After cycling for almost eighty two hours in total, a group of celebrity cyclists arrived at their destination accompanied by over one million pounds!

On Monday seven celebrities set out on a 1000 mile trip from John O’Groats to Land’s End in an effort to raise one million pounds for charity. The Money raised will benefit poor and vulnerable people both here in the UK, and across some of the world’s poorest countries.

The ride is one of the events organized by Sport Relief - an initiative of the charity Comic Relief - when people from ‘the whole of the UK come together to get active, raise cash and change lives’. It was backed by BT, the major sponsor of the event.

The participating celebrities were led by David Walliams, 38, a seasoned and dedicated Sport Relief participant, having raised one million pounds in 2006 with his cross channel swim. The team of celebrities also included Jimmy Carr, 37, Fearne Cotton, 28, Miranda Hart, 37, Patrick Kielty, 39, Davina McCall, 42, and Russell Howard, 29. They underwent training with Professor Gregory Whyte, the Olympic sport scientist who also coached Walliams for his cross channel swim.

The challenge was a gruelling one in hazardous conditions, with freezing temperatures as low as minus 15ºC, and a hill climb of almost 29,000 feet within the first twenty four hours - the equivalent of Mount Everest – and most of that was in the dark! Travelling day and night non-stop, there were inevitably several falls along the way. David Walliams fell three times, once on the notorious one thousand feet Kirkstone Pass climb in the Lake Disrict, where, with a gradient of one in four, “It was so steep you couldn’t get the speed to stay upright”. Suffering from sleep deprivation and extreme fatigue, there were times when for some it felt like they wouldn’t make it to the end. Fearne Cotton said she was ‘running on empty’ on the final day. Walliams said afterwards that it had been far harder than his cross channel swim. It was the thought of the many who had sponsored them and what that money could achieve that kept them going.

They finally arrived at their destination in Cornwall four hours behind schedule, exhausted, bruised and saddle sore, but happy to have reached their million pound target.