50 days of training for 48 hours of suffering to raise money for families in Nepal …

Folks – if you are contemplating where to go for your trekking holiday in October then I can heartily recommend Nepal. Yes they have just had an epic event of biblical proportions but by the time the next trekking season is upon us they will be well on the road to getting things sorted and back on their collective feet again.

If you are hesitant then please remember that there are 4 and a half months between now and then. The danger from aftershocks will be so diminished by then that it won’t even register. The chance of infection won’t even be worth considering by then. The clearing up won’t have finished but the fact is that life goes on and the locals will be very keen to get back to business as usual.

If people don’t go trekking and climbing this autumn then the repercussions are very far reaching. As it is the country gets 95% of it’s tourist trade in 4 months (April & May / October & November). May has just been written off. If the tourism takes a dive in Oct and Nov then effectively families will be relying on their recent April income to see them all the way through until next April.

How would you feel if your income stream stopped TODAY and you had to make your funds last until next April?

For those in ‘The West’ we would undoubtedly have the fall back option of getting unemployment benefit / child benefit / tax credits of some sort as well as free school meals / prescriptions as well as qualifying for free this, that and the other.

In Nepal they don’t have state funded benefits and are wholly reliant on income. No work … no income. Sore leg … no NHS. Sore leg preventing the ability to work … no income.

So please, please don’t be put off going to Nepal for the next trekking season because your valuable £s will help to kick start the local economy. The local economy won’t benefit from the international aid and donations that are pouring in to the country. Yes that money will go to infrastructure / rebuilding / health and welfare but it won’t be spent (or donated) to teahouse owners. That money won’t be handed to porters. It won’t go to the vegetable seller or the stone mason. And the stone mason won’t repair the teahouse if the teahouse owner doesn’t have cashflow. The entire local economy is in danger of collapsing.

Not only do the trekking regions need tourists to reinvigorate the local economy but the families who have lost loved ones need money too. The families of the 3 staff that we sadly lost recently (Pasang Temba, Kumar and Tenzing) don’t have ‘Plan B’. The bread winner has gone and no they literally don’t have any bread.

I am personally raising money for the families and this will go directly to them. Ideally this will be for the education of the 9 children that have been left behind but the family of Pasang Temba also need to rebuild their house which fell down (no insurance will be covering that).

I am undertaking a personal challenge involving a certain amount of hardship in the hope that you will feel that my venture is worthy of a donation.

I am training for 50 days to attempt the following:

Start at The Moot Hall in Keswick.

Get on a bike

Cycle the Fred Whitton route (approx 112 miles + 6 Lakeland passes & 3,800m of ascent)
Back to The Moot Hall
Change in to swimming gear
Go to the lake and swim the length of Derwentwater
And back again (around 4.5km each way with 0m of ascent)
Back to The Moot Hall.

Change in to fell running gear
Run (walk) The Bob Graham Round (66 miles, 42 peaks, 27,000ft ascent and descent)
Back to The Moot Hall.

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All in all I will be aiming to do all 3 events, back to back, in under 48 hours.

The training started yesterday with a run up and over Latrigg and continued today with a Baltic cold swim in Derwentwater this morning and another fell run this afternoon, this time up and over Walla Crag. I will be out and about at some stage or other every day for the next 50 days getting ready for this crazy venture. In only a few weeks I will need to be fell running for stretches of between 4 and 6 hours. Soon after that I should be ready to be doing 2 legs of the Bob Graham Round back to back and certainly before the big event I should be doing 3 passes on a bike, 2 legs of The Bob AND a couple of mile’s swimming in a day.

Wish me luck!

Please follow my training and progress on my Everest Expedition Page on FaceBook*. If you like the page and sign up for notifications you will get alerted every time I post. I hope that you enjoy the show.

And I hope that you might sponsor me.

But most of all I hope that you will consider trekking in Nepal in October. You will not be disappointed.

*https://www.facebook.com/pages/Everest-Expedition/343655569085328?ref=hl