A full calendar month since we wrote anything about what we've been up to. The majority of our time has been spent preparing for the Manchester Golf Show. We saw this as a great opportunity to raise the profile of our challenge and to kick start our fundraising activity. We invented a sweepstake game where the winning ticket purchased for just £2, will be decided by the scores Andy and I achieve on the 3rd round of the 1st day on each of the 5 courses. The prize £100 in cold hard cash and some other fantastic prizes including a fourball voucher and some beer related 2014 World Cup items.
So we had all the material printed, 5000 fliers, over 3000 sweepstake tickets, posters and a couple of roller banners. Everything was brilliantly designed by our good friend Lee Bearton and the printing was completed by Aylesford Printing services who did a fantastic job at keeping our costs to an absolute minimum.
We met a few times to go through preparations, how it would work, who would be there and when, timings and preparation for what we would say when interviewed on the stage. It was fair to say that none of us had any idea how big or small the event would be, what the best strategy was and realistically what would success look like. So we were prepared for the best and worst cases.
We left at 5am Friday morning to get up there from Bedfordshire, we arrived at 8.15am and by 8.45 we were ready to go, show didn't open until 10am!! so we spent the next hour pacing and wandering about, nervous about the day ahead. It's safe to say that Friday was not our most successful of the 3 days. With the crowd numbers a bit low due to school and work we spent much of the day being rebuffed by senior golfers who weren't at all interested in what we had to say and looked like they were just passing some time whilst their wives shopped in the adjacent Trafford Centre! Like rabbits in headlights we were equally inept at networking with our fellow exhibitors, not really knowing the best way to spark up a conversation. Anyway we did our best and managed to get about 70 tickets sold! It was clear by this point, actually much earlier than this point, that we were unlikely to sell 3000 tickets and would be lucky to sell 300.
Day 2 and the show was noticeably busier and the public somewhat younger in demographic. Our team was slightly different too as the other 3 lads had to be home and my wife and brother came up. Saturday turned out to be much better and we sold twice as many tickets as the first day. We started to feel a bit more comfortable in our surroundings too and made some inroads into getting to know some fellow exhibitors.
Day 3, the final day, and brother and wife had returned home and 2 of the lads had come back up. Strategy for the final day was speak to as many fellow exhibitors as possible and see if they'd be interested in sponsoring a hole in return for a bit of promotion and PR. We were tired, but we stuck to our task and came away feeling that the show was a success for us. We made about £500 to go to charity and met some great contacts all of whom were very supportive. Thanks if you came to see us and support us.
During the month there were 2 significant developments in the arrangements for our challenge. Unfortunately The Shire confirmed that they were unable to host our final day which is a real shame given the Seve connections. So Kevin is busy working away on Luton Hoo with a hope they may be interested in hosting us. The better news is that the Hilton Templepatrick in Northern Ireland confirmed they are happy host us, so we have 4 out of 5 courses confirmed and we are in contact with all of them to make arrangements for each of the days and get some support from them to raise our profile and get some donations.
Which leads us on to the focus for the next 8 weeks. We have started our fundraising campaign in earnest and we're exploring every avenue and badgering anyone we know to help us get ourselves known and get donations in. We're tweeting pro golfers and famous people, we're trying to get into local press, national press, radio, we've even written to the One Show!! We're contacting local courses, hounding work colleagues, tapping up cricket club members and our oppositions and pushing the hole sponsoring at anyone with ears!!
So if you've managed to stay awake to get to this point then we'd like to appeal to your generosity and ask that you make a donation to our challenge and make sure that you tell anyone and everyone about us. We're doing all of this for such a great cause and to help all of those out there that are affected by the devastation that brain cancer brings.
Thanks for reading and all you support, please keep following, tweeting and re-tweeting and help us make this challenge the best it can be....
In Aid of
Thursday, 1 May 2014
Sunday, 30 March 2014
Still looking for sponsors....
3 weeks since our last post so what have we been up to?
We want to see if we can get some major sponsors on board to help out with the things we don't have, like 2 dozen of the same golf shirts that need to be embroidered or 6 pairs of golf shoes that we'll need to keep our feet dry and comfortable. So we've been sending out inquiries to see if any companies want to get on board with what we are doing and supporting us with these things. Obviously our fall back is to purchase all of this ourselves but we'd love to get the backing of a company that sees our challenge as great PR and something that they really want to get involved with. Anyway, so far we've had a couple of replies and neither positive, as expected most companies get inundated with requests and have already pledged allegiance to a certain charity and committed their donations. We continue to live in hope and plug away to find someone who's interested. If you're reading this and you work for one of those companies and you're interested, please get in touch
On the courses front unfortunately Ballyclare have a junior competition on the day we're in Northern Ireland so Rachel at Tourism Ireland is making some inquiries at other venues. We have 3 courses confirmed and have written to them to start making arrangements for the days and look forward to working with them in the coming months to really get a buzz around what we are doing and hopefully get some cold hard cash against our donation target.
We continue working on our training schedules and practice sessions to get ourselves physically and mentally ready for the challenge. We've had one day playing 42 holes non stop, which wasn't too bad but was less than half a day of our challenge so we've got another longer day planned in for Easter Monday where we hope to complete 4 rounds. Beadlow Manor Golf club have allowed us to use their 2 courses to practice via a short term membership so big thanks to them.
We've also started to make inquiries into the nutrition side of things so that we understand the demands our bodies will have during the challenge and can put together a detailed meal plan for the week. We've found @GC_Nutrition on twitter and we're discussing the possibility of them doing something for us.
A final mention goes to our latest supporter, @skycaddieSteve from @skycaddie. He has been in touch and offered to loan us some devices for our challenge. We are really grateful to him for this support, with the quality of sky caddie devices it will really help with courses we don't know and the speed of play. If you've not done before check out their products they really are good. We look forward to meeting Steve in early June to collect the devices and get a demonstration.
So all in all things are ticking along. We've got some plans to put in place regarding collecting sponsorship, particularly around the Manchester Golf Show and our sponsor a hole and "guess our scores" competition. If you're at the show or going to it please look out for us and come and have a chat.
We want to see if we can get some major sponsors on board to help out with the things we don't have, like 2 dozen of the same golf shirts that need to be embroidered or 6 pairs of golf shoes that we'll need to keep our feet dry and comfortable. So we've been sending out inquiries to see if any companies want to get on board with what we are doing and supporting us with these things. Obviously our fall back is to purchase all of this ourselves but we'd love to get the backing of a company that sees our challenge as great PR and something that they really want to get involved with. Anyway, so far we've had a couple of replies and neither positive, as expected most companies get inundated with requests and have already pledged allegiance to a certain charity and committed their donations. We continue to live in hope and plug away to find someone who's interested. If you're reading this and you work for one of those companies and you're interested, please get in touch
On the courses front unfortunately Ballyclare have a junior competition on the day we're in Northern Ireland so Rachel at Tourism Ireland is making some inquiries at other venues. We have 3 courses confirmed and have written to them to start making arrangements for the days and look forward to working with them in the coming months to really get a buzz around what we are doing and hopefully get some cold hard cash against our donation target.
We continue working on our training schedules and practice sessions to get ourselves physically and mentally ready for the challenge. We've had one day playing 42 holes non stop, which wasn't too bad but was less than half a day of our challenge so we've got another longer day planned in for Easter Monday where we hope to complete 4 rounds. Beadlow Manor Golf club have allowed us to use their 2 courses to practice via a short term membership so big thanks to them.
We've also started to make inquiries into the nutrition side of things so that we understand the demands our bodies will have during the challenge and can put together a detailed meal plan for the week. We've found @GC_Nutrition on twitter and we're discussing the possibility of them doing something for us.
A final mention goes to our latest supporter, @skycaddieSteve from @skycaddie. He has been in touch and offered to loan us some devices for our challenge. We are really grateful to him for this support, with the quality of sky caddie devices it will really help with courses we don't know and the speed of play. If you've not done before check out their products they really are good. We look forward to meeting Steve in early June to collect the devices and get a demonstration.
So all in all things are ticking along. We've got some plans to put in place regarding collecting sponsorship, particularly around the Manchester Golf Show and our sponsor a hole and "guess our scores" competition. If you're at the show or going to it please look out for us and come and have a chat.
Sunday, 9 March 2014
Motorhomes and Manchester
After a couple of quiet weeks, with Andy burying his head in books studying, me getting used to a nocturnal life with my new born son and not a lot of success with the motorhome issue, last week was one of the more positive we have experienced. Last Sunday the 4 of us, that's Andy and I and our two strong support team of Ian (Barmy) and Simon, got together to see exactly where we were and what plans we needed progress or put in place. Motor home and course confirmation figured quite highly on the agenda along with trying to find ourselves some major sponsors for balls, shoes and shirts, sorting out the website and the Manchester Golf Show. As most meetings go the agenda went out of the window after about 2 minutes and we had gone in about 7 different tangents before we'd had half a pint. I think in the end we came away with a few actions but not really much clearer on what success looked like. The major decision made was that we were going to have to pay to hire the motor home. Thankfully through the generosity of parents we had two contributions to our challenge budget that would cover about half of cost, we were looking at a bill of over £1,000 for a vehicle before we'd put any fuel in it, so this was a big help. Monday arrived and I'd spent much of the night feeding, winding and rocking whilst filling the times between scouring the web for motor home options. Andy was following up the leads we already had to see if there was any hope there but by Tuesday morning we still had nothing. Nothing, that is on the motor home front...
I had previously found the London Golf Show twitter account and whilst attempting to find the dates also came across the Manchester Golf Show account. I've always fancied going to one of these but never got round to it in the past but it did make me think that it might be a good opportunity to meet a very large number of people all of whom share one thing in common, golf. Now if ever there was an audience to promote our challenge to, this has got to be it, trades and public all in the same place all there to talk, play, live and breath golf. I floated the idea with the team on Sunday and agreed we should inquire, which I did, on Monday. After a very positive conversation with the MD of the company behind the show we have a stand on block F60 and a short slot on the stage each day to promote our challenge!!! So we're going to Manchester from 25th - 27th April where we hope to promote our challenge, collect some sponsorship and see if we can do a bit of networking and find a few major sponsors from some of the other exhibitors. If you're planning on attending pop along and see us to find out a bit more about us, have a go at our challenge sweep stake or even sponsor a hole. If you're from a golf company and interested in going a step further in sponsorship then get in touch before hand and we could be promoting your involvement at the event.
So it's Tuesday and we're confirming the show and following up another motor home option. We'd finally found one available (within budget, but in Durham), filled in our details and awaited the confirmation. A couple of hours later and the booking's confirmed, Result!! At the same time, Rachel had come back to us confirming that Concra Wood were definitely on board, Ballyclare are interested and just awaiting confirmation and that Tourism Ireland are covering costs of ferries and accommodation for the Irish leg of our challenge, Result x 2!! Two days work and we were pretty pleased with the result
Wednesday comes along we get an email from the booking company about excess mileage costs giving us an additional £175 to our already increasing challenge costs. No sooner had we digested this information then it all became irrelevant. Marquis Leisure, a company we had contacted a couple of weeks ago came back to us. In return for some PR and publicity for their business and the MD and his daughter (plays off 6) to join us for a few holes on the last day, they would provide a vehicle for us for the Scotland - Wales - English legs. I couldn't believe the offer or the irony of the timing! We very quickly accepted the very generous offer and almost as quickly cancelled our previous booking. So we now have a new major sponsor and you should see their details to the right on our new look blog page. If you have any motor home needs we'd recommend you check them out.
So the final piece of the week comes from the first of our challenge supporters - Kevin Brown at Today's Golfer Magazine. As you know from previous posts Kevin has been helping is since the start to find the courses and promote our challenge. On Wednesday he confirmed that Portpatrick are on board for the Scottish leg of our challenge and that he had posted the first article about our challenge on Today's Golfer's Website - there's a link to it on the right too. Kevin has all the details of our challenge and will be penning an article to go into the April edition of the magazine out on 17th, so make sure you grab a copy and check it out.
Bit of a long post this time but hopefully you've stuck with it. Things are really taking shape and we're looking for more people to get involved, individuals, groups and companies. You can see that our blog page has been updated with a number of links which we encourage you to check out. We're in the process of building our webpage but that should be here soon and will have more content about our challenge. There's also a link to our donation page if you're feeling generous and want to support us for a great cause - My niece has pledged the first donation, which we are very proud of her for - it's her mum, Nancy, that tragically passed away from a brain tumour.
If you want to get involved follow us at @five5sgolf and send us a tweet or email us at Five5sgolfchallenge@gmail.com
Thanks for taking the time to read
I had previously found the London Golf Show twitter account and whilst attempting to find the dates also came across the Manchester Golf Show account. I've always fancied going to one of these but never got round to it in the past but it did make me think that it might be a good opportunity to meet a very large number of people all of whom share one thing in common, golf. Now if ever there was an audience to promote our challenge to, this has got to be it, trades and public all in the same place all there to talk, play, live and breath golf. I floated the idea with the team on Sunday and agreed we should inquire, which I did, on Monday. After a very positive conversation with the MD of the company behind the show we have a stand on block F60 and a short slot on the stage each day to promote our challenge!!! So we're going to Manchester from 25th - 27th April where we hope to promote our challenge, collect some sponsorship and see if we can do a bit of networking and find a few major sponsors from some of the other exhibitors. If you're planning on attending pop along and see us to find out a bit more about us, have a go at our challenge sweep stake or even sponsor a hole. If you're from a golf company and interested in going a step further in sponsorship then get in touch before hand and we could be promoting your involvement at the event.
So it's Tuesday and we're confirming the show and following up another motor home option. We'd finally found one available (within budget, but in Durham), filled in our details and awaited the confirmation. A couple of hours later and the booking's confirmed, Result!! At the same time, Rachel had come back to us confirming that Concra Wood were definitely on board, Ballyclare are interested and just awaiting confirmation and that Tourism Ireland are covering costs of ferries and accommodation for the Irish leg of our challenge, Result x 2!! Two days work and we were pretty pleased with the result
Wednesday comes along we get an email from the booking company about excess mileage costs giving us an additional £175 to our already increasing challenge costs. No sooner had we digested this information then it all became irrelevant. Marquis Leisure, a company we had contacted a couple of weeks ago came back to us. In return for some PR and publicity for their business and the MD and his daughter (plays off 6) to join us for a few holes on the last day, they would provide a vehicle for us for the Scotland - Wales - English legs. I couldn't believe the offer or the irony of the timing! We very quickly accepted the very generous offer and almost as quickly cancelled our previous booking. So we now have a new major sponsor and you should see their details to the right on our new look blog page. If you have any motor home needs we'd recommend you check them out.
So the final piece of the week comes from the first of our challenge supporters - Kevin Brown at Today's Golfer Magazine. As you know from previous posts Kevin has been helping is since the start to find the courses and promote our challenge. On Wednesday he confirmed that Portpatrick are on board for the Scottish leg of our challenge and that he had posted the first article about our challenge on Today's Golfer's Website - there's a link to it on the right too. Kevin has all the details of our challenge and will be penning an article to go into the April edition of the magazine out on 17th, so make sure you grab a copy and check it out.
Bit of a long post this time but hopefully you've stuck with it. Things are really taking shape and we're looking for more people to get involved, individuals, groups and companies. You can see that our blog page has been updated with a number of links which we encourage you to check out. We're in the process of building our webpage but that should be here soon and will have more content about our challenge. There's also a link to our donation page if you're feeling generous and want to support us for a great cause - My niece has pledged the first donation, which we are very proud of her for - it's her mum, Nancy, that tragically passed away from a brain tumour.
If you want to get involved follow us at @five5sgolf and send us a tweet or email us at Five5sgolfchallenge@gmail.com
Thanks for taking the time to read
Sunday, 16 February 2014
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...!
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.....
Saturday, 1 February 2014
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.
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.
Wednesday, 22 January 2014
So what is the Five5s Golf Challenge?
Hi there,
This is our first blog, not just for Five5s Golf but for the pair of us behind the challenge, so please be patient! The pair of us, are Bob Warner and Andy Norris, we are mates from Dunstable and Leighton Buzzard in Bedfordshire. We've known each other for about 7 or 8 years through Eaton Bray Cricket club and have played golf together for a similar period of time. It's fairly safe to say we are keen but casual golfers as both have young families that consume much of our time! Andy plays off 16 and I play off a society handicap of 11. We have decided to take on a unique golf challenge to raise money for charity and push ourselves to the limits of our golfing ability.
The Five5s Golf Challenge is a golfing marathon playing 5 rounds of golf each day, for 5 days, on 5 courses, in 5 different countries and raising £5k each for the Seve Foundation. The challenge will start in Ireland on Monday 23rd of June and will continue through Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and finishing in England on Friday 27th June. It will see us walking more than 125 miles and travelling over a thousand miles door to door whilst completing 450 holes of golf.
We have chosen to raise cash for the Seve Foundation, set up by the great Seve Ballesteros in 2009 for research into brain cancer. The foundation works with Cancer Research UK raising funds for vital research projects. For obvious reasons this charity fits our challenge particularly well but our real motivation is for the families that have been through or are going through the pain and suffering of seeing this disease affect their loved ones - just like my family has. So our efforts are dedicated to all those families out there and hopefully we can go some way to avoiding more people having to go through the same.
If having read this you're interested and want to know more then we'd encourage you to follow us on twitter at @Five5sgolf where we'll be posting our preparation progress, further blogs on how we're getting on and who's getting involved. Hopefully from there you may tweet us with handy tips and advice about our preparation plans or retweet our posts to help us grow our following and raise the profile of our challenge and we'd like to hear from those who have been affected by brain cancer so we can dedicate our efforts to you. We hope that you may also find some useful advice from our followers to help your own game or inspire you to take on your own personal golfing challenge.
We already have the support of Today's Golfer Magazine who are helping us arrange the venues and provide coverage on their website and magazine and we would welcome all the sponsorship, support and encouragement that anyone else is generous enough to provide.
Thanks for reading....and check back soon for some more info
This is our first blog, not just for Five5s Golf but for the pair of us behind the challenge, so please be patient! The pair of us, are Bob Warner and Andy Norris, we are mates from Dunstable and Leighton Buzzard in Bedfordshire. We've known each other for about 7 or 8 years through Eaton Bray Cricket club and have played golf together for a similar period of time. It's fairly safe to say we are keen but casual golfers as both have young families that consume much of our time! Andy plays off 16 and I play off a society handicap of 11. We have decided to take on a unique golf challenge to raise money for charity and push ourselves to the limits of our golfing ability.
The Five5s Golf Challenge is a golfing marathon playing 5 rounds of golf each day, for 5 days, on 5 courses, in 5 different countries and raising £5k each for the Seve Foundation. The challenge will start in Ireland on Monday 23rd of June and will continue through Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and finishing in England on Friday 27th June. It will see us walking more than 125 miles and travelling over a thousand miles door to door whilst completing 450 holes of golf.
We have chosen to raise cash for the Seve Foundation, set up by the great Seve Ballesteros in 2009 for research into brain cancer. The foundation works with Cancer Research UK raising funds for vital research projects. For obvious reasons this charity fits our challenge particularly well but our real motivation is for the families that have been through or are going through the pain and suffering of seeing this disease affect their loved ones - just like my family has. So our efforts are dedicated to all those families out there and hopefully we can go some way to avoiding more people having to go through the same.
If having read this you're interested and want to know more then we'd encourage you to follow us on twitter at @Five5sgolf where we'll be posting our preparation progress, further blogs on how we're getting on and who's getting involved. Hopefully from there you may tweet us with handy tips and advice about our preparation plans or retweet our posts to help us grow our following and raise the profile of our challenge and we'd like to hear from those who have been affected by brain cancer so we can dedicate our efforts to you. We hope that you may also find some useful advice from our followers to help your own game or inspire you to take on your own personal golfing challenge.
We already have the support of Today's Golfer Magazine who are helping us arrange the venues and provide coverage on their website and magazine and we would welcome all the sponsorship, support and encouragement that anyone else is generous enough to provide.
Thanks for reading....and check back soon for some more info
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