https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S24rRgAAH-w

The Challenge

1100km perched atop a 1 inch wide saddle is painful for anyone. Then add 30C heat to it, a few French undulations and finally consider the lump of meat at the helm. 

Yours truly has never been blessed with the greatest athletic ability. Sure, a bit of puppy fat has been shed since the days of failing to reach the triple jump sandpit in 1^st year PE but I’m still more bulldog than greyhound. Over the last 12 months I’ve also done my best to make this trip as hard as possible. Last April I tried to make friends with a Nissan Navara on a zebra crossing, needless to say we didn’t get on. Then in July, I was duly punished for an inebriated late night impersonation of Leo and Kate, at 30knots, and almost lost my right leg. An 8 inch ‘thigh dent’ is evidence of the latter which is still causing problems 10 months on. In February I had surgery to remove an encapsulated haematoma and I have no feeling to the bottom half of the thigh. This will be no walk in the park then.

The Route

The trip is London to Cotignac pretty much as the crow flies. I’ll be leaving London on Thursday 15^th June to catch an evening ferry from Newhaven to Dieppe. I plan to arrive on Saturday 24^th. It’s 88km from SW London to Newhaven and then 1012km from Dieppe to Cotignac, according to Google, so 1100km total. For those of you without a calculator handy, that’s approximately 112km every day for 9 days. I am carrying everything required with me and things will go wrong.

The Cause

Cancer is crap. Totally crap. They say this and that will give you cancer and this and that will help you avoid it. My experience is it’s totally random and unpredictable. It’s cruel, ageless, classless, uncompromising and most importantly, too many strains are still incurable and the side effects of the crude therapies are appalling.
Cancer Research is a behemoth in the charity sector and it may be seen as too obvious a go-to for fundraising of this type but the truth is they’re doing a fantastic job and with every penny they receive they’ll continue their great work.

The Link

Mum first got cancer when I was 12. Relatively speaking this was a doddle, lump removed, few bouts of radiotherapy and she was back on court. Then it recurred in 2007, an angrier big brother to the last chappy meant she required a full mastectomy. For a girly girl and one who prided herself on her stunning appearance, this was gutting, truly gutting but she dusted herself down, accepted the change and kicked on. Then in 2009, only a matter of days after my aunt Tessa lost her 9 month fight, it was confirmed we had passed the preliminary rounds and were now in for the real deal, the knockout punch. The secondaries. Secondaries are terminal so the clock started ticking. The hardest thing to come to terms with is the clock is ticking down to an unknown date. Some are ‘lucky’ and get 15 years, others 10, some 5, some only a matter of months and weeks. This was trying for us but one can’t imagine what it must have been like for her. There must have been sleepless nights and angry thoughts but she kept it all hidden. It was business as usual, fish pie on a Friday, lunch with the local ladies etc. She kept up appearances and truth be told, you would be forgiven for not thinking she was ill at all. 

Oncologists have no crystal ball so you have to savour every second you have and we did. We had 3 and a half years of what you could call memory collecting, trying to bank as much as you possible can so as soon as the time comes you can feast off what you’ve got.

Our time came almost four years ago on June 2^nd 2013. That Sunday evening was the moment a keystone was removed from a family and it’s impossible for anything to be the same again. A whole family dynamic involuntarily shifted. It’s final, there’s no trial period, you just have to come to terms with it. This is my experience, I’m sure many of you will have you own. In this fabulous 21^st century we’ve really got to beat cancer.