Marie Curie - Serious over-achiever

Because cycling is something I do voluntarily for my own good, I'm very reticent about asking for sponsorship to do it. It feels a bit like asking for sponsorship to take your kids to the beach for an ice cream. For me, it's a leisure activity, a way of getting some fresh air and exercise. At one time, I might even have described it as fun.

I've previously completed 4 Coast to Coast bike rides. One was over 4 days in 2006, one over 3 in 2010 and then there was that incident when I nearly committed suicide training for and cycling Coast to Coast and back over 2 days in 2012.

There was also another aborted attempt to ride East to West from Alnmouth to Workington in 2008. I gave that one up 10 miles from Workington, because I had a devastating loss of form in a cafe after having two punctures and a nice cup of tea. With hindsight, it would probably have been better to carry on rather than booking into a Travelodge in Cockermouth that night, especially after the thunderstorm Ruth and I got caught in, which resulted in near hypothermia, and an attack of shivering so violent Ruth nearly smashed her own teeth out.

The only way to combat the shivers that night was to leave the restaurant without even getting the dessert on a 3 course Indian meal we'd paid for, just so that we could get her warm again under a blanket. Anyway, enough about that. I should probably at some point get round to doing a full write-up of that one. The losing and finding of my favourite bike lock would also add something to that story. Then again, maybe not.

Anyway, I'm riding Coast to Coast again in 2 weeks. This one will probably be a bit different from others I've done in that I'm doing it with 50 people I haven't met yet, and also sizeable chunks of it are off-road, so I'll be riding a mountain bike. Luckily I just bought one. The ride is being organised by those Purple People at Purple Mountain bikes, and I've decided to go on it, because their advertising says it's really good, and also they said that there's the possibility of making some friends for life on it (although this doesn't appear to be guaranteed, I haven't read the small print).

I hope that I've already got a handful of people in my life who are friends for life, but most of them seem pretty busy, and so I don't see any of them as much as I'd like to. This being the case, I probably ought to get some more. Just in case. Like for spares.

Anyway, the latest ride I'm doing is a sponsored event in aid of Marie Curie Cancer Care. Although I already had some idea what the charity does, I thought I'd better check: It turns out they're pretty sound.

Marie Curie Cancer Care is a registered charity in the United Kingdom which provides nursing care, without charge, to terminally ill people at home and in hospices. It was established in 1948, the same year as the National Health Service.

In financial year 2010/11 the charity provided care to 31,800 terminally ill patients in the community and in its nine hospices, along with support for their families.  More than 2,700 nurses, doctors and other healthcare professionals help provide this care.

At the nine Marie Curie Hospices, quality of life for patients is actively promoted as is providing much needed support for their carers. Marie Curie provides the largest number of hospice beds outside the National Health Service.

My first wife Beverley died of cancer in 1998. She was 34 at the time. Towards the end of her life, and as her illness progressed, a pretty horrible situation was made somewhat easier by the many doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals, who were on hand to support me, as I was trying to support her. For that reason, I'm not in any doubt how important the work of Marie Curie Cancer Care is.   

If none of the above is interesting enough for you, you should read the life story of Marie Curie herself. Here's just a flavour. I borrowed all this from Wikipedia. Some people criticise them for being open source, but the people on there know loads of stuff I don't. They can event tell you how an atom bomb works (I didn't understand that though).

Anyway, I quote:

The physical and societal aspects of the Curies' work contributed substantially to shaping the world of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.  Cornell University professor L Pearce Williams observes:
The result of the Curies' work was epoch-making. Radium's radioactivity was so great that it could not be ignored. It seemed to contradict the principle of the conservation of energy and therefore forced a reconsideration of the foundations of physics. On the experimental level the discovery of radium provided men like Ernest Rutherford with sources of radioactivity with which they could probe the structure of the atom. As a result of Rutherford's experiments with alpha radiation, the nuclear atom was first postulated. In medicine, the radioactivity of radium appeared to offer a means by which cancer could be successfully attacked.

I used to think I was pretty clever when I was at school. I can't remember forcing any reconsiderations of the foundations of physics though. I once put a test tube that I'd heated up over a Bunsen burner under the cold tap to see what would happen, but that was just stupid. That might have been in danger of reshaping my own eyebrows, but it didn't do much for the twentieth century. 

Amongst other things Marie Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, and if you'd been around during the First World War, you would have been able to observe her somewhere very near the front line with her 17 year old daughter, operating some mobile X-ray units that she'd managed to invent. They were pretty useful for seeing through wounded soldiers to locate things like fractures, bullets and shrapnel.  This was of course a big help to the surgeons of the time, but the X-rays had the somewhat unhelpful side effect of causing radiation poisoning. Unbeknownst to her, the pioneering work she was doing was contributing indirectly to her future death.  Wow doesn't even cover it.

And if you're still not inspired, here are some quotations from her:

“Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something and that this thing must be attained.”

“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”

Anyway, as inspiring as that is, in practice my confidence in myself isn't fully developed yet. Whatever I'm gifted for is some way short of being attained. I do have some experience of trying to understand things though, but I also remain afraid of lots of stuff too, so what to do next?

Well, I'm going to start by going on a bike ride.  If you want, you can sponsor me.  

here's my justgiving page

All the costs of this trip are being paid for by me, so any money you'd like to donate will go directly to Marie Curie.