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.
No comments:
Post a Comment