#RIDE FAT BOY RIDE

Helllooooo, everyone.

Well, another year and another birthday coming up (over 50's) coming up 1^st April (yep I know the gags 😊 ) and a good time for reflection.

The last couple of years have been a struggle personally with snapping my Achilles and then having to work away from home for most of the year in hotels wasn’t great.

As you can imagine the lack of exercise and the perfect storm of crap fast food and excuses why I shouldn’t be getting up early to train had taken their toll.

The cumulative effect being early Jan topping the scales at a rather hefty 19 stone 12 pounds almost back to where I was 4-5 years ago.

But the thing is I am lucky and privileged to have a second chance, I enjoy my work , love my family and have the ability to train, If I put the effort in.

I’m luckier than most and I think we all know someone who
has been affected by the Big C.

It keeps going and people we all love keep being affected by this disease. My Sister & myself lost our own mum after a massive fight with Cancer lasting a decade or more.

Fast forward to a drunken cheese fuelled night in Dec with
an ex Royal Marine (Mac)  , Matlow (Dom) and a Royal Engineer (myself) what could go wrong !!! (RM+RN+RE= Good Craic' & lots of alcohol) & our partners led to an act that required a donation to be made to a charity!! and then an agreement to complete a CFT in September between Dom & myself.

Well with my gammy slappy foot ( it is getting better) the CFT I may well struggle with, however I’ve been thinking about Dom’s better half (she most definitely is the better half) and her unwavering continuous battle with Cancer.

She Is a true inspiration.

She is past the middle ground with her own battle and is closing in on the final few chapters, chocolate and alcohol still help so there’s always hope xx.

So ensuring this Is nothing maudlin as both Dom and Mrs A are far from it, and ensuring that I at least try and provide an epic enough challenge to relieve you lot of at least a little of your hard earned cash I’ve decided that for the rest of this year I will attempt to complete the same distance of at least 4 Lands’ End to John O’Groats rides , each one being 874 miles (cycle routes)  with a cumulative distance of 3496 miles from now (11th March) up to Dec 24th 2024.

I realise that an 8-month challenge may seem a long time but when you think, I’m still at work 12hrs a day 5 days a week with an average 2 hr commute either way in & out of London this starts to leave less and less time to get the mileage in!!

I’ll probably be racking up the early morning ride miles with an ETA out of bed at around 04:00-04:15 hrs daily to get enough time in before my 06:30 commute start's.

The distance will be covered predominantly indoors and you can track this via Zwift / Strava.

So what am I asking for?

To be honest anything you can spare even 10 p - £1 makes a
difference, 1p a mile 😊 would be fantastic and would really help.

The choice in the end is all yours and I just want to say thank you for taking the time out to read this and remember Cancer will probably, unfortunately affect almost everyone in one form or another in our lifetime, from friends, family and loved ones we just never know so anything we can do to assist, fight or help those affected is massively appreciated.