The ride covers roughly 190 miles over 3 days - the pictures in the gallery show the route. Obviously all the spare time that having two small children allows me means I'm incredibly well prepared for this challenge! I have been managing to get up early to cycle up some hills around me for the last few weeks, as well as joining my local cycling club for a couple of longer rides.

As a small charity of only four people, donations make a huge difference. They allow for the support of the roughly 400 people who are diagnosed with the disease each year.

WMUK is the only charity in the UK focused solely on Waldenstrom’s macroglobulinaemia (WM), a rare type of blood cancer.

The charity's vision is that people affected by WM live long, good quality lives, supported every step of the way by WMUK.

Your support helps them to provide expert information, drive research and understanding in, and give personal support to empower patients and families to live well with WM.

I'll be self-funding the trip so any additional monies I can bring in will be hugely appreciated.

An update on the ride now it's been completed:

The trip got off to an inauspicious start. On Wednesday, shortly before midnight, I managed to puncture my rear tyre during the short, cold, and wet bike ride from Norwood Junction station to the Crystal Palace Travelodge. As I had no pump and a tube strike made taxis hard to come by, I ended up pushing my bike for the 30-minute walk to the starting point, where one of the trip mechanics thankfully sorted me out.

We were lucky with the weather for the most part. Huddled outside the Dieppe ferry port in the dark at 6 a.m. on Friday, nobody was relishing a 115km ride as the rain hammered down. Miraculously, however, the weather cleared up as soon as we got started.

That's not to say it was easy. My £80 eBay road bike doesn't allow me to break any records (which I probably couldn't anyway), but I like to think it adds to the challenge. The ferry ride on the first night was grim, and I hardly slept. With little sleep on the second night either, tiredness was my main issue, aside from the wind, rain, and hills. Early on the second day, I came off the bike, skinning my knees and banging one of them quite hard. Plenty of ibuprofen and generous slathering with deep heat kept the knee turning.

These things make a trip more interesting, and the challenges weren't just mine. Someone else had a nasty fall on the last day (apparently breaking five ribs!), we had a ridiculous number of punctures throughout the group, and various people got lost. There were about 30 people in our group, not including the guides, and everyone except for the guy who fell badly made it to the end. Having a support team made it much easier, with stops roughly every 20 miles to regroup with food and drinks. It meant we only had to focus on getting to the next section.

My trip ended with a rush to catch the Eurostar on Saturday night, as I was going to the T20 cricket match at Trent Bridge on Sunday. Sadly, the match was cancelled due to rain with no play whatsoever, which only increased the disappointment of missing the end-of-ride celebrations!