IT seems that Ben Boughton-White is a man keen on suffering.

So much so he wants to become a Knight of Sufferlandria by doing ten hour-long cycle training sessions back to back to raise money for charity.

The Shipton Gorge businessman decided to support the Smile with Siddy charity set up by a school friend of his wife Jo’s whose son died from a rare form of cancer at 17 months.

Ben said: “An old school friend of my wife, Jo, has established a charity in memory of their son who they sadly lost to neuroblastoma at 17 months.

“As a father of two and having lost a baby to miscarriage between our two children it was something that really hit me. Hearing their story made what normally is consigned to something that happens to others or you read or hear about becoming something that was happening to someone we knew.

“The fact that our son Jesse was born the day before what would have been Siddy’s second birthday somehow made me think even more. They have worked so hard to set the charity up I wanted to find a little way I could help.

“Basically I’m going to be doing almost 12 hours on a static bike trainer when I will be keeping up with 10 training session videos from the Sufferfest website.

“As the name suggests these aren’t a walk in the park and each session is different, pushing you as a rider by going through intervals, hill climbing, long tempo efforts and hill climbing.

“Each video is around 60 minutes – typically people only do one for a training session, if however you can complete 10 back-to-back then the title of Knight of Sufferlandria is afforded to the person completing by Sufferfest.”

He is pretty confident he will succeed, training as he does two or three times a week out on the road and on his static trainer and he’s just completed 95 hard hilly miles on Dartmoor in just over 10 hours .

He added: “It’s just going to be a question of getting people to support me on the day to make a bit of an event of it, to have a cup of tea and piece of cake and cheer me on and put money in the bucket.”

He has set himself a target of £250 but hopes to do even better.

The event is taking place in Gullivers Orchard by Dorwest Herbs in Shipton Gorge on July 26.