RIDE BEYOND LIMITS RECORD RESILIENCE

Sarah Ruggins's Double End to End record took fortitude forged by an agonising early illness, finds Tom Davidson

- Tom Davidson

The pain was searing, like third-degree burns - rising from the tips of her toes, up through her entire body. It locked her joints, immobilised her limbs, and left her in such agony that it felt as if her bones were breaking. Sarah Ruggins had been a promising junior runner, slated to one day represent Canada at the Olympics. But in her teens she found herself bedbound and dependent on a wheelchair to get around. Doctors feared she would never walk again.

“All I remember was that the pain was so bad,” Ruggins, now 37, says. That pain was a distant memory when, last month, she broke the outright record for cycling the length of the UK and back. The feat took her five days, 11 hours and 14 minutes, during which time she covered 2,700km (1,677 miles), climbed almost 20,000m, and slept for only eight hours. Afterwards, she slumped on a patch of gravel, her back against the John o’ Groats signpost, and sobbed.

It was a moment that once was unimaginable. For a decade of her life, just getting out of bed had been a challenge.

When we meet over videocall, four days have passed since her world-record ride. I expected Ruggins to seem worn out, too tired to find adequate words, but instead she is sprightly and smiling. The wealth management adviser, who lives in rural Gloucestershire, is unflinching as she looks back on her painful past.

Ruggins was 15 when she was diagnosed with complex regional pain syndrome, a rare and poorly understood condition affecting the nervous system. For the then runner, it materialised after she underwent operations to treat injuries in her feet. “It’s one of the most painful conditions known to modern medicine,” she says. “I had this really incredibly severe nerve pain, and then that tracked up into my face. I lost all my hair, I lost about 40% of my body weight, and went from a high-functioning young athlete to somebody who required 24/7 health care.”

Never give up