Guest blog

Time's up - let the challenge begin
28/09/2012

Time's up - let the challenge begin

Tomorrow, Lucie-Anne will walk an impressive 50km to raise money for Papworth Trust. In this blog, she shares her thoughts ahead of the event:

Tomorrow, at some hour of the morning I can't even bring myself to commit to writing, myself and a colleague - Tom Piper - will be on our way to London to take part in the Thames Path 50km Challenge to raise money for Papworth Trust.

I first learned about Papworth Trust when an email came round at work asking if anybody wanted to take part in a 50km walk, which the Trust had organised to take place in June of this year. Caught momentarily off guard, my tendency to agree to things without thinking somehow defeated my natural aversion to physical activity, and before I knew it I was part of a five-strong team of semi-enthusiastic hikers, ready to embark on a gruelling 50km walk...

Then came the rain (known to some as "the great British summertime") - and lots of it! So much so that our intended path was all but destroyed, meaning that the walk had to be cancelled.

However, undeterred by the rain (or the prospect of coming up with another three months of excuses to avoid doing any training!), and spurred on by the sponsorship we had already raised for the Trust, Tom and I signed ourselves up to take on the Thames Path 50km Challenge. Of course we had also lost over half our team by this point, but at least it meant we could incorporate our surnames into the seemingly accurate team name: "The end of the Rhode is a Pipe dream".

Which brings us to today, the day before the event. It perhaps goes without saying that I am feeling severely underprepared and am now wishing I had spent less time "carb-loading" (on reflection, perhaps 27 years was excessive!) and more time actually training. Still, as Doris Day once so famously and harmoniously said: "que sera sera"... so I guess all that remains to be done now is to hope that whatever will be will be relatively painless!

by Lucie-Anne Rhodes

If you'd like to support Lucie-Anne and Tom, you can sponsor them at www.justgiving.com/evershedspapworth.