Mini pork pies.” proclaims Andy Bond, the chief executive of Asda, peering into his BlackBerry.

What’s this? Bite-sized savoury snacks as the latest front in the supermarket’s fight against Tesco? The surprise bestseller in Asda’s overnight sales report? Or the subject of the latest food scare?

No. “It’s an e-mail from James Cracknell,” Mr Bond explains. “It’s his top tip for something that will keep you going when you can’t face another sugary energy bar.”

It might come as a surprise to learn that the two-time Olympic rowing champion and the boss of Britain’s second-biggest food retailer correspond, let alone that they trade dietary advice.

But Cracknell has just attempted a feat that on Tuesday Mr Bond will begin — riding a bicycle from Land’s End to John O’ Groats. Cracknell’s was the more audacious endeavour, an attempt to break the non-stop record by riding the length of Britain in less than 48 hours on a tandem with Rebecca Romero (his fellow Olympian, whose knee problems ultimately forced them to abandon).

But Mr Bond’s is no soft pedal. Because he is visiting 21 Asda stores and a distribution centre along the way, he will be racking up 1,050 miles — 200 miles more than the regular route.

There will also be no restorative breaks, merely ten consecutive days of turning his legs until, all being well, he arrives at the tip of Scotland the following Thursday.

Which comes to explain why he and I are standing outside Asda’s head office in Leeds on a breezy summer afternoon clad in bright green jerseys (his the hue of Asda, mine of Times Online) and he is checking his e-mails while I make last-minute adjustments to my bike.

This is the biggest week in Mr Bond’s training schedule — he will rack up more than 400 miles before steadily paring back the distance over the remaining ten days — but our task this afternoon is a limb-loosening 52-mile foray into the Yorkshire Dales. We are joined by Matt Harrison, an Asda buyer who, along with colleague Jim Viggars (who has taken a week off to train elsewhere), will be Mr Bond’s constant companions on his end-to-end trek. I have got a slight edge on Mr Bond by age — he is 44 — and I have been road cycling for longer, but I am not expecting the proverbial easy ride. He was a nationally ranked track runner in his teens and turned out for Lincolnshire, his home county, into his early twenties.

One glance at his lean six-foot frame suggests that he has not let himself go in the interim. Then there is the inherent competitiveness you expect of anyone who has risen to the top of a large organisation.

Over coffee in his office, Mr Bond has already explained how sport has proved a powerful influence in his professional life.

“What I felt I learnt early on through sport is what I see as the very strong connection between physical fitness and physical discipline and mental capability and mental achievement. I was not a particularly bright student, but what I learnt about how to develop your own personal discipline through sport I think I adopted into being a more accomplished student and a more accomplished businessman.”

Sport’s other clear appeal to Mr Bond is the correlation between effort and reward. “No one is going to be at the top of their game by what they are born with. It’s evidenced time and time again that if you don’t train you are not going to be a good cyclist.”

That meritocratic ethos runs deep in a chief executive who had no obvious head-start — his father was a plumber, his mother a nurse — and who has pinned his own drive on pulling his way back from failing his 11-plus.

“In sport, there’s a real purity in winning and losing. I’m a very competitive guy — as you’ll probably find out this afternoon.”

I do. About an hour into our ride, Mr Bond launches his first “attack” on a short but stinging climb between Otley and Ilkley. He is swiftly out of the saddle, pumping hard on the pedals, and looking back over his shoulder to see if he has opened a gap. On this occasion I manage to stay with him.

Mr Bond’s competitiveness is evident on the flat sections, too. It is customary when cycling in a group for each rider to take a turn on the front, so that the wind resistance is equally shared, but every time I overtake Mr Bond to do my bit he will not let me stay there for long, often nipping past me in turn, as if taking my attempt at team spiritedness as a challenge to race him.

“I’m still learning,” he says. “I see myself as a massive novice rather than an expert. But I think it’s a brilliant sport in terms of the tactics. It’s one of those intriguing sports where an individual wins but you never win as an individual, only as part of a team. The tactics that allow that to happen are a very interesting challenge.”

Through his own tactical nous, Mr Bond has given his enthusiasm for cycling both a commercial and philanthropic edge. Most obviously, Asda has used his end-to-end ride to raise more than £1 million in sponsorship and donations. The cash, funnelled through the supermarket’s Pedal Power charity, will be used to promote cycling proficiency at a grass-roots level.

Nearly £5 million has been secured by the Cycle Touring Club from The National Lottery to fund a network of local project officers to foster participation in cycling, and Pedal Power’s proceeds will expand its reach.

The bulk of the donations have come from staff, many of whom have held cycling events, but Asda has also tapped suppliers through sponsorship packages. Mr Bond’s bespoke cycling strip bears the logos of a clutch of brands stocked by the store — including Velvet toilet paper (across the seat of his shorts) and Gillette (a staple among the sport’s leg shavers). Mr Bond’s jersey, which is getting its first airing on our training ride, has velcro patches on its sleeves for a roster of daily guest sponsors. Finally, two or three riders among Asda’s suppliers are paying to accompany Bond on each section of the route.

And the commercial benefits? For the first time this summer Asda has started selling bikes, too — Falcon’s British Eagle range, which, at £50 for children and £70 for adults, are the cheapest on the market. It has sold half of its stock of 80,000 since the end of July alone, threatening Halfords’s dominance as Britain’s biggest volume retailer of bikes. To keep the price low, Asda is taking no profit on the sales. “It’s a very expensive sport, so making biking a bit more affordable was something I thought would be good,” Mr Bond says.

Not that you would choose one to ride more than a hundred miles a day. Mr Bond will be astride a Scott Addict, the top of the range carbon road bike also ridden by Columbia-HTC, the team of Mark Cavendish, Britain’s most successful Tour de France sprinter. Depending on specification, they sell for up to £5,000.

“It’s my one and most extreme extravagance,” Mr Bond says, clearly feeling the need to explain. “It is an extremely expensive bike. I’m not some lavish chief executive, quite the opposite.” The Addict is also known for its ultra-lightweight frame, only 880 grams, which means that fully fitted, it only just scrapes through the Tour de France’s 6.8kg minimum weight limit.

It must be that advantage, I tell myself, that makes it so hard to stay on Mr Bond’s wheel. We stop for coffee and flapjacks at Bolton Abbey, the 12th-century ruin in Wharfedale that marks the western extent of our route. Mr Bond is keen to get going, however. He has to be home in Harrogate in two hours to host a dinner for a candidate for a senior executive post.

Yet within a mile of our return leg we are waylaid. A teenage girl on a road bike who we had passed earlier is standing on the verge, her back wheel jammed. Mr Bond, who spent five years as a chartered engineer before switching to retail, is off his bike and, after a few attempts, he and Mr Harrison have made the running repairs that should get her back home.

Then it’s up Beamsley Beacon, the highest point of our ride, and a rite of initiation for the local cycle clubs. Once again, Mr Bond is out of the saddle — and this time I cannot stay with him.

“One of my philosophies I’ve taken from Alexander Suvorov, the Russian general,” Mr Bond says of his preparations for his marathon ride, “[is] train easy, battle hard, train hard, battle easy. That means finding terrain that by the time I get to the end-to-end the climbs will seem fairly easy, which is not hard, given the amount of hills round here.”

The rest of the ride passes quickly. A fast descent back down Wharfedale and, with the wind behind us, a high-tempo spin to the turning for Harrogate, where Mr Bond branches off. An average speed of just under 18mph is respectable for the lumpiness of the landscape and the congestion encountered in getting out of Leeds. So what next? Professionally, Mr Bond has not ruled himself out of the race to succeed Sir Stuart Rose at Marks & Spencer. And in cycling — some of the celebrated climbs of the Alps or Pyrenees, perhaps?

“Now that I’ve got the bug, I’d love to go a bit further afield. But the reality is that I’m a full-time chief executive, not a full-time cyclist. We’ve got a lot of people fitter at Asda, raised over £1 million and 80,000 people will have secured a bike at a price they would not have achieved before. That drives you on to do something else. I don’t know what it is but I’m not going to do nothing.”

Burning 8,000 calories a day

Sir Chris Hoy, the Olympic track cycling champion, is due to accompany Andy Bond on the last day’s ride to John O’Groats. But beforehand Mr Bond must cope with nine consecutive route sections that range from 72 miles to 134 miles in length and cover a cumulative climb of 17,300 metres — four times the toughest mountain stage of the Tour de France.

“If I have a fear, it is not so much the physical fitness as injury and mental attitude,” Mr Bond says. “At some point, typically around the third or fourth day, you will hit a mental low, you will feel quite bad. Because it is such a repetitive thing you are doing,you are also quite likely to get some sort of repetitive strain injury. I’m quite worried that some part of my body will get very sore — my knees, hips or some part of my lower limbs.”

But Mr Bond will also arrive even leaner than when he set out. He has already dropped 6kg in training from his regular 88kg. “I calculate I’ll burn about 8,000 calories a day. On the basis that it is hard to eat more than 6,000 calories, I would expect to lose a couple more.”