Partner Article

The Elympics Enters the Home Straight

£4,000 has now been raised for four Yorkshire based charities marking the halfway point in the twelve month challenge, named the Elympics. Engage staff are aiming to raise £8,000 by the end of February 2017.

Amongst the many countless cases of fatigued feet, bruised bums and aching arms here are some of the headline stats:

• £4,000 raised
• 2,250 activities logged
• 13,300 miles covered
• 1,465 hours exercised
• 490,000 feet climbed

To put that into perspective that’s an average of £500 a month raised through swimming, cycling, running, rowing and walking. We’ve climbed the equivalent of Mount Everest an exhausting 16 times, the total mileage of 13,300 means we have traveled from London to New York 3 times!

On November 6th, 19 members of team Engage will be lacing up their running shoes for the Leeds Abbey Dash. The additional 190km covered will give the elympics another boost closer to the £8,000 target.

The Elympics was inspired by a desire to not only encourage a more active lifestyle for Engage staff but to give something back to the local community within which they operate.

Engage have chosen four local charities to sweat it out for:

• Lineham Farm - Lineham Farm is a charity that gives disadvantaged, disabled and local school children a break in the Leeds countryside.
• Open Country - A Harrogate-based charity that seeks to enable anyone with any disability to access the countryside.
• ToastLoveCoffee - A community café; creating a space where boundaries between different communities will disappear over good coffee, good food and good conversations.
• CATCH - A community space based in Harehills, setup in partnership with West Yorkshire Police and Leeds City Council.

All activities are tracked using the popular fitness app Strava and the data flows into the microsite, doing a bit of maths along the way to calculate a whole number of interesting statistics and eventually generating a monthly Elympics leaderboard - thus creating a bit of healthy competition for those who want to push for glory each month.

Engage Director, Alex Willcocks, said, “The Elympics has been a great success so far, we aimed to make a tangible difference to our charities as well as our waistlines! We’ve already seen this as the funds raised have been used to purchase an oven for Toast Love Coffee and also a new tandem bike for Open Country.

“We’ve seen plans for Lineham Farm to use the Elympics money to finance part of a new activities section in their grounds. Overall it feels like the staff are fitter and enjoying the challenge, maybe we could even break our £8,000 target?”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Tom Scott .