I Was Going to Ride Anyway. So Why Am I Asking You for Money?

Next month I am going to ride a bike most days and ask people to pay me for it.

The second half of that sentence is the part I have been putting off thinking about.

What I Have Signed Up To

It is the Cycle the Month Challenge, for Prostate Cancer UK. A month of rides, as many as I can fit around work and family, with a fundraising page attached to them.

The riding is not the difficult bit. I would be on the bike anyway — perhaps not every day, and perhaps not on the evenings when the light has gone and the sofa is available, but the bike and I are on reasonable terms.

The asking is the difficult bit.

I Have No Personal Claim on This

I should be straight about something, because it changes how the rest of this reads.

I did not choose prostate cancer because it has been through my family. It has not. There is no name I am riding for, no story I can put at the top of the page, nothing that would make this a moving appeal.

I chose it because it affects an enormous number of men and we still barely talk about it. That is the whole of my reason.

Which makes the asking harder rather than easier. A fundraiser with somebody behind it has a claim on people. Mine has an argument.

I am asking on behalf of a statistic rather than a person, and I am aware that is a weaker thing to hold out.

The Part Nobody Writes Down

Here is what actually happens when you sign up to one of these.

You write the page. You share it once — and the people closest to you give almost immediately, which is a lovely thing to watch. Then you have to share it again. And again, through the month, further out each time, in progressively more public places.

Every one of those is a small negotiation with your own self-consciousness. You are asking people who have their own commitments and their own causes to fund something you chose to do and will largely enjoy.

I have never seen anybody write that down. I would guess most people doing a fundraiser feel it.

The Layer You Actually Have to Ask

The ones who give first are the people I could ring at three in the morning. That part is easy, and it is barely asking at all.

The awkwardness starts further out — twenty-odd years of colleagues, clients and people I was at something with once. They will see the post. Most will scroll past, which is completely fine and exactly what I do with other people’s.

Some will give — which puts you in a small and slightly odd sort of debt.

And it has to be done repeatedly, because a single post reaches almost nobody. Sharing it four times feels like nagging. Sharing it once raises nothing at all.

Why the Embarrassment Is Worth It Anyway

The reason this cause needs the asking is the same reason I picked it.

Men do not talk about this. We are poor enough at going to the doctor generally, worse about anything below the waist, and worse still at mentioning it to each other afterwards. A great many men find out late for no better reason than that nobody in their life ever raised it.

That silence is what the money is working against. Research, yes — but also the duller business of getting men to know what to look for, and to say something when they notice it.

Set against that, a month of slightly awkward posts is a very small embarrassment.

So I Will Be Asking

I will ride, and I would have ridden anyway. I will enjoy most of it and complain about some of it here.

The riding was never the point of the fundraiser. It is the excuse to ask, and the asking is the only part that raises anything.

So I will be asking, repeatedly, for the whole of next month. I have decided in advance not to apologise for it, and if that means being the man who posts about his bike ride again, I will take it.

If you would like to support the challenge, the page is open now.