Her fiancé has been supporting her in her Comic Relief challenge
For your average cyclist, a 500km charity bike ride would be quite the challenge. But for Mollie King, it’s a whole other level. Not only had the former Saturdays singer not ridden a bike since childhood, she had no experience of road cycling before beginning training in mid-January for her Comic Relief Pedal Power challenge. Oh, and she’d not exercised at all since getting pregnant with daughter Annabella, one, who she shares with cricketer fiancé Stuart Broad.
Still, that’s not going to stop her. On Monday, the 36-year-old singer hit the road for the mammoth charity challenge, which will see her covering 100km a day as she rides from London to Hull. Despite the gruelling training, Mollie – who was speaking just ahead of the challenge – told heat she was staying positive. “It’s been quite intense, but it’s amazing to be doing it for such good cause,” she says.
Hull is a particularly poignant place for Mollie, as it’s the home city of her late dad Stephen, who died of a brain tumour just ten days after the birth of her daughter. Parenting has, naturally, been a hectic experience, and training has allowed Mollie the headspace to really “process everything”. “You get on the bike, and it’s just you and the wind out there. It’s the first time that I’ve had that real silence,” she says.
A self-proclaimed fitness fan during her pre-parenting days, Mollie had to “start from zero again” when it came to preparing for the challenge, but she says she intends to stick with her new regime.
“Annabella is 100 per cent my focus, but this has taught me that it�
