Roy said: “I was very privileged to be asked to co-drive for Sir Chris, but it just really hit me that in between the two events, Chris was sadly diagnosed with stage four prostate cancer, and yet he turned up so positive, interested in me and how my family was doing.
“And I remember thinking ‘hold on, he’s going through all this’, and his wife Sarra had been diagnosed with MS by then too, and his desire to raise awareness of prostate cancer and raise money for research was so absolute.
“I just came away thinking, I must do something to help. I can’t sit on my backside. I don’t ride a bike, but I do a lot of walking so we came up with this challenge.”
The challenge that the 71-year-old is taking on is the Scottish National Trail, 540 miles from Kirk Yetholm just south of Kelso to Cape Wrath, in the far north-west of Scotland.
It was devised by the outdoors writer and broadcaster Cameron McNeish and is said to follow some long-established footpaths as it heads through the Borders and across the Central Belt of Scotland, before heading north into more difficult, boggy terrain and up a 1,000m ascent in one day, before finally meeting the exposed Cape Wrath Trail.
