Fourteen weeks to go until the big challenge and still lots to plan! Although that sounds quite far off, it’s really not!! We only have to think of how quickly the time has gone from when we first contacted the Mercury Phoenix Trust about our fundraising event to see how fast time flies!
It’s been a little while since our last blog, but there’s really only so many times we can write ‘we went for a walk’ before it starts to get really boring for those reading! But we do have a few things to talk about today, so here goes!!
We still have quite a few things to put in place for our walk – in particular, where on earth we’re staying each night!! You may remember from previous blogs that we had hoped that we might be able to find some lovely charitable hotel owners to donate a room for us. So far we’ve not been altogether successful! Turns out, people aren’t quite as charitable as you would think! As it stands, we are sleeping rough from Saturday night to Thursday night! We have had a few lovely people offer to pay for a night’s accommodation, but as we explained to them, we would much rather see our sponsorship total go up than have people use their donation to keep us dry at night! We will find a way to finance our accommodation – even if the rooms are not donated to us by the hotels.
So we came up with the ingenious idea of holding an evening of entertainment at our local church hall to hopefully raise enough money to not only fund our accommodation, but to also add to our ever growing sponsorship pot! We’ve rounded up a few friends who are willing to do a bit of singing and planning is in progress! We’ll keep you posted on that one!!
With only three months to go we are starting to step up our training. Walking around the same roads does become a little monotonous and so last weekend we decided to drive to the Lickey Hills for a more scenic walk! Well, we say scenic...it’s just trees and hills really, but you know...! Not only does it give us somewhere new to walk, it also proved to be quite the cardio vascular workout – hills are mean!! We’re pretty sure there won’t be any mahoosive hills on the way to London, but it’s always good to prepare yourself! The dogs loved it of course. Well, they love any training that we do as it usually means that they get to come with us! Unfortunately, one of the dogs loved it so much that she decided to do a celebratory role in a big pile of cow poo! Oh how we enjoyed that sweet aroma in the car on the way home!
We’ve shall also be installing a treadmill in our lounge!! No, we didn’t go out and by one! It will be on loan from Becky’s dad until September, but we think it will be a really good way to ensure that we are getting the exercise and training needed when we’re not both available to go out and train together. It will of course be a complete eye sore in the lounge, but it’s temporary so we’ll put up with it! I’m sure there will be some entertaining treadmill based video footage in the near future so keep checking our youtube channel!
In our last blog you may remember us talking about the lovely Mazz Murray from We Will Rock You giving us a big thumbs up from the stage. Well a couple of weeks ago we received yet more encouragement from our favourite Killer Queen. Unbeknownst to us, one of our lovely supporters had emailed Mazz’s agent telling her of our walk. We’re not sure exactly what was said, but what we do know is that shortly afterwards, we were presented with two postcards with a message for each of us from Mazz herself, wishing us luck and telling us that she was thinking of us. As you can imagine we’re very very excited by this! People probably don’t realise that small gestures such as that give us the biggest boost of motivation. Those post cards will most definitely be coming with us on our walk, and when we’re tired and emotional and feeling like we want to give up, they will give us that boost of motivation to keep plodding on...well, that and the rucksacks full of chocolate and energy drinks that we will be carrying with us!
So that’s about it for this time. Keep with us guys – we really need your support! :-) xx