{"id":732306,"date":"2026-08-09T08:14:09","date_gmt":"2026-08-09T08:14:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/732306\/"},"modified":"2026-08-09T08:14:09","modified_gmt":"2026-08-09T08:14:09","slug":"northamptonshire-woman-cycles-portugal-norway-for-mnd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/732306\/","title":{"rendered":"Northamptonshire woman cycles Portugal-Norway for MND"},"content":{"rendered":"

McCombe said she noticed something was wrong with her father when he tripped while walking in Devon. He started dragging his foot which he believed was a trapped nerve. <\/p>\n

“My dad was a climber, a mountaineer, a cyclist and he really inspired my love of the outdoors,” she said.<\/p>\n

She said she undertook the challenge “to help research because there is no cure”.<\/p>\n

More stories from Northants:<\/p>\n

Broadly following the EuroVelo 1 Atlantic Coast route, her journey, which she has recounted on Facebook, external<\/a>, started in Valenca in north-west Portugal, headed down the coast to south-west Spain and then up through the Basque country, the west coast of France, south-west England, south Wales, Ireland, Scotland, a ferry from Aberdeen to Bergen and finished at Norway’s most-northen point of Nordkapp.<\/p>\n

She knocked on the door of a family in Norway who were all affected by a genetic condition, not MND, and had not engaged with the outside world for four years. <\/p>\n

She told BBC Radio Northampton’s Annabel Amos: “I had a cup of tea with them and started talking about motor neurone disease. <\/p>\n

“As a result, they felt they could now go out and talk about their condition. <\/p>\n

“They said it had been life changing that I’d just knocked on their door.”<\/p>\n

Carmen Brown, from the Northampton-based MND Association, said the condition was “absolutely ruthless” and that six people were diagnosed with it in the UK every day. <\/p>\n

“What they [the fundraisers] do each day is phenomenal, so we can get to that cure sooner, we haven’t got the time to wait.” <\/p>\n

Do you have a story suggestion for Northamptonshire? Contact us below.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"McCombe said she noticed something was wrong with her father when he tripped while walking in Devon. He…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":732307,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[4985,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-732306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cycling","tag-cycling","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/732306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=732306"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/732306\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/732307"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=732306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=732306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=732306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}