We are Ben and Craig, and we are at it again, cycling from Beijing to who knows where... all we know is we're heading west with a 10 day time limit, and for a good cause!
This all started with Ben visiting an ICM kindergarten in Dumaguete in 2014 and was so taken by the work ICM is doing there that he began discussing the possibility of fundraising to help. Ben and Craig had spoken for sometime about cycling to Beijing and ICM offered a great cause to support. The way that ICM’s efforts in the Philippines changed the lives of so many children, as well as their families, and offered them a new outlook on their lives and futures helped inspire our ride to Hong Kong and will push us along in our efforts in October.
Last year we rode from Beijing to Hong Kong on bicycles in 30 days. Because we both worked with children as teachers in China, we wanted to focus our fundraising efforts on helping children less fortunate circumstances. Door to door we clocked up 3,200km. Having achieved this, we wanted to push ourselves to go further each day during our next charity ride. We figured that giving ourselves a time limit and opening up the possibility of people sponsoring us depending on how far we get will encourage us to push ourselves harder for this excellent cause.
This year, we will be setting off from Beijing on September 28th 2016 and have a full week to get as far away from Beijing as possible on bicycles. We are aiming to reach Sichuan province and cycle beyond Xian, which would require us to cycle about 200km per day for 7 days straight with no previous training. This is almost twice the amount we covered per day during last summer’s ride and would mean we are aiming for 1,400km in 7 days. We will leave Beijing to the south west and skirt a mountain range before heading towards the Tibetan plateau, largely through rural parts of China. We will release a video blog each day (as we did last year) so that people can track our progress on Youtube, as well as posting pictures and comments on Twitter and Wechat throughout the ride.
As part of our fundraising efforts we have decided to do the ride without any previous training. We haven't trained since reaching Hong Kong last August. The lack of training will add to the challenge and hopefully encourage more people to support and follow our journey.
You can see our videos from last year and follow us on:
- Facebook - http://bit.ly/2dkwqFx
- Youtube - http://bit.ly/2dvF6Ip
