A good friend of mine, Sammy Badgery, kindly pointed out to me that she was worried that there were no blogs coming through from the last leg of my around Australia jaunt. Each year for six years now I have always ridden the 8 day Challenge event from Brisbane to Townsville and then immediately continued on to the next leg of my journey around Australia.
Well that all changed this year due to being overwhelmed with interest from fellow riders keen to join me on the final leg from Melbourne to Brisbane. So it was decided within the team at Smiddy and the Mater Foundation that it was impossible to run the Smiddy Challenge and the Sharky OZ 7in7 Final Leg so close to one another. Hence the reason the events have been seperated by a month.
Well as you know the Smiddy Challenge was another resounding success with over $300,000 raised for cancer research. This final leg of my journey hopes to raise close to $200,000 and has attracted 29 keen riders for the first leg from Melbourne to Sydney, while the last leg from Sydney to Brisbane will see close on 40 riders partake in this gruelling last leg.
All up over the 14 days of riding the crew will cover over 2600 kilometres and a massive 28,000 metres of climbing. Think of the climbing part of this journey as being equivalent to summiting Mt Everest over three times from sea level and you will get an inclination of what lays ahead for our heardy riders and road crew.
The start out of Melbourne begins on October 3rd and will finish seven days later in Sydney on October 9. After celebrations and a two day break some riders will be leaving us, while new riders will join the crew and 20 riders will complete both legs. The push out of Sydney begins on October 12 and finishes at UQ Aquatic Centre at 2:30pm on October 18, where we are hoping to get a warm welcome from as many supporters as possible.
I will once again be blogging about the full two weeks on the raod and along the way some guest bloggers will be giving me a break from time to time.
So until that first blog in October I invite you to draw breath, put your feet up and relax and look forward to a most adventurous fortnight of life on the road for this very last and most final leg of what has been an epic seven years of riding around the big beautiful and bloody tough country of ours!
For those of you that wish to support my efforts to reach my final fundraising goal I welcome any donations no matter how big or small. It is as easy as following my link here https://thefinalleg.everydayhero.com/au/mark-1
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