But not 14-year-old Jack Denny, who has finished a mammoth cycle ride from the Scottish Highlands to Jersey – a lot of it in wellies.
Jack, who cycled alongside his Jersey-born mother Becks, completed the challenge in memory of a school friend who died last year of a brain tumour.
And Jack, who arrived in Jersey on the ferry from Portsmouth on Friday evening and then rode the final few miles to the finish at the home of his grandparents Peter and Jackie Denny in St Mary, has raised almost double his original target already.
‘It has been a really enjoyable experience, although I do have very sore legs now,’ said Jack.
‘We met some lovely people along the way and saw some great landscapes, especially in the North York moors.’
When the mother-and-son duo set off from their hometown of Aviemore in the Cairngorms National Park in the Scottish Highlands on 4 April the weather was extremely wet so they began the journey wearing wellies.
And in the weeks that followed they had to contend with everything from floods to heatwaves, at which point they did change their footwear.
Ms Denny, an ecologist, said: ‘It has been about 45 miles a day on average, although some days we have pushed it to 60. We have been camping most of the way and staying with friends. The journey has been totally unsupported and we have just used an old road atlas so we have tried to make it a proper adventure by not just relying on sat navs and the internet – we have done it a bit old school and it has meant we have had to speak to people.
‘Jack is a real avid reader so we have been stopping at second hand book shops along the way too.’
The original fundraising target was £1,000 for Brain Tumour Research but Jack has already raised around £1,800. To donate visit justgiving.com and search for Jack Denny.
