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“Luckily I've got an adventurous gene, as life in a wheelchair is full of unexpected adventure. I was a keen runner, climber and all round outdoor addict, but fell off a cliff and became paralysed from the chest down…Just the night before my accident, I said I would rather die than be paralysed, but little did I know what lay ahead. Instead I found fortune in my misfortune, inspiration from people in similar and more challenging situations all around me, and began pursuing alternative ways to access the outdoors. Not being able to move or feel anything below my chest level has of course been a challenge, but I’ve come to learn that nothing is impossible if we set our mind and our efforts to it".

It only takes a brief meeting with Karen Darke to suddenly ‘get it’.  To get why she’s gone from, what many of us would view as extreme personal tragedy, to paralympic silver medallist over a relatively short space of time.  Somehow with Karen you’d expect nothing less.   So when Karen came to me and said she was planning on cycling from Lhasa in Tibet to Kathmandu in Nepal my first thought was 'of course you are!'. 

I’ll let Karen take up the story…

"It's a trip Sinead and I had wanted to do for a long time, but life circumstances had never quite fallen into place. Twenty years and a few life crises later, the plan was hatched at last...for five of us, all women as it happened, to ride from Lhasa in Tibet to Kathmandu, Nepal. 1200 kilometres of the world's most incredible mountain scenery, and the longest descent from the Tibetan Plateau into Nepal. The dirt wash-board road it once had been had been replaced by the smooth tarmac of the Chinese, but it was still the ride of a lifetime, a journey into our future."

So I gave Karen a tiny portable recorder and agreed we’d just see what happened.  You can hear the results in Ride of a Lifetime.