In November 2010, after many years of trying, Alan and his wife, Kate, welcomed their baby daughter into the world. After two days in Special Care at Warwick Hospital, she was diagnosed with a heart murmur. Three days later she had a cardiac scan and was diagnosed with a congenital heart defect known as Tetralogy of Fallot and referred to Birmingham Children's Hospital.
Since then she has had regular checks at BCH and in September 2011 she had a successful operation to correct the condition.
Alan decided in early 2011 that he wanted to raise money for the Birmingham Children's Hospital Heart Unit after seeing the work done by the BCH Charities. A chance Facebook discussion with Steve at work regarding some photos of the Giro d'Italia passing through the Dolomites lead to the idea of riding the Maratona dles Dolomites (a regular, major sportive event shown on Italian television) .
This remained the seed of an idea for about six months. In late August Alan and Steve decided that the Maratona was the event we were going to attempt along with a group of cyclists from work (pending a successful application). A group of willing victims (Nick, Simon, Mark and Gavin) were then recruited to make the team of six.
This blog was setup as a record of the teams training for a major sportive event and to, hopefully, inspire others to do the same.
The training programme we are following is taken from "Elite Performance Cycling - Successful Sportives" by Garry Palmer & Richard Allen.
