Hello All!

Thanks for stopping by! A couple of year back a friend and I had an idea for a charity endurance event to ride our bikes between all the UK offices of our company TEKsystems to raise some money for some very worthy causes!

The Challenge

Between the 14th- 17th August I am planning to ride my bike from Edinburgh to Bracknell stopping at my companies offices in Manchester, Birmingham and London. This will mean a total 736km in 4 days , with 6300m of climbing (for reference Mt Kilimanjaro is 5895m). I will be averaging about 8 hours of cycling a day with my longest day being 220km or about 11 hours of continuous cycling.

If you wish to see more details about my route you can see the plan at the link below:
https://www.komoot.com/collection/2204638/-ride-tek-csr-ride?ref=undefined

Before this year the furthest I had ridden in one go was 100km. Back in March in order to gauge how much training I needed to do I did take part in a 200km cycle ride which I completed but only barely and it took me over 12 hours. I have been training a lot since then, putting in 10 ish hours on the bike and racking up the KM's but doing these distances day after day is still going to be really tough!

The Charities

As ever I found it difficult to be decisive so have picked a few charities to raise money for. When donating your donation will be automatically be split between the 3 charities evenly but if you wish to alter this split I believe you will be given the option to do so. The charities I have chosen and the reasons are as follows:

Mind - Around 7 years ago now I was diagnosed with Anxiety after a period of intense panic attacks and has been something I have been coming to terms with and learning to deal with since then. Although the NHS was very good at getting my life "triaged" and normal ish again, It was the resources from charities such as Mind that really enabled me to take control again by better understanding the condition. They gave me the tools to talk to my family, friends and colleagues about it and really start living my life openly bad freely again.

Cancer Research UK - Roughly 1 in 2 people in the UK will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime. Unfortunately in recent times I have also had family members be affected by this horrible disease and wanted to do all I can to help research into a cure.

The Lullaby Trust - The Lullaby Trust raises awareness of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), provides expert advice on safer sleep for babies and offers emotional support for bereaved families. Sadly while younger my wife Lizzy lost a sibling to SIDS. As such with welcoming little Florence into the world recently the anxiety and worry about sleeping safely was really high for the both of us. The tools and advice from the Lullaby Trust really allowed us to ensure we were following best practice and putting all precautions in place and really led to us having as little worry as possible. Without them I have no doubt that the first six months of Flo's life would have been a lot more stressful so I wanted to raise some money to continue their great work.

You can read more about any of the charities I am raising for on their website or feel free to get in contact with me! Thanks so much for taking the time to read and hopefully support this charity event and I look forward to updating you all on my progress!