Jonathan and Mike are two keen cyclists who decided to take on a 360km tour round the regional offices of their company, Taylor Wimpey!
Inspired by an ex-colleague’s son who lives with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, the two engineers have sought sponsorship for each of their stops, increasing their fundraising potential.
The route
They will start with a ‘short’ 70km ride on the Friday afternoon from the Taylor Wimpey regional office in Bury St Edmunds to their first stop-over just north of Cambridge. The Saturday morning will see them head to the North Stowe site and then up to visit all sites to the west of and around Norwich. On the Sunday, they will meander south across the Norfolk-Suffolk border to Ipswich and then weaving either side of the A14 until returning to Bury St Edmunds.
We know what you’re thinking, it’s pretty flat around here, it should be a breeze. Well when the wind whips across The Fens the ‘breeze’ is part of the problem! Not to mention a total climb higher than Ben Nevis at over 1500m. But given the challenges these kids go through every day we should be able to put up with some sore legs.
Mike
How Mike is adapting his training in isolation
With the current Covid-19 issues we are a bit restricted with our training and the date of the ride is a little up in the air, but it will happen! We are not sure exactly when at the moment but at times like these, the kids we are raising money for need the support even more.
Utilising my hour of daily exercise today I took the smallest of my two kids out on an animal search on the bike where we found normal cows, Scottish cows, horses, ponies, chickens, geese and a lost delivery man! The extra weight on the back makes a 12 mile ride a little bit tougher so good for the training. We got home and as we were putting the bike away the delivery man turned up at our house… with our jerseys!!
I took my little helper on another training ride today. She makes the training harder by not only adding weight and wind resistance, but also insisting that we go back up most of the hills to see a flower or some cows.
Today should have been the day!
So I’m sure you will understand that the current Covid-19 concerns has put the brakes on this challenge to a degree. However we are battling on and have a plan!
We are unable to complete the whole challenge this weekend as we are unable to stay at hotels overnight (we discussed sleeping in bushes… then decided against it) and sources of food to fuel us on the way around (we need pub lunches and cake stops) are not quite open yet.
So the plan is to move the date of the challenge to 11th of September, when hopefully it will still be kind of warm and it looks like things will be open again.
But this weekend we must ride!! So JD is finally going to get his jersey and we have worked out a 100km ride (a reasonable distance when you have to carry your own food!) from our office in Bury St Edmunds down towards the Essex border and around past a couple of our sites to test the route a bit.
Helping you through COVID-19
