Lewis Moody has spent the eight months since his motor neurone disease diagnosis refusing to look too far ahead. This week the former England captain turns that outlook into action, climbing onto a bike for a 500-mile charity ride that finishes at the Gallagher Premiership final.
"The present is all you have," Moody told the Guardian in an interview published on Friday — a line that has become the quiet creed of a flanker once known as "Mad Dog" for his fearlessness on the field.
Moody, a 2003 Rugby World Cup winner who retired in 2012, revealed last October that he had been diagnosed with MND, the incurable neurological condition that also claimed Scotland lock Doddie Weir and rugby league great Rob Burrow. In the months since, he has reframed what winning means to him.
"Winning looks like having a wonderful purpose that I am utterly passionate about," he told Sky Sports. "For the last 14 years you feel like you've not had a proper fight to get into [...] but now all of a sudden you've got almost reinvigorated."
The ride is that fight. Organised with Weir's family and the My Name'5 Doddie Foundation, the Lewis Moody XV Cycle Challenge sets out from Newcastle — Weir's old club — and finishes at the Allianz Stadium in time for the Premiership final, stopping at all five of the clubs that shaped Moody's career, from his first club at Bracknell and his school at Oakham to Leicester Tigers and Bath.
He will not ride alone. Former Tigers and England team-mates Martin Corry, Ben Kay, Tom Croft, Geordan Murphy, Leon Lloyd, Ben Youngs, Tom Youngs, Dan Hipkiss and Louis Deacon are among those joining him, along with his teenage sons, Dylan and Ethan. The group reaches Welford Road on Tuesday, where supporters have been invited to welcome the riders and join a Q&A.
The support has, at times, overwhelmed him. Moody recalled how Lloyd once drove for hours to see him and, arriving late, slept in his car on the drive until morning just to deliver a hug.
"The love that I felt, that we felt — that's when I..." Moody said, pausing as the emotion caught up with him. "If I talk about myself, I can talk quite frankly, quite pragmatically about it all, but if I talk about [the support] it always hits me again."
He is clear-eyed about the disease's progression. A weakening shoulder first sent him for the scans that led to his diagnosis, and he has since noticed strength fading in his fingers. Yet he has settled on a deliberate way of carrying it.
"I remain positive and hopeful. I just choose not to dwell on the negative. I don't see any benefit for it," he said. "It's not that I'm not sad or difficult thoughts don't enter my head. Of course they do. I sit with it briefly, I rationalise it quickly and I just move on."
There are harder days. Moody admitted to "fleeting moments" of frustration, and to two days of feeling mentally floored when he lost strength in his middle fingers. The trick, he says, is recognising the dip and allowing himself to sit in it before stepping back out.
"I always focus on the things I can do rather than things that I can't," he said. "So when I'm training now, if certain movements are tricky, then we just adapt the weight or we change the movement."
His stated aim is simple and large: to have as big an impact on MND as he can with the time he has, following the trail blazed by Burrow and Weir. The bike ride, and the money and awareness it raises, is the next mile of that.
"The only certainty is that everything is uncertain," he said. "That's what I've learnt — and maybe the same can be said for life in many respects."
