Life cycle

"It helps me practice my standing starts," says Darren Kenny, as I try to keep up with him. "It also brings a fun element to training, which is essential."

And ten-year-old Brandon certainly seems to be having fun on this Monday morning in the New Forest, after all being a back seat rider and helping your Dad train during the summer holidays certainly beats school. Darren admits that he finds it difficult balancing family life with training for the Paralympics, although you wouldn't have guessed it.

Neither would you have guessed how significant Brandon has been in his father's success, indeed it was him who spurred him on to get back on his bike after Darren suffered a serious head injury.

"I was a milkman in Bear Cross," explains Darren. "One morning while I was walking up a path I tripped over a cat and banged my head on a wall."

Ordinarily this accident might not have caused Darren permanent physical impairment, but this was the third head injury he had sustained after two other serious accidents - one when he came of his bike in a race in Ireland and the other when he went through a car windscreen.

"After the last accident I was on medication for 18 months to stop me having fits, all I was doing was drinking coffee, smoking and eating cake - I put on a lot of weight," he explains.

"One day I just looked at Brandon, he was two at the time, and I just thought that some fat, lazy slob wasn't the ideal role model so I got back on the bike."

After his accident Darren actually found cycling easier than walking, although when he got back on two wheels in 2000 he didn't anticipate becoming a paralympian, let alone a gold medallist.

However as he lost the weight and became fitter his wife supportive Maria, and friend Barry convinced him to enter competitions and four years later he was setting records and heading to the Athens Paralympics.

"I had no intention of racing, but it's always a race" he grins. "I didn't like people going faster than me and my competitive nature kicked in."

Halfway through our bike ride we stop for coffee in a tearoom in Burley, where Darren has arranged to meet some friends and sponsors. They're a lively bunch, all keen cyclists themselves and eager to talk about our recent success in the Olympics - particularly in the cycling events.

It's success that Darren wants to add to when he races in Beijing next week, although despite the pressure he is confident.

"I have done the work and I know what I can do," he says, as we leave the tearoom and start to cycle back towards Ringwood. "I've never lost on the track before."

Indeed Darren's abilities on the track are unrivalled. In Athens he won gold medals for his efforts in the pursuit and the kilometre events, whilst he also holds a brace of paralympic world records, including the fastest 200m sprint, the 1km time trial and the 3,000m pursuit.

On top of this he also won a silver in the road race at Athens and is hopeful of turning that into a gold this year, although often the outcome of this race can be down to luck as much as a good training regime.

"In the road race there are so many variables and so many tactics involved," he explains. "If someone puts you into the barriers with 300m to go, you're not going to win it."

Nevertheless Darren is improving his odds. He doesn't have a set routine as such but every day incorporates some rigorous training sessions - one of which is a stint on the Turbo, something I volunteered to partake in later that day.

Essentially the Turbo is a bike, on a kind of rolling road that Darren has rigged up in his living room. He informs me that we are about to do something called Russian steps on it, which is part of his training regime. "I'm usually sick after these," he says.

What was it going to do to me then?

Well in short it made me useless for the whole of the next day. The punishing Russian steps involved one-minute cycling flat out, followed by one minute at normal pace and then the same for two minutes, three minutes, four minutes and then back to three minutes, two minutes and one minute again.

It was intensive training and a real eye opener as to how hard athletes train. I just about managed to keep my lunch down, but probably only because I wasn't putting in as much effort as Darren and he'd already been on the Turbo earlier in the morning.

With such a fierce training regime and Darren's determination to be the best, he shouldn't struggle to return from Beijing in a little over two weeks, with a brace of gold medals. "You have to go out there believing you can do it," he says as he recovers from the Russian steps and mops the sweat off his brow. "I should be able to beat everyone there."