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Please also check out my website for more info on this challenge.

Visit www.cyclingformnd.com

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Around four or five in every 100,000 people in the UK have MND at any one time. It usually starts between the ages of 50 and 70 but can occur at any age. Men may be up to twice as likely as women to be affected.

Research is underway to understand the causes of MND and to develop an effective treatment. Currently there is no cure and life expectancy depends on how symptoms progress. However, there are effective treatments to manage symptoms.

 What is motor neurone disease? 

Your brain sends instructions as electrical impulses along nerve cells called motor neurones to muscles that control voluntary movement, such as walking and swallowing. MND is a disease that gradually destroys these nerve cells and this leads to weakness and wasting of your muscles.

 The MND Association is the only national charity in England, Wales and Northern Ireland that funds and promotes global research into the disease and provides support for people affected by MND.

 

My Mum, Joan Duff.

My Mum, Joan lived in Northern Ireland and devoted her life to caring for others, spending almost all her working life as a Nurse.  Even after she retired from nursing, she went on to work as a missionary, travelling to Ghana in Northwest Africa where she and my father assisted in the construction and administration of a new health centre in a village in the north of the country.  Her last trip to Ghana was to assist in assessing the suitability of children for surgery to remove cataracts in their eyes due to malnutrition.

 

In late 2007, we noticed her speech was slightly slurred as though she had had a slight stroke.  As time went on, this got worse until in 2008 she was diagnosed as having MND. Of course, this was devastating news to her because, having been a nurse for so long, she knew there was no cure for this condition.  Throughout her illness, my Mum remained hopeful that the disease would progress slowly, but in January 2009, she developed some complications and her condition deteriorated.  My Mum passed away in March 2009, her body barely recognisable from when we visited her at Christmas just a few months before.  

 

MND is a desperately sad condition to watch someone endure, not least because the victim's mental capability is usually unaffected, so they are fully aware of their body grinding to a halt around them and unable to do anything about it.  I can only imagine how terrible it must be to endure.

 

Despite research into the condition, an accurate method if diagnosis is still very difficult and very little is known about many aspects of the disease.

This July (10th - 14th) I am riding my bicycle from my home in Norwich to where my Mum lived in Newtownards, N. Ireland, a distance of about 460 miles in 5 days, via Stranraer in Scotland.  All expenses such as hotels, equipment, meals, ferry etc.  are being paid for my myself, so ALL of the money raised will go to the MND Association.

 

Please help me raise as much money as I can to help this organisation pay for research into this terrible disease and to support those people who have already been diagnosed with it.

 

In memory of my Mum, Joan who I will always be so proud of and I hope that this venture would have made her proud of me.