The challenge is born

A few days before the end of August 2012 my sister completed a challenge she set herself which was to run 50 miles during the month.  She's been running for a few months now and has become much fitter as a result.  My mum has also been exercising, swimming a mile three or four times a week.  Over the last few years I've made the odd attempt at getting fitter losing a stone or so and doing a bit of exercise but I've never really been able to make the commitment I need to get the results I want and so I started to think about my own challenge.  I approached my mum and said I had a challenge for her which was to swim the equivalent of the English channel during September and that I would also set myself a similar cycling challenge.  I've started cycling a few times but again never managed to keep it up for any length of time so I felt I needed a challenge to get me going.  I worked out that for mum to swim the English channel (21 miles) she would need to be in the water for approximately 26 hours and if I cycled at an average of 11.5 miles an hour for the same length of time that equated to about 300 miles.  I emailed my sister an suggested that she up her challenge from the 50 miles she ran in August and join us.  She said it would be hard but she thought she could manage 80 miles in September and so the challenge was set.  At the time I got my sister involved I also thought it would be a great idea if we used the challenge as a way to raise some money for charity through sponsorship.  My cousin lost her husband to cancer back in 2010 and a number of his friends had started a foundation called Smilers and were holding a dinner in early October in aid of the Royal Marsden Cancer Charity so I thought it would be perfect if we could also support the same charity.  I setup a justGiving page for donations, created a group on Facebook to post details of our challenge and progress, and we announced it to the world...  No going back now!