Ok, so people who know me might know that I broke my foot last November. I was training for a 15k race (running) and missed a curb…. Stupid, stupid, stupid….

Seven weeks of a cast, a wheelchair and crutches on I was more then ready to restart my live and decided that I had to get back in the swing of exercising. As running still felt a bit daunting so soon after the break and as I had already kind of committed myself to walk the Dander4Dosh I figured it would be the perfect way to force myself into a regular exercise pattern again. And so it did. For the last 5,5 months I have been walking daily. Doing a morning round before work and an evening round after dinner. I even went up to Northern Ireland for a weekend last March to get some elevation training in (The Netherlands is not exactly big on hills you know…).

Dander4 Dosh… So what is it? Well, figure a team of nerds from all over the globe (Ireland, UK, Netherlands, Portugal and USA) who’ve met each other at conferences or through the social media channels. Not particularly well trained (or at least not all), not at all the typical ‘athlete’ type but with a big dose of humor, a spiderman onsie or two (no not me!), enough connected and GPS enabled devices to get us to the nearest pub and a target to get: Walk 5 days to raise as much money for Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) as  we can!

This isn’t the first Dander4Dosh although it is going to be my first. The team consists of 7 walkers and two lovely volunteers who will most likely have to rescue us and transport us to the nearest pub at the end of the day. ‘Rescue us’ as we unfortunately lost our designated map reader: Eileen, who can’t attend due to work related obligations. The route will take us along the coast line of Wales through picturesque places who’s names I will probably never be able to remember or pronounce correctly and it will be long… very long.

In the run up to this walk there has been some confusion about the total distance we will be walking in 5 days. Somehow someone said it was 85 miles, some thought 92 miles and others said 100 miles. I’m the ostrich type of person so I opted to convince myself it would be the already daunting 85 miles…. Yes you guessed it, it turns out to be the 100 miles (160km). How are we going to do that?!? Well probably with a lot of blisters, aching muscles and some cursing.

But…!

You can help! As mentioned above we will be raising money for MSF and to do that we set up a donations page. Every cent donated there is another incentive (and stick behind the door!) for us to walk. So help us out and donate on our Just Giving page. The money will be going directly to MSF and will be well used by this fantastic organisation. In return I promise we will be posting lot’s of updates on twitter (follow #Dander4Dosh) and Facebook and Steve will hopefully use his amazing (and slightly deranged!) writing skills to write a day by day review of it all on the blog afterwards. Reading last years blog about D4D2013 was what got me into it this year and is well worth it if you are interested in the antics of a group of otherwise quite normal IT folks in the wilderness of Scotland.

Plus you have my promise that as I will be armed with a smartphone, ipad and a MiFi -which I hope will have coverage in rural Wales-, there will be lots of ‘Spiderman & consorts meet Wales’ updates!