Climbing Everest

This March, Raymond and Michelle Richards took their charity fundraising to new heights. The couple from Hedge End in Hampshire participated in a gruelling challenge that saw them walking up and down 333 wooden steps from the bottom to the top of St Catherine’s Hill in Winchester with sandbags strapped to their backs. Michelle says, “Each time we went up, we swapped a sandbag over, and it was a 67-metre elevation gain, which with the number of times we went up and down [133 times in total] was the equivalent of climbing Mount Everest.”

As a result, the couple raised a fantastic £1,010 for Crohn’s & Colitis UK. Raymond himself has lived with Crohn’s for 10 years, and also has family members with the condition, so his choice of charity was of particular significance.

“My personal journey with Crohn’s has been quite plain sailing compared to others,” Raymond tells us. “It was quite a daunting prospect to accept what it was and get help, because I’d seen the journey my mum had been through.”

Michelle and Raymond had previously raised over £400 for the charity in January 2020 by running 5k each day of the month. For 2021, they decided to go bigger.

“We wanted to do more beforehand, because it’s obviously a charity that’s close to my and my family’s heart, but we wanted to wait to get into a position where we could do it without risking my health,” explains Raymond. “As soon as I was on an even keel, we sat down and started planning what we were going to do.”

Although not seasoned hill walkers, the couple already had a relatively active lifestyle and Michelle is a qualified personal trainer.

“We’re not hill climbers; we don’t go out climbing hills all the time – we do a range of fitness activities but we’re not what anyone would deem as being super-duper fit,” Michelle laughs. “We thought ‘What could we do?’ and we like a challenge, so this was the biggest challenge we could come up with; walking up and down this hill over a weekend, carrying 20kg sandbags on our backs.”

Due to COVID-19 restrictions the couple were unable to get their family together to cheer them on as they normally would have. However, they still managed to find motivation in the friendly faces they encountered on the climb.

“We met loads of fantastic people and got loads and loads of support and donations,” says Raymond. “Two people we saw on the Saturday actually came back on the Sunday to check if we were okay and if we needed any food or drink or anything.”

Reflecting on the weekend, the pair agree that while it was a positive experience for them both, they now know how to prepare better for the next time.

“We could see the donations coming in over the weekend, so mentally it was quite easy to keep going, but we both felt that in hindsight training would have been a lot of help,” Raymond admits. “Our knees just gave out.”

However, Raymond and Michelle plan to continue fundraising in new and challenging ways for Crohn’s & Colitis UK. They have already got something in the pipeline and will announce it when all the details are finalised. “We need to go more extreme for 2022,” says Michelle.