Seraph is a family friend and the little brother of one of my son's best friends at infant school. He has High Risk Neuroblastoma; an aggressive form of paediatric cancer, with only a 40% chance of surviving the next 5 years. Almost half of the children who make it through frontline treatment relapse. It means that Seraphs family are fundraising £237,000 for the Bivalent Vaccine clinical trial, currently only available at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

Seraph's Mum describes things a whole lot better on this page: https://www.teamsuperseraph.org

To contribute to the fundraising I, along with Chris (https://www.justgiving.com/Chris-Clarke41) the dad of another one of the gang of friends at school, am going to complete the 170 mile Chilterns Cycleway in a day.  

https://www.chilternsaonb.org/cycleway.html

Those 170 miles rather unreasonably also contain nearly 4000 metres of ascent - that's the best part of half an Everest - I thought the south of England was suppose to be flatish!  That's more than twice as far and twice as much climbing as I've ever done.  I always feel that I can't ask for sponsorship just for doing my hobbies that I was going to do anyway, for something that isn't a huge challenge.  Unfortunately this makes things a little tricky when your hobbies are quite hard work to start with.  So I may be planning two half Ironman triathlons and this year, but I can honestly say the thing that really scares me is this cycle ride.  I genuinely don't know if I'll be able to complete it, but I'll be training hard and hopefully I haven't bitten off more than I can chew!

This is going to be painful, but absolutely nothing compared to what Seraph has already had to put up with, so anything I can raise towards his fund will make the sweat and tears (please no blood!) on my part well worth it.

Planning at this stage is modest to put the best possible spin on it, but it has been decided that 1st June is the date I'm now dreading.  I will add updates of training, planning, and the route as these things happen.

So please, please, please chip in if you can, or come along to support or ride a bit of the way with us, or even better... both!  Or even better still... join us for the ride and get people to sponsor you too!