Choose Love in 2017 and help us raise £1 million for refugees.

Through our Choose Love campaign, we want to help support some of the 65.3 million people displaced from their homes due to conflict or natural disaster.

Money raised will go to our longstanding partner UNHCR and Europe’s largest grassroots distributor of aid, Help Refugees. Both charities play a critical role supporting both the immediate and long term needs of those who are displaced.

In partnership with UNHCR money raised will allow us to continue to enable young refugees to access a quality digital education through our Instant Network Schools in both Africa and Greece. Working with Help Refugees we want to provide food, shelter and access to information for refugees across Europe.

At the start of this year, I was a lazy, unfit, and rather rotund middle-aged man who – despite claiming to be a cyclist – had never cycled more than about 50 miles in a day. I also couldn’t ride up anything that even pretended to be a hill without stopping. But I decided it was time to make a change, and so I went on a diet and started exercising more than I have for over 20 years. By the start of April, I had lost roughly 20% of my bodyweight, ridden my first ‘century’, and signed up to do something that I never thought in a million years I would ever be capable of doing.

This September, I will cycle 969 miles from Land’s End to John O’Groats in 9 days with #TeamVodafone, as part of the Vodafone Foundation’s Choose Love campaign. That’s over 100 miles every day. For 9 days. Consecutively. And it involves hills – quite a few of them (I still don’t like hills, but I can do them without stopping now).

Here’s the thing though – I made the choice to do all this. I still have no idea what finally convinced me to get off my backside and spend hours at a time on a turbo trainer, or forgo my favourite foods for the best part of 6 months, but it has made a massive difference to me and my life. Unfortunately, there are those who – through no choice of their own – have been forced to give up far more than I have, and the difference to them and their lives has been far greater than I can possibly imagine. I am, of course, talking about the 65.3 million people worldwide who have been displaced from their homes due to conflict or natural disaster.

969 miles on a bike is nothing compared to the thousands of miles that some have had to travel – mostly on foot – in order to seek food and safe shelter.

It may be the biggest challenge I will have ever faced, but it’s something that I have decided to undertake in order to achieve two things. First, quite selfishly, to prove to myself that I can do something like this and I’m not quite as lazy as the evidence would suggest, and because doing ‘LEJOG’ is on every cyclist’s bucket list. The second, more important reason, is that I would like to help those who have been forced to give up their homes and travel vast distances just to survive.

So, my ask of you is this. Choose Love and sponsor me. Please don’t put it off until later, just take another 2 minutes out of your busy day and click on the link below now. You already have my appreciation and gratitude, and I’m sure you will have the same from those your money will go towards helping.

Collectively, #TeamVodafone are trying to raise £1 million for the Vodafone Foundation’s Choose Love campaign, to help support some of those 65.3 million people. Personally, my target is £3,000 and I need all the help you can give to get there. Every £1 that you donate will go directly to aid some of these unfortunate people, and every £1 will be matched by the Vodafone Foundation to make an even bigger difference.

If you still need a reason to donate and support me, how about the chance to make me suffer even more? If the total amount I have raised exceeds £1,000 by the time I reach John O’Groats on 17 September, I will cycle an additional 100 miles the following weekend (23/24 September), and I will let one of my supporters (selected at random) pick the route for me (as hilly as you want!). If the total is over £2,000, I’ll complete that extra mileage on a mountain bike doing laps of the Forest of Dean cycle trail (believe me, 100 miles on a mountain bike isn’t easy!). And, if you’ve all been super generous and got me to my £3,000 target… I will cycle up and down The Tumble 10 times in one day – the equivalent of doing the Three Peaks Challenge in terms of ascent (The Tumble is a 5km climb going up 384m near Abergavenny - google ‘The Tumble’ – I’ve been up it once before, so I know just how tough a challenge this would be, especially given how much I don’t like hills).

For more information on Vodafone Foundation, please visit https://www.vodafone.com/content/foundation.html

For more information on the challenge itself, take a look at http://www.rideacrossbritain.com/classic-plus-route/

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