The one where I throw myself off a tower several times...

I love abseiling. I do it every chance I get, even if it means going out after work and helping out with a late night training session here at Caythorpe. I've abseiled off a 100ft (~30m) sea cliff in the Isle of Man, and a 100ft waterfall in Australia. Abseiling is pretty much my favourite thing in the whole world, and most of my friends know that. So when I was planning what to do for my fundraising, obviously I thought about abseiling. But it's not a challenge for me, and it should be a challenge if you want people to sponsor you. There's not a building, cliff or rock face here in the UK that's tall enough to be a challenge for me. So how could I make it a challenge? An endurance abseil! So, I decided to do an hour long abseil session down the 40ft (~12m) tower at work- with the aim of 40 descents during the hour - and set May 12^th as the date. 

At 5am on Monday morning I woke up, suddenly very nervous. My head had just done the calculations - 40ft tower, 40 descents, that meant abseiling 1600ft (~480m). That's a long way. It also means I'm doing one descent every minute and a half - from clipping in at the top of the tower, down to the bottom, unclipping and running back up the stairs to the top again... My head kept spinning - Would it be faster to walk down or jump down the wall? What would be the quickest way to clip and unclip myself from the ropes so that I could get back up the stairs? Oh my, the stairs. Would my knee (always a little bit dodgy) cope with the stairs? Eventually I managed to persuade myself to sleep again and get a bit of rest before the time.

It was an easy morning at work, there were no guests on site, so we had a meeting at 11.30, lunch at 12, and then it was time to go. With my four helpers (Brit, Lewis, Hannah, and Amy), we set up the abseil ropes and I harnessed up, and stepped off the tower, ready to go, with various cheers from people working below me. Lewis checked I was safe, and the timer started. I flew down the wall, Hannah helped to unclip me, and I was back to the top of the wall again in 34 seconds. After 5 minutes, I'd done my first 5 descents. It was only going to get harder though. After about 14 descents, Lewis and Brit commented that I should have said I was doing a sponsored stair climb rather than a sponsored abseil, because that's where the hard bit was. I flew up them the first few times, but a 46 step spiral staircase isn't something to be taken lightly. I soon slowed down, including suggesting I take a nap half way up the staircase at one point. Apparently I wasn't allowed. 

At 25 minutes, I'd done 20 descents - half way to my aim of 40, and Amy took over from Brit at the top of the tower. After about 25 stair climbs, I grabbed my inhaler for some much needed lung relief - definitely worked! I hit 30 descents with about 20 minutes left. I had to do 1 descent every 2 minutes to hit my target. The stairs varied from feeling like the longest staircase I'd every climbed in my life to feeling like I only had to climb 2 stairs and I was at the top. With 10 minutes left, I had 5 descents left so, like any true endurance runner, I sprinted to the finish. I climbed out of the tower for my 40^th descent at 56 minutes, and hit the bottom with 3.5 minutes left, so I headed back up to do one extra one, because there's nothing like beating your target. I took it a bit slower though, and enjoyed it! 

All the way through the hour, I had my friends and colleagues cheering me on, with random shouts of "How many have you done?" and "How long left?" which I generally let Hannah answer because I couldn't breathe! So I'd like to say thank you to everyone cheering from the ground, and an even bigger thank you to Lewis, Hannah, Brit and Amy for their technical support - I literally couldn't have done it without them!

I'd also like to say a big thank you to everyone who's sponsored me so far - Right now, I'm not entirely sure how much I've raised, because there's still money coming in, but I think it'll be around £200. If you'd like to sponsor me in retrospect, you can do so either in person, or on my justgiving here. It all helps to get me to Latvia for my GOLD project!

PS - I also owe a thank you to PGL Caythorpe Court for the use of the tower, and to the Chief Instructor Lana for letting me go for a shower and sit in the office doing some laminating for a while before I went back out to work with the kids - it took me a while to return to a normal colour! 

Abseiling...

So. It's been a while since I updated, but things have been plodding along - both GOLD-wise and life-wise! I started work again, so GOLD got put on the backburner a little bit while I settled in, but now I'm back and bursting into action - just in time for GOLD briefing number 2 at the weekend! We've had two conference calls to plan for the briefing as the team have to come up with an interactive presentation about Latvia, and an activity for the evening entertainment... The theme is BIG BROWNIE BIRTHDAY (it's 100 years of Brownies in case you didn't know!), and so each GOLD team is running a Brownie Badge - we're doing the Swimmer badge, and we're very excited! I'll write more about that after the weekend, I don't want to give too much away!  

The conference calls have been a bit of a challenge - you try finding a time when 6 people are free to chat, when two of them work 9-5 office jobs, one is a nurse working shifts, one works freelance, one works nights at weekends, and one is me who works all sorts of times! Unsurprisingly, we haven't managed it yet, but we're having calls with the majority, and filling the rest in afterwards - everyone has managed at least one of the two so far, so that's good! I think finding times to organise will be the biggest challenge for our team. 

In other news, I am back on the fundraising - I have managed to organise a sponsored abseil on May 12th - I am going to be abseiling for a whole hour, constantly up and down the 40ft tower at PGL Caythorpe Court. I'm hoping to do 40 descents during the hour, and any sponsorships over £10 can suggest things for me to do whilst abseiling - perhaps the YMCA, or the cha cha slide (not sure how I'll do that one, but you can suggest it!)... the more original the better, and as long as it's safe, I'll give it a go! I'm also hoping to film a lot of it, and create a video at the end to prove to everyone that I did it! (As long as the camera batteries last...) 

If you would like to sponsor me, you can do so at my justgiving page or by speaking to me directly. I need to raise approximately £2000, and I've got around about £800 so far, so please help out! 

That's all for now... more next week all about second briefing! 

Making A Difference

During my fundraising, I am always on the look-out for grants and awards to apply for, which will help me towards achieving my goal of £2000 for GOLD. These grants sometimes have the most simple questions (Name, Age, Describe your trip...), and sometimes, they ask for more complicated things. Today, I have been trying to fill one out which asked the question:

Please tell us how this grant will make a difference to you as a person

Well. That threw me. I'm not doing GOLD to make a difference to myself. I'm doing it to help other countries, and their Guide (and Scout) organisations - in my case, that's Latvia. I went to both India and Finland for myself, and whilst both of those opportunities did involve me helping other people (as staff in both instances), I purely did it because I wanted to go, I wanted to experience things, to develop, to change... The helping people was an added bonus. But this one, Latvia, this time, wanting to go is the bonus. It's not like I woke up one day and thought "Of all the countries in the world, Latvia will have the biggest impression on who am I as a person." It's not even like there's a cool camp happening there that I really want to be involved in, and I have to go as staff because I'm too old to be a participant. There's a project to help people, to help Guiding, and I want to help. I'm there to make a difference to other people, not to me.

But I know that at the end of the day, whatever your motives, everything you do in life makes a difference to you. But I don't know how. So I closed the grant form, and left it for another day... and then I had a flash of inspiration, and I wrote...

I have been lucky enough to attend a wide variety of Guiding events throughout my life, and each one has made a difference to me in ways that I never expected, and often don't realise until a long while after the end of the event. Sometimes it will be skills learnt and developed, whether leadership or teamwork, or practical (how to cook for and serve 3,500 hungry Scouts and Guides). Sometimes it will be future opportunities arising, getting more involved in WAGGGS, or the chance to help run the next event. More often than not, it will be friendships gained that become more important than I could have imagined.

Right now, I anticipate that GOLD will help me to develop my "transferable" skills - including organisation, time-keeping and in training others (useful for both my Guiding life and my career), and to allow me to experience new ways of Guiding and Scouting that I can bring back to the UK and use within my own local guiding. However, I have no way of knowing the full extent to which this grant will make a difference to me personally, but I am excited to make that discovery.

Unfortunately, the box on the grant form is too small for that answer, so I'll have to re-write it more succinctly, but I think it's important for me to remember that this will make a difference to me as well as Latvian Guides and Scouts.

PS. if you know of any grants/awards that may be able to help with my fundraising, please let me know - I love filling in their forms!

PPS. - if you personally want to donate some money towards my trip, my justgiving account can be found here.

Thank you!

I'd just like to post a brief, but heartfelt, thank you to Girlguiding Leicestershire for their generous contribution towards my trip. I arrived home from my non-Guiding travels to a totally unexpected, and rather large, cheque, and as always, a lovely letter from the County Commissioner.

Having grown up in Leicestershire, and under the wing of the incredible Leaders that this county seems to have in abundance, I am all too aware of the impact they have had on my life, and I am so grateful that they continue to support my Guiding adventures. 

Thank you so much to everyone!