I'm excited to be joining the One More City team for the ride from Nice to Montpellier, a distance of over 575km with nearly 9000m of ascent, including a climb of the legendary Mont Ventoux.

This will be a very personal journey for me, as well as an opportunity to raise funds that will go directly to support vital research into secondary breast cancer and show support for family members, colleagues and friends who have been affected by breast cancer.

In September 2022 I was diagnosed with aggressive stage 3 triple negative breast cancer. This came as a complete shock because as a regular runner and cyclist I thought of myself as very fit and healthy. After 15 months of treatment, chemotherapy, immunotherapy, radiotherapy and surgery, I was thankfully cancer-free. I set about trying to rebuild the fitness that cancer treatment had taken away. It has been a long road back, but I now feel ready to take on One More City as a way of giving something back to the breast cancer community, as well as simply enjoying being back on the bike.

Life has pretty much returned to how it was before cancer, but as for many who have been through treatment, the fear of the cancer recurring as secondary breast cancer is never far away.

Secondary breast cancer is cancer that has spread beyond the breast and nearby lymph nodes to other parts of the body. Despite the best treatments available for primary breast cancer, an estimated 20-30% of women and men, will develop secondary disease, which is no longer curable.

While new treatments are enabling more people to live longer with this disease, more research is needed to improve the outlook for all secondary breast cancer patients. This is why I am riding and why your support will make such a difference.

The ethos of One More City is that the journey is never over; we are always progressing towards the next city, there are always more kilometres to do, more climbs to conquer and more challenges to face. This is akin to the reality of anyone living with cancer, especially secondary cancer, for whom the challenge is never over; there are always more treatments to endure, more scans to face, more side effects to manage.