I'll be cycling the Ride London-Surrey 100 Mile bike ride on 4th August.  I've never cycled anywhere near that far before, but how hard can it be...?

I originally attempted to get a place via the ballot, but was unsuccessful.  So I decided that I'd have a go at running a marathon instead.  And this made sense when you consider I didn't have a bike anyway...

Unfortunately I found my legs can't cope with running more than 3 times each week which makes it difficult to get in as much fitness training as I'd like.  Plus I usually can't even do that because I get injured frequently.

So I got a bike and figured I'd do some endurance training on that too to help.

Then I thought that if I'm doing all that cycling training, I may as well do a ride.  So I looked up local long rides and found this 100 Miler was the closest to where I live.

So because the ballot places were all gone, I looked at about 50 different charities to see about getting a place through them, and that's when I found the Guide Dogs charity that had a space available.

So that's entry sorted...  I now need to get in some training.

Regarding the charity.  They sent me one of those sleeping masks that black out the light as part of the fund-raising pack.  I put it on, I couldn't see anything, so I took it off again.  Wasn't going to get much done wearing that.  I presume part of the reason for sending it was to make the point that blind people can't take it off again and see stuff... They didn't send a dog so I couldn't see how much better it was with one of them, but I imagine it's better...

I think Guide Dogs (for the blind) is obviously an essential charity (for blind people anyway) and I'm hoping that some people will donate some money to help them as a result of me training and cycling 100 miles.

Because it's for charity, I won't be taking it easy with my training.