A couple of weeks ago I was a crew member on the Chartwell Children’s Cancer Charity team (the Panto Paddlers!) along with Joshua, also from the EJJB team.  After a lovely hot summer we got wind, rain and choppy water to combat, but we’re always up for a challenge!

We won one race and had a bumpy start in our second one, but came storming back, only behind by a whisker at the finish line.  It was fun, but tough and worth it as the team raised well over £5,000 for the charity.

If you’ve been following us for a while, you’ll know this isn’t our first charity event.  Josh and I went on the Spartan 21K in May, in warmer weather, tackling 30 obstacles along a 21 kilometre course – also raising money for Chartwell.

We’ve been sponsoring a local ice hockey team too, which happened almost by accident.  We’d never been to an ice hockey game and decided it would be a fun thing to do as my partner and I brought our respective families to meet each other.  We loved it and went again.  Then we saw a notice from the local team looking for sponsors for their helmets and signed up.

What’s the point?

Why am I telling you this?  Because it’s not just about being able to wear a halo about doing good things.  It’s about being a responsible member of the community. I don’t think you should take-take-take all the time, the community needs support to function.

There are so many worthwhile charities, that depend on people and businesses supporting them and, while this year we’ve supported Chartwell, because my family has been touched by cancer, so it’s a charity I have a personal reason for supporting, next year Joshua has a charity he particularly wants to support and, as he’s been an active part of the fund-raising efforts, we’ll probably support them.

Other benefits

It’s a great team development opportunity, Joshua and I go to the gym to train together and it reflects our business ethics of ‘whatever it takes to get the job done’ attitude.

It’s exactly how we tackle every client problem.  Right now we have a particularly knotty challenge, the client has something causing a glitch, we’ve seen it happen, but have been unable to replicate it in a test environment.  So, we’re off to visit the site and work on it hands on until it’s fixed – and it’s not a local company, but a few hours drive.  It doesn’t matter – we’ll find a way to fix it.

Of course, we have personal challenges when we tackle something physical, it can be hard and really test our reserves, but we love a challenge.  Life isn’t easy, you’ve got to give it a go.

Now we’re serious ice-hockey fans too.  It’s exhilarating watching the speed that they respond, change direction and accept that, if they get hit by the flying puck, it’s going to hurt.  Again, it reflects our business ethos, we need to be fast on feet – or on skates.  If you get knocked down, get up and get on with it.

Having said that, while we can skate, neither of us is tempted to try ice hockey, it’s too fast and violent; we’d get annihilated!