On Thursday 20th June, 2014, I set off on a sponsored cycle from London to Paris along with 26 UKTV colleagues taking in over 270 miles over three days. Why would we want to do that? To raise money for Pancreatic Cancer UK, an excellent charity that does a lot of terrific work for a less than fashionable disease.
Our journey started very early on a fairly dull summer morning in Greenwich. A buzz of activity outside a coffee shop next to the now dry-docked Golden Hind, nervous excitement was on everyone’s faces – the majority of whom had only ever completed a fraction of the total distance. Meanwhile, I was getting distracted by a fibreglass whale…
The weather was less than glorious (I’m pretty sure it was meant to be summer!) and France threw a meteorological nightmare and sleepless nights our way. It’ll take more than a bit of wind and rain to stop us though, France!
What could have gone wrong, did go wrong. We wrote off four bikes, multiple cyclists got lost, 29 punctures and we didn’t have very much downtime, but it still remained a tremendous success.
We took some camera kit along for the ride, so naturally we had to make a film of the event. Here’s what Aidan Hackett and I put together, hopefully it does the feat some justice:
In the end, we not only raised a significant sum of money, over £40,000, for Pancreatic Cancer UK we also helped to spread awareness of this terrifying disease. I for one had no idea of how deadly and under funded it was.
Now to set myself another challenge so that I don’t fall off the cycling bandwagon. London to Paris in 24 hours anyone? Maybe not.
smprsn 