When Helen saw on Mike’s Tinder profile that he was a keen cyclist and wanted to cycle around the world, she sent him a message. “I said: ‘When are we leaving?’,” she recalls, “and he said: ‘How about Tuesday?’”

When they met up in a pub a week later, in January 2016, they talked about the trip. “It was, initially, ‘Wouldn’t it be funny? How would you do it?’,” says Helen. “It was on the second date that it started to be a bit more: ‘Why shouldn’t we do it?’ We weren’t happy with our jobs, and we had no responsibilities to hold us back.”

After four weeks they were a couple, and after five months they moved in together, mainly to save money. They sold everything worth selling, and stopped spending. Mike was working long hours as a trainee solicitor, but took an evening job in a restaurant. Helen worked in a medical lab and transcribed medical notes in the evenings. In November 2016, Mike proposed, and in April 2017, they embarked on their round-the-world cycle ride. They left on a Tuesday.

“Lots of people would say to us, especially when we’d been on the road for a while, ‘That must be like 10 years of marriage condensed into 18 months,’” says Mike. “In a way it was, because we spent every day together.”

They didn’t cycle side by side the whole way. “We would very rarely lose sight of each other, but it didn’t mean we were always in conversation every second of the day,” says Helen. “Occasionally I wanted some of my own time, but even then I was like: ‘Don’t go too far.’”

They got to know each other, and themselves. “It was a big lesson in compromise, communication and listening,” says Mike. “Not just what someone was saying, but all the non-verbal things: is Helen tired? Is she stressed? She’s saying we can go on, but does she mean it?”

And they saw each other during extreme moments. Cycling across Australia – in 40C heat, into a headwind that meant they couldn’t travel more than six miles an hour – was the most brutal time, physically and mentally. “For weeks on end, nothing changed,” says Helen. “We both reacted very differently to release that stress.”

Helen cried every day; Mike tended to bottle up his emotions, but, after a minor disagreement, had a meltdown. “It’s probably quite a rare thing to learn about a partner,” says Helen. “I guess not many people experience that kind of extreme to know how the other person would react.”

Moving on to the US, they cycled from San Diego to Yosemite national park, where they got married. “I think by then we’d done a year and about 12,000 miles,” says Mike. “We were like: ‘We’ll be fine; we’ll still love each other enough to get married.’” Their parents and a couple of friends flew out, then Mike and Helen carried on. It was about a month later that Mike nearly died of hypothermia in the Rockies. “That was our honeymoon,” he says with a small laugh.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Helen and Mike got married in Yosemite national park. Photograph: John Johnston Photography/Provided by Helen Langridge

They had left Salt Lake City and were cycling along the hard shoulder of the interstate highway when a storm came in. Within minutes the temperature had dropped to about 4C and there was nowhere to shelter. Helen was in front. “Over the noise of the traffic I heard him shout, so I turned around and he had his eyes closed but he was screaming and crying, and he wasn’t really with it. I don’t know how he hadn’t already cycled into traffic because he was weaving along the hard shoulder with his eyes closed. I dropped my bike, and caught him. His body was curling over the bike and I couldn’t unfurl him.” She turns to him. “You weren’t reacting to me.”

She waved a car down and a man helped drag Mike off the bike and get him into the car to try and warm him up until the ambulance arrived.

After Mike recovered, they cycled on through Canada, and two months later flew to France and made their way back home, arriving in the UK in August last year. Was it hard to get back to a more normal life? “It’s almost like it never happened,” says Helen. “All those amazing experiences and places and people, it’s like it never happened.” Mike had the harder task, she says, going back to work so quickly.

There are new adventures, though of a more stationary kind (they are buying their first house). Everything in their relationship until now had been focused on the trip, says Helen – either planning it, or on it. “I think there was a risk that our relationship was so based around that trip that it could have fallen apart once we came back,” she says. “But it’s very naturally changed into a relationship at home.”

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