D-Day minus 5 ...

It's getting closer now ...just 5 days until I have to actually start this 365challenge. One of the therapists at my consulting rooms summed it up quite nicely, I thought ..."mental, mental, mental". Well, that might be a little strong, but I guess it is going to be a real challenge for me, and that's the whole point - I want to earn my sponsorship, and this is the best way I can think to do that.

What's really motivating though is that tonight I crossed the £3000 mark for sponsorship, and that's just phenomenal - in less than 3 weeks! Thank you to EVERYONE who has supported me so far, and the rest of you who are thinking about it, come on, you know it makes sense! I'd really love to reach my target before I kick this 365challenge off on Monday, but obviously that's out of my hands - it's over to you lot out there, so if you can, come on, make my day, week, month and year.

And be assured, I'll not simply stop when I hit that target, I plan to keep going over the year, and doing all I can to raise as much as I can. A lot of the extra effort will go into promoting the 365challenge idea far and wide, and getting others involved in taking their own challenges. Obviously, the more people I can encourage to raise money for CRUK, the greater the overall pot, and that can only be a "good thing". There is some interest, and I know that this will grow.

One person I spoke to today, Claire, is frightened of water. But she is planning to learn to swim as part of her challenge, and then, once she has, she's going to swim at least a mile a week for the rest of her 365challenge year. She reckoned that she'll take up to six months to learn to swim - I reckon she'll manage it sooner than that - but we've re-framed her 365challenge so that now she's planning to learn to swim and then swim the English Channel (22 miles) in her 365challenge year. How good does that sound - well worth supporting, eh? She told me that her grandmother died recently from cancer, and so did another relative, last year, I think, so when she saw my poster in the gym, she was inspired to take this on and now she's excited to be doing something in her grandmother's memory.

That's the kind of story that will make 365fchallenge the fund-raising success that I believe it can be.