The Magpies 150 Challenge - September

#Magpies150Challenge

This year Maidenhead Magpies Football Club are celebrating their 150th year. As part of their celebrations, and at a time when many local charities have been terribly impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic, they have launched the Magpies 150 Challenge, through which they are aiming to raise at least £150,000 to support 15 Maidenhead and Windsor based charities. You can find out more about the chosen charities by visiting their website here.

GoodGym Windsor and Maidenhead are supporting this brilliant initiative by taking on a different challenge every month, each one based around the numbers 150, 15 or 1.5. We are fundraising via this Just Giving page, we hope our efforts will raise awareness for the Magpies and their fantastic community support work, and we'll have a bit of fun and get fit while we're at it.

Super September

We kicked off our year of 150s with a distance challenge, to collectively run or walk 150 miles. GoodGym normally work in kilometres so that would have been the obvious metric to go for, but we wanted to stretch ourselves, so miles it was! The original plan was to do it all on Sunday 20th September, but in the preceding fortnight the challenge took on a life of its own and became a whole weekend event. Running and fundraising on Saturday too - why not!?

And the weekend was a great success! In the end we covered over 196 miles, and we raised £278. Even though this was a virtual event with most runners going solo, the team spirit was fantastic and really spurred us on. WhatsApp and Strava didn't know what had hit them, and along with our legs, the emojis for clapping, cheering, trophies, medals, strong arms, 'boom', stars, rockets, celebrations, love, sweat and tears (of laughter) are going to need a few days' rest.

The weather was glorious and as well as pounding the pavements of our towns we also reveled in the beautiful scenery of Windsor Great Park, along the Thames Path, up Winter Hill, through Cookham and Bisham Woods, around Pinkneys Green and Maidenhead Thicket, and along the Greenway through Cookham fields and Braywick Nature Reserve.

So let's celebrate the team's achievements...

• All Power to Sara - Sara Powell got the WhatsApp party started when she logged 7 miles early on Sunday. Sara has type 1 diabetes and hasn't been running for long, so managing this distance is amazing.
• A Lovelly day for a run - top of the leaderboard James Lovell ran a whopping 16.5 miles in Windsor Great Park on Sunday morning - the furthest he's run in 21 years.
• Speedy Preedy strikes twice - Helen Preedy reported 7.5 miles on Sunday morning and then 12 hours later she went out and did it again!
• Super Stephan! Stephan ran nearly 9 miles with Meggie and another friend from MAC on Saturday morning. Then instead of putting his feet up he nearly doubled the distance by taking on the Maidenhead Millenium Walk with the Civic Society in the afternoon. An incredible achievement!
• Make mine a half - Having each pledged 10 miles, Amy and Jen both rounded up to a half marathon. Angie was also 'playing rounders'...having pledged 5 miles, she pulled an early morning 10km out of the bag for the first time in 2 years.
• What do you get if you put '0km in sub' in the middle of '150'? 10km in sub 50 of course! Well Lara did anyway, beasting her personal GoodGym target a week earlier than her training plan. She didn't rest there either. She added a further 5+ miles to the leaderboard just for fun.
  
• Mystic Meggie always seemed to know where to be to cheer others on. She spotted Lara flying past on the Saturday while she was volunteering as a marshal at a pop up drive through flu clinic (well done for your good deed Meggie!). Then on Sunday she ran with Stephan and they bumped into first Nathalie (looking fresh as she powered through 6 miles), then Amy. Amy later passed Nathalie's husband Francis on his epic 10 mile mission, giving her another boost.
• Allora miles - Allora contributed a lorra lorra miles (8 to be precise - well done!!) on her Sunday morning outing and gave Amy a big cheer from her car too.
• Local legend - well done to Christelle for running 3 miles on Saturday, and then going on to cycle 15.5 miles over the rest of the weekend. On her bike Christelle is steadily cleaning up all the Strava 'Local Legend' titles around Dorney Lake. Kudos!
• Reporting mileage from the 1990s... Well done Ana for 4 miles, measured in the present day on your cool retro Casio. No doubt there was an inspirational sprint finish at the end!
• Mysterious miles - thank you and well done to Candiesa Kingston and 'Strava Athlete', for your 8 mile and 5 mile runs respectively. I don't think you were signed up to the GoodGym listing, but it was great to see you pop up on our leaderboard and to have your support! It would be great to meet you at a GoodGym community mission soon.
• Route-spiration - Francis was following a route Michelle had run earlier in her seemingly effortless 10 miles. Anna Snelling also powered through 10 miles of river and woodland trails. One of the best things about Strava is how you can see other athlete's maps, and we love trail blazers like Michelle and Anna!
• A wheel family effort - well done to Sophie and Elliot Lack, who banked 7 miles between them, as well as pushing 3 year old twins in a buggy with a wonky wheel - that's how they roll! Fellow twin parent Amanda also pushed a double buggy on her Saturday run, and then took her mileage to a total of 8.5 by running away from some cows with a friend on Sunday.
• Isherwoods fight back - Tara and Paul are both in recovery from Covid-19, and they did amazingly well to run 5 miles each.
• Its a family affair - Clare G also made a family event out of the challenge when she accidentally (on purpose?) signed up husband Rod. Well done for your collective 7 miles!
• 90 minute warm-up - Jess set a record for the longest ever warm up, playing (and winning 6-0!!) a full football match before her run - awesome effort!
• Ankur what!!? By Sunday evening we knew we had hit the magical 150 and Ankur was tired after a long bike ride. He had every excuse to duck out of his planned evening excursion, but he had already carb loaded and was feeling the team spirit, so he donned his head torch and went for it anyway! His 9 mile adventure took him along the river and through the deep dark woods - Bear Grylls has nothing on him.

What a great weekend, and in support of so many worthwhile local causes. Keep an eye on the GoodGym Windsor and Maidenhead Facebook page and Happenings page for next month's 150 challenge and many more ways to get involved.