The beginning of a thousand pointless miles

David Walliams is going to cycle from Land’s End to John O’Groats for Comic Relief/Sport Relief - with sort of help of Jimmy Carr, Miranda Hart, Fearne Cotton and Davina McCall.

My heart sinks everytime anyone says “I’m going from Land’s End to John O’Groats”. It is a very pointless excursion. There are two main reasons to take on a big challenge like walking/running/cycling a long way. Firstly to raise money for a charity, and secondly for a personal challenge.

If you’re doing it for charity – there is no reason to spend more than 2 weeks on the way from Land’s End to John O’Groats – after you’ve gone about 26 miles, you are not likely to get significantly more sponsorship if you go further. Sure, running a marathon is better than a half-marathon, and a half-marathon is better than running a measly 5k or 10k, but for each of the additional one of the extra 852 miles you are doing on top of a marathon by going from Land’s End to John O’Groats – you are not going to make any money. You will spend lots of money of your own though. You’ll also find it difficult to get any press coverage for something so mundane – this is the reason that various twats do it on unicycles, pogo-sticks, barefoot, etc – desperation for publicity. There is a fine line of doing something for publicity and doing something pointless – and the inclusion of circus equipment is well over that line. If you want to raise money for a charity, the best bet is to let everyone know of your personal link to the charity, why it is worth donating the money to that charity, and what they might do with that money. People are much more generous this way.

Personal challenge-wise, I still don’t see the point of Land’s End to John O’Groats – it’s not very exciting. You finish the climax of your journey and you are rewarded with the North Sea. You go through places which you would never normally have any reason to go to. Yes, you’ve gone 874 miles, or 1200 miles if you’ve done it off-road, but so have lots of other people. You join a club. If you pay. Yes, you have to pay to get a little certificate. I shudder at the thought of paying for a useless piece of paper declaring that you, like 23,592 other people (and counting), have felt the need to do something so utterly dull.

Just do a marathon, and concentrate on your fundraising. A marathon is a fantastic achievement – and if you can clock sub 4 hours in one, then you’re doing brilliantly. Spend some of the time that you might have spent planning 14 days across the UK, and more time on getting people to sponsor you – and I guarantee you’ll get more cash in.

But why not think of something original? I’ve worked with a few people during my time as a Events Fundraiser at various charities who have tried something original. One man ran 60 miles on his 60^th birthday, a fantastic achievement especially for a sexagenarian, he was able to run around his home town with people running with him for various legs of the run. Another guy wanted to run lots of marathons, but lacked some focus on what the challenge was - he ended up running 26 marathons in a year – one for every letter of the Alphabet, from Apeldoorn to Zermatt.

One journey I recently considered, was going from Zero to Hero literally. This would be quite an undertaking. As it involves going from Zero, in Montana, USA to Hero Bay in the South Shetland Islands in the Antarctic. Fortunately I have no urge to actually make this journey, as it is a very very long way.

The only reason for going from Land’s End to John O’Groats is that you live in one of the two places, and a close personal friend or family member lives in the opposite place. I find this quite hard to believe, but it could be possible. There is no other reason. At all.

So come up with a better idea. Something a bit creative. A bit different. A bit personal. Don’t do another criminally dull Land’s End to John O’Groats. That is a complete waste of time. If you want to do a thousand miles, go to Spain/Italy/Greece and cycle home. Find a historical route and cycle that. Find some amusing place names. Find a place name that is your surname. Spend a couple of days cooling off once you’ve decided to do Land’s End to John O’Groats, to think of something better.

But then nowadays, all you need is some shiny celebs to do some decent fundraising. Which is great - that the shiny celebs are willing to help out. But it does show the paucity of originality and ambition in fundraising now.

Tags: charity fundraising, events fundraising, From A to B, John O'Groats, Land's End, Land's End to John O'Groats, LE2JOG, LEJOG, marathon, paucity of ambition

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 19th, 2010 at 9:43 am and is filed under The Death of Originality, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.