Courses, Vehicles and the trouble with Glastonbury

I think we've previously mentioned that getting the courses sorted was obviously essential to our challenge going ahead. Equally essential is finding a suitable vehicle to transport us on our 1000 mile round trip whilst allowing us a brief opportunity to catch 40 winks between each 15 hour, 25 mile, 90 hole stroll around each of the courses.

The confirmation of courses is coming along thanks to Kevin Brown at Today's Golfer magazine and his associates Andy Hiseman at Magic Hour Media and Rachel Meehan at Tourism Ireland. Andy has confirmed that The Shire would be happy to host our final day on 27th June and we are just awaiting confirmation that the date doesn't clash with another event. Rachel is busy arranging the courses in Ireland and Northern Ireland and has confirmed that Concra Wood in Ireland is available to host our opening day on Monday 23rd June. Kevin is chasing up our Scottish and Welsh venues so we are hoping that very soon we can announce the venues and start working with them to make arrangements for each of the days.

The vehicle situation currently has about 4 different contingency plans with Andy and I coming up with different options daily! We started out with the idea of targeting companies that provide sleeper buses (like the ones rock stars use!), RV's and Camper vans hoping that we could find one generous enough to loan one to us for a significant discount or for free. However whilst googling away to get some contact details Andy stumbled across the dates of a little independent, folky music festival known as Glastonbury, that starts on Wednesday 25th June, halfway through the week of our challenge. Unsurprisingly this puts the availability of anything resembling a tour bus and a significant proportion of the RV and camper van population out of the equation! We haven't yet given up hope, but finding a company generous enough to loan us the vehicle free of charge is looking increasingly slim. So what are the alternatives? Here is a list of our ideas some more creative than others...!

• Hire a camper van at full price. There does appear to be some limited availability but Andy and I would need to find about £1,000
• Buy one and then sell it again afterwards
• Use normal vehicles and sleep upright in the passenger seat
• Borrow a demo vehicle from a dealership that's happy for us to clock up 1000 miles
• Find someone who owns one that they can lend to us
• Scour the streets knocking on peoples doors if they have one in the driveway!
• Charter a helicopter instead!
• Tweet famous people and celebs with a plea for help

We're going to try a few of the more realistic of these with the fall back being the pair of us are £500 worse off! Hopefully we can get this resolved soon.

Along side these immediate requirements we have been working on what we need to do to get ourselves in shape for the event. We've started running regularly and have some core work out regimes and golf specific exercises that we are doing, the main purpose being injury prevention, and we have been to the range a few times to practice. To get some further advice on this we have been in touch on twitter with the guys behind golfconditioning.co.uk. They are running workshops out of Bedfordshire Golf Club in Stagsden that combine the technical elements of improving your golf swing with physio work and conditioning exercises tailored to individuals. They have offered to give us an hours one on one session to advise on a specific programme to get us ready for our challenge. We've also been in touch with Alexander Hautekiet one of the guys who completed the Modular World Golf Record - 8 rounds in 8 different countries in less than 24 hours. He has given us some advice on the nutrition we need to consider to keep us going.

Finally we have been focussing on how we can tap into the wealth of generosity of those interested in our challenge to raise support and sponsorship. We have a project page setup at Cancer Research UK ready to collect donations and we have a website being constructed as we write. We hope to have a couple of interesting features on there that will allow individuals or businesses to sponsor a hole or take a punt on our number of shots sweepstake. Both will offer the opportunity to win some small prizes and gain a bit of publicity from supporting us. We are looking at running a raffle or auction to raise additional funds so will be trying to get donations of sports memorabilia, signed items or golfing equipment. We hope to have our web page up in a week or so and some further details of fundraising activities will feature in our next blog.

So we are making progress in our preparations and things are beginning to take shape. We're really pleased with the interest so far from the twitter world and really grateful to those that have offered to support us so far.

125 days to go.....

How we got here and where we are....

We thought we'd give you a bit of background to how our challenge has come about, what we have done so far and what we expect to do over the coming months.

Back in 2006 I (Bob) took part in a longest day golf challenge for Macmillan cancer. We got a four ball together and completed our challenge around Caddington golf club in Bedfordshire. We raised about £5k between the 4 of us, so we felt pretty pleased with our effort. A few years ago I was having a chat with one of the guys that I did the challenge with and we were discussing about maybe doing it again. 
Anyway beer took over and nothing really came of it, except that is, the little seed that planted in my brain - if we did do it again how do we better it...? Add an extra round? - yeah that would work. What about doing it more than once? - now it's getting serious! So how about both then, and try and do it across the UK? It's a crazy idea but amazing if we did it. That was 18 months ago and the crazy idea had stayed firmly in the depths of my imagination! Until October last year when I shared the idea with Andy. Turns out he's about as mad as I am and he started thinking about it too - is it even possible? What route would we take? Maybe it is just a crazy idea!
Two weeks later we've finished a round at Luton Hoo and the idea pops up in conversation again. We pull ideas about a bit and by the end of a couple of pints of Becks Vier we're on our way home to tell our respective other halves we want 
to do this in June 2014! This is a good time to point out that my wife was 5 months pregnant, so I wasn't expecting the most positive of responses! However, my wife is quite an amazing person and knowing what it would mean to us to do this, she agreed. Andy's not said how the conversation went with his wife but she's pretty amazing too and full permission was granted!!
Now we needed a plan. How the hell do we put something like this together? What route do you take, which courses do we choose, what do we need, when do we need it - the questions go on. We started looking into the logistics first and it soon became apparent that the only way around is the route we've chosen, the ferry routes and times dictated that for us, but the courses in each country were more of a dilemma. So assuming that everything else we could probably put in place ourselves we had to do something about courses - no courses and the idea is dead in the water from the start.
Before we set about emailing and writing to every golf course we could find on google in 5 different countries over hundreds of square miles we thought we'd ask for some help. Why not ask a few organisations that might be a bit more connected than us and see if they could point us in the right direction? It was a bit of a long shot but we did it anyway. I've subscribed to Today's Golfer Magazine for a few years now so thought that they would be a reasonable shout and was stunned when the courses editor Kevin Brown not only replied but has offered to help us get the venues and cover our challenge in their magazine! We could not believe the luck and are so grateful for the support. So here we are, probably at the point of no return, which as Andy put it is "scary and exciting, but probably more exciting"
The next steps are 3 fold, firstly we're trying to build a following to raise the profile of our challenge and all the ways that we can get sponsorship, second work out all of the people and "things" we'll need to complete the challenge and thirdly train, practice and train some more! 

In our next blog we'll share our sponsorship ideas, our progress with venues, and how the training is going.