The mighty Glynn - Ryan ready for cycling challenge

They will set out from St Helens' Brewdog Stadium on Thursday afternoon, to reach Wigan's Brick Community Stadium on what promises to be an emotion-charged night as the Warriors face Hull KR.

There are full, updated details of the route below.

 

Ryan's journey from the Bradford Bulls Academy to the global programme managers Turner & Townsend, via a degree in Building Surveying from Leeds Beckett University, would be an inspiring and impressive story in itself.

It enters the range of improbable and remarkable given the terrifying, life-changing injuries that Glynn suffered playing for Shaw Cross at Elland on a frosty March afternoon 13 years ago – although as the 38-year-old Yorkshireman explains, it was that incident which triggered his highly successful change of career.

“I’d been working as an electrician’s mate,” Ryan told the Seriously Injured Players Fund’s General Manager Francis Stephenson, in an interview to support the first Rugby League Cares Charity Round.

“But as I was lying in hospital, I knew my career going forward wasn’t going to be as physical. I’d always been interested in exploring different routes – in using my brain as much as my physicality – and I made the decision to look at options of going back to university.”

 

Ryan had loved playing Rugby League since playing for Dewsbury Moor’s Under-8s. He moved to Batley Boys in his teens, and then joined Shaw Cross Sharks for a first stint before signing a three-year deal with the Bulls.

“That was great,” he recalls. “It was around 2006, and there were superstars everywhere – Leon Pryce, Stu Fielden, Vainikolo and Vagana, with Brian Noble as coach and Steve McNamara as well. We were full-time as well and we’d mingle with them – being around them you get to understand their approach to training and playing – a good foundation.”

 

Ryan made his senior debut for Dewsbury against Celtic Crusaders in Bridgend, then had a spell in Australia before returning to Shaw Cross – “a great Rugby League club, where I’d made a lot of friends from my time in the junior ranks – they look after you”.

Then on that fateful day at Elland in March 2013, “I was doing quite well – we were winning, and I’d scored a try. I broke their line, one of their players grabbed my collar and pulled me back – nothing malicious – and I landed on my neck on the hard ground”.

He suffered a number of dislocations but it was a spinal stroke that caused the most complications. “It was very intense. I remember travelling from Elland to Huddersfield Royal Infirmary for scans, and then being escorted to the spinal unit at Sheffield Hallam – I was straight in for surgery, about three days, when I had my neck fused – and I stayed in hospital for about three months”.

It’s that recollection which puts Ryan’s subsequent success in perspective – and it was during those days at Sheffield Hallam that he first came into contact with the Rugby League Benevolent Fund, as the Seriously Injured Players Fund was then known – in the person of Stephen Ball, who would later receive the MBE for his service to Rugby League charities.

“Steve Ball was one of the first people to come once I’d gone through all my surgeries and was awake. He told me about the Fund and the support they could offer, not just for myself but for my family – which was key, as they were obviously struggling to come to terms with what had happened and how to cope.

“The three months in hospital gave me the foundation of my rehabilitation, but after that it was the Benevolent Fund that provided the physio and the rehab, I’d say for two years, as I was trying to get back to walking and living my life.”

 

Now Ryan will join Jimmy Gittins, John Power and Pete Stephenson, with support from a number of high-profile figures from Rugby League and beyond, on the RL Heartlands Cycling Challenge.

The route will include his old club Dewsbury on Saturday August 29 – the 131st anniversary of the foundation of the sport of Rugby League through the Northern Union breakaway at Huddersfield’s George Hotel in 1895 – when Ryan and his fellow cyclists travel from the Thornhill Trojans community club to the Flair Stadium ahead of the Rams' Betfred Championship fixture against Newcastle Thunder.