90 year old Norman Gregory goes out on his bike nearly every day and last year cycled almost 6,000 miles. Norman is pictured in Windsor Green, Cockfield.

FOR 90-year-old Norman Gregory there is only one way to travel – by bicycle.

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The active nonagenarian from Cockfield, near Bury St Edmunds, clocked up almost 6,000 miles in the saddle last year and can be found out and about on two wheels almost every day, cycling the back lanes of his beloved west Suffolk.

“Cycling keeps me from seizing up – if you don’t use it, you’ll lose it,” said Mr Gregory, a retired science teacher, who logs his mileage using a small computer attached to his handlebars.

“I usually head out to villages like Bradfield St Clare and Thorpe Morieux.

“I have been a bit slow getting going this year because of the cold weather and have only cycled 350 miles in total but I’m hoping to improve my average when things warm up.”

But this impressive regime is not the result of a recent passion for pedalling – it’s a consequence of a lifetime spent travelling long distances under his own steam.

“It all started when I was a schoolboy attending Sudbury Grammar School. I used to cycle the 10 miles from Shimpling to Sudbury and back again. That’s 100 miles a week,” said Mr Gregory who, aged 18, was sent to study at St John’s College, in York.

“It was about 200 miles to York and I’d often cycle there from Suffolk, staying at youth hostels on the way.

“It was just an adventure and the chance to see a bit of the country. You’d always meet other cyclists to keep you company.”

And during the summers, he was not content to laze around in rural East Anglia, but rather took cycling trips to Land’s End, John O’Groats and west Wales as a young man.

Mr Gregory says the current cold snap is hindering his cycling, not so much for the snow on the roads but because it aggravates an injury to his right knee that he suffered during the Second World War, when as a Lancaster pilot he was shot down over the city of Dortmund, in Germany – an incident that has some connection to bicycles.

“I landed heavily and couldn’t walk and was very soon picked up by the local policeman on a bike who took me to the prison by balancing me on his handlebars,” recalled Mr Gregory, who was held captive in Poland and survived the notorious so-called Death Marches back to Berlin, in 1945.

Today, a proud great-grandfather, Mr Gregory is well-known to all the villagers in Cockfield who wave and hoot their horns as he sets off on one of his regular cycles.

They even came together to organise a 90th birthday party for him on January 26 at a venue close to his house.

“It was walking distance, so I didn’t have to cycle,” added Mr Gregory with a laugh.