David's Tonne Run Banishes the Winter Blues

In the build up towards Christmas last year I’d been thinking about how to stay motivated to exercise during the cold, dark winter months ahead. 

In previous years, I got out of the habit of whatever exercise (if anything!) I’d been doing before the holidays. January blues hit hard and the aftermath of Christmas gluttony takes a while to dissipate.

This year though I figured if I set myself a physical challenge for 2020 then I’d have to start strong in January and keep on going. What’s more, if I told a bunch of people about my challenge then I’d really be committing to it. To take it I step further, I then decided to see if I could raise some money while I was at it which definitely meant failure would not be an option! And so, the 2020 Tonne Run Challenge was born. I settled on a target of 100km (hence ‘tonne’) which seemed tough yet achievable.

I was introduced to EFTC when I joined HD Decisions about 18 months ago and more recently took part in the infamous HD Charity Challenge back in September last year. What was supposed to be a day’s tough hill walking in the UK's Lake District turned into a fight for survival thanks to some extreme weather but that’s a whole other story!

EFTC’s vital and highly effective work in Jocotenango, Guatemala delivers such a radical shift in the opportunities available to the School of Hope’s students, and I wanted to do more to support them alongside sponsoring an individual student’s education. The challenge so far has had its ups and downs, with a really strong start during the first couple of weeks of January to having to stop entirely for a week or so thanks to illness. At the time of writing I’m now in triple figures, so I feel like the challenge has really begun! If you’d like to keep up with my progress throughout the year I’ve started a blog which you can follow at: https://tonne.run/

Wish me luck!

David