THE COVID MONTHS | STEPtember 2020 challenge
KEEP ACTIVE STAY FIT MAKE A DIFFERENCE
Walk or Run 202,020 Steps in September and donate £20 to your chosen charity.
Sherry Ford has come up with a fun way to kick start Autumn and make a difference.
In 2018 I retired from my career as a doctor. I wondered how I would fill my days with so much time on my hands. Our children had long since flown the nest, no grandchildren on the horizon and all the years of juggling work, home and family no longer an issue. All those activities I had never quite found time for were now just waiting for me to get involved.
You will have gathered I’m no spring chicken but I like to think I am reasonably fit, even though the last time I was serious about sport or regular exercise was when I was at school. A couple of years before I retired, I had persuaded my sister and son to do the Shine Night Walk Charity Half-Marathon in London and achieving that felt good. I had no interest in running and was happy to accept that activity was for me to marvel at and others to enjoy.
The problem with doing a half-marathon is that you start to think “Why not the full 26.2 miles?” After all it’s only putting one foot in front of the other again and again and again……. So I started to contemplate whether this would be a step too far and had a while to think about it as I needed a hip replacement and that curtailed activities for a while.
In 2019 I entered the Shine Night Full Marathon with the thought that if I wasn’t really up to it when the event came round, I could always dip out. Not so, my son and his girlfriend signed up to walk with me and told me not to be a wimp – just do it. And really that’s a good motto for life – just do it! The training was really important for me and as I had the time to follow a programme, I felt prepared and a great sense of achievement when I completed the distance in the early hours of a Sunday morning.
For me, regular exercise has yielded many benefits: quietness with time to think; exploring new places; improving my map reading skills; listening to music, podcasts and audible books, and generally adding to my sense of well-being.
But what challenge for 2020? There was a marathon walk round Lake Myvatn in northern Iceland, organised by the Walk the Walk charity, and that sounded too exciting and beautiful to miss, not least because it was during their period of 24-hour daylight. But why just that, there was the 3 Land Challenge, adding a London and an Edinburgh marathon to the Iceland experience, all over a period of five weeks and all overnight. What could possibly go wrong?
I started to walk regularly, met up with others who had signed up for this and all was going well until COVID-19 put paid to travel and charity events and the 3 Land Challenge was postponed to 2021.
Then I started to think of a new goal for 2020 that would encourage me to keep up regular exercise. I also wanted to support some of the charities I care about that were struggling with the increased demand for their services when their income has been catastrophically reduced. For me, this was all about self-sponsorship – I didn’t want to ask others to support me in a challenge I had chosen to take on.
I liked the idea of linking the challenge to the year 2020 and as it was early in the year, my commitment to walk 2020 miles in 2020 didn’t seem totally unreasonable. Still a few months to go and my goal is in sight.
The next step was to see if others liked the idea of a challenge and if I could do a little bit to encourage support for the many charities that have been starved of funds. Importantly, I wanted participants to be able to choose which charity they wanted to support and make their donation directly. And the STEPtember 2020 Challenge was born.
And that’s it really! If you’re up for a challenge and want to support a charity that you care about, then Join . It’s only about three miles or 6,500 steps a day throughout September.
Everything about this is voluntary – the only money that changes hands is directly from you to your chosen charity.
Visit www.steptember2020.org to find out more and register. And don’t forget to spread the word to your friends and family so they can join us too. Every step will help!
SHERRY FORD