Faye Paul - TEAR Fund

In May 2007, I was diagnosed with debilitating chronic/adrenal fatigue. Two years later, desperate for exercise, I set out to walk on Good Friday, 2009 but my body was only able to cope with a 5 minute walk to the end of our short street and back. The road to recovery has been long, cruel and at times very lonely. Eight years later, it’s Saturday afternoon and I am stretched out on the couch having experienced the freedom of health and fitness in cycling over 200km, on top of working, this last week. I am training to cycle the 700 km of The Tour of NZ so I can translate my freedom into setting others free also.

During the week, my spinning class coach encouraged me to visualise a story in my mind which would motivate me to keep cycling even when the going gets tough. I closed my eyes and imagined being with an Nvader team who were rescuing and escaping with young children from a brothel. I hoisted a 5 year old girl I had been carrying onto the handle bars of my bike, mounted and began to pedal, as our lives depended on it, in the direction of a rendezvous point where a police van was waiting to whisk these children away. In our wake were angry brothel-owners threatening to kill us; the chase was on. I sighted the van, pedalled my heart out and reached it in the nick of time pedalling one more child to freedom…mission accomplished!