Fancy spending the weekend walking 100 km with mates in Brighton’s South Downs in aid of Oxfam and the Gurkha Welfare Trust? Well, I did in 2004!

The team

The challenge was to walk 100km as a team of 4, within 30 hours. My team, called ‘The 4 Fabulous Foxes’, consisted of my mates Tori, Meg, Paul and myself. We managed to cross the finish line in a speedy 25hrs, 20mins and 5 seconds! Well, I thought that was speedy, but the Gurkhas ran it (are they mad or what?) in 9 hrs and 46 mins – a new record!

	They didn’t even complain when Meg cut her toenails at checkpoint four and one flew into the tasty tortellini they were cooking!

Getting prepared

As a team, we’ve been training for the last 6 months, so when the bagpipes and horns blew at 11.00 am on Saturday morning we were all well hyped up and ready to go. It was a matter of walking continuously. Every couple of hours we had checkpoint stops where our support crew (a range of flatmates, friends and family) supplied us with food, drinks, foot massages and anything else we demanded!

Almost there

The worst point was walking through the night. All I could think of was my bed, and at times I felt like I was sleep walking. On Sunday morning the beautiful blue sky we had all been anticipating turned out to be fog. But we still kept walking and managed not to get lost. We finally hobbled over the finishing line on Sunday at midday-ish with everyone clapping and cheering. I then collapsed in a heap on the grass (okay, after first eating some tasty Gurkha curry) and fell asleep.

Success

Trailwalker is Oxfam’s top fundraising event and this year the event raised an astounding £450,000 for Oxfam and the Gurkha Welfare Trust. I feel very lucky to be one of the 1,205 people who took part and helped to raise money whilst accumulating a couple of blisters along the way! It will certainly be one of the most memorable events of my life.



If you like a challenge then check out how you can get involved next year - hopefully I’ll see you there!