Thanks for taking the time to visit my JustGiving page.

At the beginning of 2008, Dad had finally retired aged 68. He was fit, a keen walker and traveller and was looking forward to the future with Mum, us and his grandchildren. He noticed he was becoming out of breath easily and that he was getting some aches and pains. He put this down to age, his asthma and his previous irritable bowel syndrome, as did his doctors.

He got gradually worse though, and finally went to hospital for tests in April. He was diagnosed with bowel cancer which had spread to his liver. It was beyond treatment. He died 6 weeks later on May the 25th.

If he'd discovered bowel cancer earlier, the outcome may have been very different. If diagnosed at stage 1, 97% of patients survive for 5 years or more. Diagnosis at stage 4, (like Dad) only 7% survive. Beating Bowel Cancer are working, amongst other things, to improve the early diagnosis of bowel cancer. That's why I'm cycling to raise money for them. If we can prevent just one family from repeating our experience it will be worth it.

Most of you know I'm a keen cyclist anyway, so to make this a proper challenge I'm going to attempt to finish in 5 hours. That means I've got to cycle at 20 miles an hour for 5 hours to achieve the 100 miles in that time. That should hurt!

Thank you very much for reading and thank you so much for any donation. No amount is too small, everything helps and is much appreciated.

Thanks again, Dave.

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