Thanks for taking the time to visit my JustGiving page.

Fortunately, many people have never been touched by serious illness or injury, but many people sadly have. Around 30,000 people in the UK are diagnosed with a blood cancer each year, and many of these do not survive because the right treatments simply aren’t available. For this reason, charities such as Bloodwise (formerly Leukaemia and Lymphoma Research) endeavour to battle against such life threatening blood and other diseases, and they need to rely on events to raise money to support research and clinical trials, and to increase the success rate of treatments. And hopefully offer a better outcome for those affected.

This is one such event.

It is the London to Paris Bike ride 2016, and Woodcraft UK Ltd are sponsoring me to take part. A group of 250 cyclists of all ages and abilities will depart from Eltham Palace on 15th September, and hope to arrive in Paris on the Champs Elysee 4 days later after cycling 500km.
This may be an ordeal in cycling terms, but nothing compared to that which those affected have to go through.

This is a personal challenge for me as I am currently trying to catch up on training having been laid off for 14 months following a cycling accident in January 2015. I was originally entered for this London to Paris event in September 2015, and was actually  out training for that when I had the accident.

The accident broke my femur. There were 2 attempts to repair it during 2015, but when they didn't work I had a full hip replacement in January 2016.
I had intensive physiotherapy - still am having it - but my cycling is going well and the hip replacement is great. I just need to build the muscles that had atrophied during the layoff.

There are 2 of us from this area - we are the 'Yorkie boys'. But there are 250 riders in total from all over.

Training is going well all considered, I can easily exceed 40 miles now, although there is still a way to go, as the event requires riding 80 miles a day for 4 days in a row.

We are thinking of either doing the either Trans-Pennine trail or riding from Rotterdam to Koblenz along the river Rhine to help with the training.

All of the costs of this “ordeal” are being met by Woodcraft UK Ltd., which means that every single penny that is kindly donated will go to the very worthy cause of fighting blood cancers.

It is at this point that I need to ask for your help as a sponsor. A contribution of any size would be greatly appreciated, and will help towards developing new treatments and drug combinations, to give blood cancer patients the best possible chance of survival.

More details can be found at www.bloodwise.org.uk
Donations can be made by cheque, bank transfer or online via
 http://www.justgiving.com/michael-davidson4. Thank you in anticipation.

Yours, training hard,
Mike Davidson.