This September I'm cycling from Nice to Montpellier – four days, roughly 100 kms a day, three of them with 3–4,000 metres of climbing to grind through.

The standout day is Mont Ventoux. If you've watched the Tour de France you'll have seen it: the "Giant of Provence," a brutal, near-treeless climb that turns to bare white limestone near the top, so the summit looks less like a mountain than a stretch of the moon. It's the hardest thing on the route and the one I'm most nervous about – which is rather the point of doing it.

The ride is part of One More City, a campaign that never really stops – each year picks up where the last one finished and pushes on to the next city. In 2023 I rode Munich to Venice and in 2024, Venice to Rome.

Since 2017 it's raised nearly £250,000 for secondary breast cancer research at the Institute of Cancer Research in London, funding three PhD students working on treatments for people whose cancer has spread.

I've been fortunate: I've never faced cancer myself. But I've watched good friends go through it, and even from the outside that's enough to know two things – how much it takes out of the people living it, and how much the outcome depends on research that's still being done.

Most breast cancer awareness and research focuses on prevention and early detection – on catching primary cancer while it's still confined to the breast and lymph nodes. Caught there, it's curable in most people, which is why early diagnosis matters so much. But in an estimated 20–30% of cases the disease spreads to other organs. That's secondary cancer, and at that point it can no longer be cured. The people living with it will spend the rest of their lives on some form of treatment.

That's why I ride. Around me on the road are people who've had cancer, people living with it now, and people who've lost someone to it. I ride because they do.

In September I'll get to Montpellier, climb off the bike, and be done. The ride has a finish line. The work doesn't – there's always another treatment to find, another form of the disease still without a good answer, another person hearing the news tomorrow. That's the journey that never really ends, and it's the one your donation actually invests in.

Every penny you give goes straight to a Clinical PhD Fellowship at the Institute of Cancer Research – 100% of it, no cut taken. You don't need a personal connection to give – just the sense that this work should keep moving. If you can spare something, thank you. It moves this forward.