Thanks for taking the time to visit our page and donating to a very good cause.

This is the challenge- 42 year old overweight, arthritic man, riddled with back problems and a very stressful job working long hours, and my 12 year old Son Finley, recently started secondary school and experiencing life becoming a teenager with all the growing pains and life challenges a 5’7” tall 12 year old faces, have decided to set ourselves a challenge and to make that challenge count by using it to support Little Havens Hospices.

We have set ourselves a target of cycling 1,000 miles between 1st May and 1st September 2023. This works out to an average of just over 55.6 miles a week, or 8.13 miles per day (every day!). We will be using our normal mountain bikes, so no fancy expensive equipment to assist, but have given ourselves the luxury of a set of road tyres to make our bikes slightly more road-marathon friendly!,

We will use GPS trackers to log our routes and journeys and update the page regularly with our training progress and all the fun and games endured along the way. 

We are not regular cyclists or members of any clubs, so will be utilising the 3.5 months we have until the challenge start date very wisely, getting ourselves checked over with doctors and seeking professional medical advice, particularly important for Dad who is currently laying down plugged into a TENS machine to ease the crippling back pain following yet another massive gout flare up rendering him unable to walk without crutches and a big bag of medication for the past 2 weeks!

So when we say this is a challenge, it really really is!!

We will be fitting this in around our normal everyday lives, so will still have work, school, and home commitments to deal with, and will have to plan and test to work out our best strategies to achieve this goal, whilst still allowing for rest days for our bodies to recover and repair properly. 

Any injuries that we sustain along the way will make the challenge even harder, as this will delay our progress and add more miles to the following days and weeks that we will need to catch up on. To put it into perspective, if we used the following schedule as our ride plan, these are the miles we would be looking to achieve;

Monday - rest day

Tuesday - 8 miles

Wednesday - rest day

Thursday - 8 miles

Friday - rest day

Saturday - 20 miles

Sunday - 20 miles (every week, regardless of weather!)

We thank you very much for your donations to Little Havens, and if any of you would like to come and show your support on our rides or send messages and video messages of support, I am sure they will help us get through this together!

We will post our ride plans and routes as we go, and will add photos of our colours and shirts so if you see us out and about you can give us a beep or a wave of encouragement!

Once again, thank you so much for your support.

Let’s do this!

Matt & Finn.