When Bradley Starr started to experience problems with his prostate, he knew who to call. Over twenty years earlier, when his father was being treated for prostate cancer, Bradley first met urologist Professor Roger Kirby.
“My father, typical of his generation, wasn’t somebody who talked a lot about medical issues, but he did sit me down at the time he was seeing Roger and said ‘you need to know about this’. He actually had me come to the appointments with Roger to make sure I understood all about the prostate cancer, which was one of the best things that happened,” says Bradley, a marketing consultant from London.
Thankfully, Bradley did not have cancer like his father and grandfather before him, but was treated for an enlarged prostate. Bradley’s family had donated to TUF over the years, and during an appointment, he noticed a poster on Roger’s desk for the 2015 TUF bike ride across India.
“At that point, I actually hadn’t owned a bike since I was a teenager. I thought that just sounds crazy enough to be interesting,” he says.
After a trial run of being back in the saddle, Bradley signed up to the ride. Despite it being tough at times, he speaks very fondly of the cycle:
“I knew that my sponsors required that there was a degree of suffering involved! It certainly met that criteria with the temperature and the distance of 500 km.
“There were over 30 of us on the ride, and everyone looked after everybody else. You had that connection of all doing it for the same reason.
“It sounds a little bit corny, but it really was one of those life-changing events. I’d never done anything like that before.”
Two years later, Bradley did another TUF bike ride in Cambodia and Vietnam, and he is itching to do the next when it becomes possible again. With his family’s history of prostate cancer, he says supporting TUF is a bit like ‘an insurance policy’ for not only his future, but his two sons and others with the disease:
“I like that TUF is a relatively small charity and it’s efficient. It’s very much practitioner-led, so the urologists that I’ve met are actually driving the research and improvement in treatment that will make a big difference fairly quickly.”
