash, one of them broke off.”
It was around this point, too, that Burrell’s legs started tiring. “They felt like they were burning, on fire,” he says. “I got to the halfway point and I thought, ‘My computer must be broken. Surely I’ve done 80 miles, not 50.’ At that point, I was doubting myself. I was thinking, ‘I’ve bitten off more than I can chew. Maybe I can walk the rest of it and push it, as long as I can get it done before midnight.’”
Night fell at 4pm, and Burrell was soon plunged into “pitch black”, with more than four hours still to ride. The lack of vision forced him to slow down. So, too, did the rain. “My Santa costume filled up with water. It was so much heavier,” he says. “I think that added to how hard it actually was. It was just an extra layer of dead weight.”
Burrell continued to ride through the discomfort. The distance ticked by. Then came the 80-mile mark, and the attrition of a day on a Victorian-style penny-farthing, particularly the saddle soreness, became unbearable. “I’ve always had a bony, skinny bum,” Burrell says, “[but the last 20 miles] were really painful.”
What kept him motivated to carry on? “It was just the charities that I’m doing this for,” the 40-year-old says. There was one person in particular he kept thinking about: his friend’s son, who was diagnosed with cancer when he was a year old. “He fought it, it went away, which was good, and then this year [now aged three], it’s recently come back,” Burrell says. “He’s currently in hospital, fighting it for a second time, going through all the chemo.”
Twelve hours after he set out, Burrell returned to Brighton Pier in his rain-drenched Santa suit. He looked down at his bike computer unit to end the ride, “but it said I’d done 98 miles,” he recalls. “So I thought, ‘I can’t stop now’, and I rode up and down Madeira Drive, along the seafront, until it hit 101… I said I was going to cycle over 100 miles, so I had to go to 101.”
Burrell pulls up his Strava file to rattle off the stats. Stoppages aside, he spent more than nine and a half hours in the saddle, for an average speed of 10.5 miles per hour. He also climbed more than 4,400 feet of elevation (1,300m), on tracks he chose because he thought they would be flat.
“I underestimated the route, the daylight, how hard it would be,” he says frankly. “But at least I finished in one piece.”
Burrell set out to raise “literally a couple of hundred quid”, and is now nearing in on £2,000. Donations can be made via his GoFundMe page.
