Anyone with two wheels in west London will know about Richmond Park . It's a splash of cool green in the middle of suburban concrete. It's surrounded by Roehampton high rises, A3 traffic jams and endless residential streets. On the proverbial clear day, you can see the London Eye , BT Tower and Canary Wharf from the middle of the park. It's home to a wide variety of wild - and not so wild - life. Rabbits, badgers, woodpeckers, squirrels, foxes, ring-necked parakeets, magpies and herons live there. 350 fallow and 300 red deer roam the park at will. They've been in the area since the 17th Century when Charles I enclosed the land for easy hunting. It remains one of the largest enclosed parklands in Britain. At the weekends Richmond Park is rammed with cyclists on the metalled roads, as well as on the off-road Tamsin Trail. Groups of club riders, most notably from London Dynamo , whiz round the perimeter in fully-fledged peleton formation. Scattered bunches of Kingston W...

Etape Jitters... Lance was wrong. It’s ALL about the bike. Or that’s how it feels, having recently joined Kingston Wheelers cycling club and signed up for a hellish day of pedalling in the Alps. Never have I spent so much time orbiting the indifferent deer in Richmond Park, or rubbing manically at oily marks on my once pristine bike frame. What possessed me? Not only am I attempting a real 187km stage of this year’s Tour de France, it ends on one of the most infamous and daunting climbs in that strength-sapping race, L’Alpe d’Huez . Do four revolutions round the park at top speed do this task any justice by way of training? I doubt it. Not even repeated ascents of Box Hill’s three mini switchbacks are much good as preparation - and you can’t stop for coffee and a sticky chocolate bun on the Alpe’s Hairpin 15. There’s a word which looms larger as I strain to increase my cadence up Sawyers Hill, ‘hell-for-leathering’ it as best I can, towards the horizon. This multi-syllabled term warns...