The Big Relec Bike Ride 2018

Sponsorship Update

Thank you so much everybody.  We’ve managed to double the running total since the end of April.  We still have a long way to go (1100 miles) but we really believe we can hit our £10,000 target now.

Money continues to come in from our corporate donors and we now have our water bottles available from stock.  Our sincere thanks go out to Mornsun who funded the cost of the bottles.  They certainly stand out!  We cant wait to get them loaded up on the bikes and they will hopefully complement the Jerseys.

Jerseys – Hopefully if you’ve been following the blog, you’ll have seen the Jersey design.  We have them in stock now, so if you want one, please drop me a mail and we will put one by for you.

If you would like one they are available for £50.00 with 100% of the proceeds going to the the brain tumour charity.  Just contact me for details.

Ride Schedule & Blog

I’ve just discovered the Strava Routes app and used this to create our daily schedule.  Click on the daily links and you can see exactly where we plan to go each day and once we’re there we’ll tell you all about experiences.

15th May – Kings College Lab tour  – Lesley and I were treated to an extremely interesting day to see how the brain tumour charity funding is used.

Professor Al-Jamal’s team are focused on drug delivery using both natural and synthetic drug carriers to get the drugs more effectively to their intended destination.  The brain is an especially hard place to get drugs to.  Currently only about 2% of an injected drug reaches its target, and those that don’t can have terrible side effects. From an engineer’s perspective I found it absolutely fascinating to learn more about what they are doing.  I’ve just posted a report on our news feed with links to a more in depth report on their incredible research.

14 – 20th May  – Carried on with the commutes and extended rides in the evenings.  It’s so nice to have plenty of daylight now.  I just wish it could be 5 degrees warmer.  Thursday evening was a case in point.  Left the office with temperature in the high teens, but by the time I got back at 7.30 my hands were white.  Forecast looks better for the weekend though.

 70 mile ride on Saturday across to Dorchester and then down to Sutton Poyntz (looking for a photo of Portland, but couldn’t really do it justice) before heading back up to Warmwell, Wool and then back on the old stamping ground of the Purbecks.  We always like a challenge and had to fly off the top of Nine-barrow down to catch the 6.30 ferry.  Made it with 1 minute to spare.

Sunday was a shorter ride but took in Bulbarrow hill for couple climbs which might be representative of our first few days in the highlands (I wish).

21 – 27th May  – Got caught in one almighty storm on the way home on Monday.  Water was flowing down Chequer’s hill like a river.  All good training but I did find out my waterproof wasn’t quite as watertight as I’d thought. The rain also seems to have got into my Garmin cycle computer.  It seems to think I’m permanently at 20,000m.  I know we’re flying but this is ridiculous.  Time for an upgrade.

Had a final push over weekend (40 miles Friday, 50 Saturday and 40 on Sunday), but decided against any real biggies.  We’ll leave these until next week.

Anyway, the training is done and  the weather forecast is looking OK (tempting fate maybe).  Thank you for reading so far and especially to those of you have sponsored us.  At the time of writing we’d just hit £7000.  Just £3000 and 1100 miles and we’re done.

Don’t forget to follow the ride.

Bye for now – John