Cycle TEAM 874miles, JOG to LE

Hello, Due to the current situation with COVID-19, it is great to see the community of Caithness come together to help battle the virus and to help local businesses, missions to help produce essential PPE, to help the soldiers of our NHS our community’s services and individuals battle this horrible pandemic. As a group of friends, we have created a Cycle Team (Cycle TEAM 874miles) of nine members (Chloe Mackay, Chelsea Durrand, Colin Mackay, Angus Henry, Ryan Edwards, Robyn Aitkenhead, Valerie Webster, Sarah Robertson and Stephanie McNeil) to cycle John O Groats to Landsend (874 miles) between our team. As a team we will be carrying out this cycle from home on turbo trainers or in close proximity to our homes following social distancing guidelines from the government. We will be in no contact with anyone apart from our bikes The cycle will take us 10 days (commencing Monday 20th April). We are doing this to help raise funds for our local community by donating what is raised to CHAT (Caithness Health Action Team). CHAT is a local campaign that have done a tremendous amount of fundraising for our local community and of course to the local NHS, the money raised will help multiple areas of the community and individuals. These include: raising funds for mothers to be whom have to travel to Raigmore Hospital, this is a scary thought having to travel 108 miles to have a child and also transporting a new born child and their family back to Caithness, without a world wide pandemic going on. Therefore CHAT look to improve this for both mother and baby. Another area that CHAT look to improve are: Virtual FaceTiming/ Skype calls those that cannot have visitors due to social distancing regulations under care in hospitals and other facilities. Another example of great fundraising by CHAT: donating a sum of money towards ‘The Corner Cafe’ to help produce great quality food for those hard working heroes in Caithness General. The reason why we chose CHAT to donate our money that will be raised was that we thought they were a fantastic campaign due to their great efforts to improve Caithness and of course Health Care within the community. The work they have done to improve services, facilities and help individuals really made us realise that it would be great to donate to them. Due to the majority of the team not working due to this horrid pandemic we thought we needed act as a group to help our community by donating to CHAT, so that donations/funds could be dispersed to the areas that really need it. It is our mission to help the community fight this pandemic and to help services have as much support through this time. A few of us are still working, volunteering to help our community. Others work on a farm (Colin), endless hours at this time due to lambing and calving, all year round to help keep the country’s food chain going. This cycle will be mentally and physically challenging for all 9 of us, we all are different fitness abilities, many have off spring that need home schooling, hard work and graft that you mums and dads endure. A few of us are working: night shifts etc. Of course trying to continue life as individuals in this crazy times of COVID-19. As a team we will be all cycling as individuals, over 10 days following social distancing rules. We will be adding our miles up each day so we can all comtribute to our 874 mile effort. I really hope you can spare us what you can to help us on our ‘little’ mission. A few pence will go along way. Thank you in advance for reading this and hopefully you can spare us what you can. The local sevices of Caithness will appreciate this. Many thanks Cycle TEAM 874 miles