Charity Work On My Bike

Cycling For Zoe’s Place Baby Hospice, Coventry

Up to now all of my cycling fundraising efforts have been for a small local Charity Called Zoe’s Place Baby Hospice in Coventry and to date I’ve raised over £17,000 for this beautiful place. They are they only baby specific hospice of it’s kind in the entire midlands and help support children and there families up to age 6 when sadly they have to move on and make room for another deserving child but Zoe’s soften the blow by having a lovely Graduation for the departing 6 year olds.

.”Hospice” has it’s traditional connotations and although end of life care is an important part of what they do so well, the vast majority of time is spent caring for kids with life threatening or life limiting conditions, taking them in, caring and PLAYING with them, including overnight stays in private rooms and giving their parents some well earned rest.

Far from feeling sorry for the children attending Zoe’s be aware that their time spent at the hospice is among the best time these beautiful kids have, the nurses carers and staff there are dedicated to it being a fun and memorable stay.

So you can see why it was easy to fall in love with wanting to raise money for a cause which doesn’t have national awareness and as do all smaller charities, their fund raising team have to work extra hard to find sources of income to keep their beautiful ship afloat

I started by raising a small amount Cycling with sons Andy and Jamie on the London to Brighton event and progressed as mentioned in detail elsewhere on the site to cycle Land’s End to John O’Groats raising almost £10,000. Zoe’s then concocted their own fantastic event Tour de Zoe’s when we gathered at 7am at the Middlesborough Hospice and had an amazing sendoff as we made our way via Zoe’s Place Liverpool and another incredible welcome all the way to the Coventry Hospice with the now almost expected warm reception and plenty of Cake !! Take a look at the videos on the yellow link above , it really was an enjoyable and emotional event.

This last year my focus has been on what I’ve named “Project Ventoux” which will be similar in length to LEJOG and takes us from St Malo across France diagonally and finishing 14 days later in Nice on the Mediterranean and toward the end, the bit I was most concerned about. We take on the ascent of “The Beast of Provence” Mt Ventoux, made famous by it’s frequent inclusion in the Tour de France with a climb of 14 miles ahead of us.

You may be reading this after the deed is done (hopefully) and there are videos on my YouTube channel showing us triumphant in Nice.I say “hopefully” because during my preparation there was a huge spanner in the works and as I write this in early August 2023 just 7 weeks before we are due to set off in St Malo, I have plenty of doubt I can complete this and just a few weeks ago I was on the cusp of pulling out altogether. The entire story of my preparation for this including the chaos of the last few months are in this Video collection on my YouTube channel called Project Ventoux