Next up was a summer in the Alps. Gareth and I had spent many long summers in the French Alps, biking and climbing together, and it has always held a special place in my heart. The Megavalanche was a race we had always wanted to do together, and so it seemed as good a time as any to tick it off.

The Mega is unlike any other race I’ve ever done. It is such a ridiculously insane and dangerous concept of a race, that it is actually brilliant.

Let several hundred riders line up, at 3500m, on the snow, at the top of a black ski run on a glacier, and send them straight down all at the same time, all the way to the Valley below. Carnage. Gareth would have loved it.

I felt really nervous before hand. There is a kind of self-confidence that I used to have when Gareth was alive, that only comes from knowing you always have someone there to fall back on and help you out when you need them, no matter where or when. But, I was lucky to have my friend Tom there and he encouraged me hard.

Amazingly, I survived the race unscathed, and the tears I quietly shed at the top, wishing Gareth had been there too, weren’t noticed by too many people thanks to my full-face helmet.

I wasn’t the fastest person there, but several months of riding every day meant that I was one of the few people sprinting on the uphill sections! I can still recall now – a year on – the feeling of total, full body exhaustion and exhilaration that I felt at the end. It was a completely unique experience, and one day I’ll ride it again.

From there I persuaded Tom to come and ride from Chamonix to Zermatt with me. We took 5 days to ride the route we’d planned. It was a real adventure, carrying all our kit, bivvying in some brilliant spots where we could wake up to stunning mountain vistas each morning, washing in icy cold alpine streams.

Tom and I rode some great trails, ate a lot of pizza, and came back tired but feeling like we’d had a much bigger trip than just 5 days. It was incredibly hard accepting Gareth wasn’t there with us on the ride, but several times I would see or feel or remember something that made me think that although I couldn’t see him, he was definitely somewhere near in spirit.