James Coote
The LONG REACH Challenge
Fundraising for Combat Stress
Story
Thanks for visiting our fundraising page.
The LONG REACH Challenge is successfully behind us. As you can see we have now raised over £4000 hard cash which was our target. With Gift Aid this takes us to over £5000 raised for COMBAT STRESS, which is fantastic. The page does not close until September, so you can still add to our total should you wish to! It's secure and Gift Aid is added automatically where appropriate. Our aim was to complete the course quicker than the fastest cadets. We did achieve this, completing the 41 mile course in 22 hours and 55 minutes against the fastest cadets' time of 23 hours and 18 minutes. However, it would be a little disingenuous to make a direct comparison as they had to undertake command tasks, which we did not. We have, therefore, calculated the actual time walking for both and we completed the course in 18 hours and 21 minutes against the cadets’ 17 hours and 39 minutes. Therefore, they were some 42 minutes faster, or about a minute a mile quicker, than us. Given that our average age was 39 we feel that this is reasonably respectful! For those of you who put an additional financial incentive down against our time we will leave it to you to decide whether to add to your already generous sponsorship!Having now all pretty much recovered the Challenge seems to be sitting back in the ‘Good Idea’ camp, although there were times when this was very definitely not the case. We have all been reminded of two things – first, that our bodies are not as young as they once were. And second, that the young cadets we have the privilege to train are remarkable young men and women. That they undertake this exercise 6 weeks after joining the Army is a real credit to them – and to do so in under 24 hours a remarkable achievement.So thank you once again. We know that COMBAT STRESS is extremely grateful for the assistance; please do bear them in mind should you be in involved in fund raising activities in the future; arguably, their latest challenge is perhaps just beginning!