Getting on my bike for Marie Curie

This isn’t something I normally use this site for but I hope you won’t mind me making an exception on this occasion to share a challenge that Mrs Techstringy has “encouraged” me to join her on this year!

My wife works for the Marie Curie Charity here in the UK, they do incredible work helping to care for those with terminal illness who require end of life care. As you can imagine the work can be very challenging, in fact helping those and those close to them deal with terminal illness, is perhaps some of the most challenging circumstances you could be faced with.

Through a range of services from nursing support to hospice care, this incredible charity takes on this challenge daily, providing crucial services and support for those who need it, every day of someone’s life matters – from the first to the last and the charities role is to ensure that is the case.

All these services are provided for free, but of course aren’t free to provide, as Mrs Techstringy says, “Marie Curie is an amazing charity and working for them has given me an appreciation of just how much money needs to be raised for us to be able to continue to support as many people as possible”.

Over the last 5 years my wife has supported several charities, primarily through cycling events, be they local, national, long and even longer rides including riding through Vietnam, raising thousands of pounds and acting as a constant source of inspiration to me as I’ve watched her take on these epic challenges.

After a year working with Marie Curie she knew her next challenge would be something to help support the work they do, to do that she has decided to take on the Prudential Ride London event, a 100 mile ride around the UK’s capital city. Her inspirational examples of taking on long cycling challenges to raise money for great causes has rubbed off as she has “inspired” me to join her and having never really done any long distance cycling, 100 miles seemed a sensible place to start!!

We are a couple of months away from the event, training is well underway, I rode my first 100km event a couple of weeks ago (well thanks to some suspect measuring 106km) we are taking on hilly midweek rides with a long ride at weekends and spending a bit of time down the gym on the cycling machines, my bottom has adopted the relevant resistance to time in the saddle, so with a few more weeks of training to go, we should be ready to take it on.

Why am I sharing this? well of course, not only has my wife’s willingness to spend many hours in a bicycle seat inspired me to want to have a go, but the incredible work this fantastic charity does in providing end of life care has also inspired me to want to help and see if I can do a bit to financially support this great work.

How can the techstringy.com readers and listeners to the Tech Interviews podcast help? Well of course some heartfelt good lucks on this page or on the twitters would be wonderful, but of course what would help Marie Curie is if you’d be able to contribute on our Just Giving Page to help us towards our target of £1100.

Every penny you donate will make a difference so please, if you can help we would both really appreciate it, and if you can’t, that’s no problem, a good luck message will help with those hours in the saddle.

Thanks for letting me steal some space on my blog site to share this personal adventure and if you can help, that would be marvellous.

Right, where’s my bike!?

For more on Marie Curie and the amazing work they do visit mariecurie.org.uk

To find out more about the challenge visit the Prudential Ride London Event page.

If you can help us to support the charity financially then please visit our Just Giving Page.