After battling cancer for a year, James Golding was rushed to the hospital with septicemia peritonitis on February 12, 2009. The sepsis, a complication caused by cancer, gave him a five percent chance of survival. Doctors saved Golding by keeping him in a medically induced coma, sacrificing half his body mass and his ability to walk in the process. During recovery, Golding had to re-teach himself to walk, one toe-wiggle at a time.
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On July, 23 2009, Golding was given the all-clear. He wanted to raise money for the organization and people that helped him by accomplishing a momentous physical task, but his life-threatening struggles had left him unable to run for long periods of time. Instead, he vowed to bike across the country. Less than a year later he was on his bike, attempting to pedal from LA to Miami in 34 days when, on the 22nd day, he was hit by a truck going 70 mph. Back to the hospital. But, not one to quit, he was back in the saddle six months later, completing what he had started. He biked across the country in 24 days.
After finishing in Miami, Golding set his sights higher. He began training again, this time to break Pat Hawkins’s seven-day biking distance record, set in 1940: 1,546.8 miles. In April, 2014, Golding began pedaling across the French countryside with a support crew, hoping to average 220 miles a day. Spindle Productions captured Golding’s attempt at breaking the 74-year-old record, framed within the more impressive journey: Golding’s life.