Race for life?
More like stroll around the park for the evening with some mates wearing some pink tat and then go to the pub!
ride 100 miles (loads of people do that every weekend),
I wonder what a percentage of the population actually do that? Less than 0.001% would be my guess.
Sponsorship Rant
There not a just giving page on the go for this? 😆
Race for life?
More like stroll around the park for the evening with some mates wearing some pink tat and then go to the pub!
It's rased over £500m not bad for a stroll and a pint.
Drac - I've read the 1st post a few times to try to ensure I'm not missing something.
Perhaps you could explain where it defines the fitness or otherwise of the participant?
I think we're all agreed that for some people riding 100 miles would be a challenge. Perhap you can also see that it's not those people we're actually saying are taking the piss, but those for which the sponsored event is just something they enjoy doing or want to do because it's fun and not a challenge.
Perhaps you could explain where it defines the fitness or otherwise of the participant?
That's exactly the point a 100 miles for some is a challenge, does it matter if they fancied doing it or not it can still be tough. The remark of loads of people do it every weekend belittles the effort it can be for some.
Run a charity here, the best form of giving is direct. Short illustration of what works for us - went to buy a small fleet of bikes as we are moving some of our transport to greener methods. A customer heard about what we were doing and has paid for one of the bikes even upgrading it to electric. Has cost us nothing (no fundraising costs) and gives us 100% of the benefit. It also allows us to build a relationship with the donor that is meaningful.
That type of altruism is rare!
Last year I rode round Staveley and Kentmere a few times. Then one weekend I did pretty much the same thing as part of the Sam Houghton Challenge and raised a few hundred quid for cancer research in the process. I'm a right ****t.
Sponsor someone to ride 100 miles? Depends. Are they a regular cyclist that wont find it tough? Then no.
I think I'd be looking at the cause as well rather than solely at the personal challenge difficulty. If it's a charity worthy of support then it's worth supporting, n'est-ce pas?
Sometimes threads like this are useful too. I donated to a guy because his seemed like a worthy cause. It's very very rare i do that.
I've not even donated to my own sons one in a few weeks yet.
I'll sponsor this thread 1p per page.
I can see the OP's point, for instance when there was a charity abseil off one of the cranes on the Clyde a few years back, I knew I wanted to do it and wasn't really doing it to raise money, so I paid for the expenses out of my own pocket and everything I raised was on top of that. I felt this was a fair deal as I got to do something fun and paid for it myself, and the charity got a bit of exposure and maybe a bit more money.
I wasn't offended by anyone who said no.
I agree that there seems to be an industry springing up offering to essentially get you fun stuff to do if you raise "enough" "for charity". I'm not very comfortable with it.
Whenever I do the Strathpuffer I drum up sponsorship. It's a 24 hour race, I used to do a lot<span style="font-size: 0.8rem;"> of them and while they're hard at race pace, they're doable .</span>
I raise money at the Puffer for Glencoe and Lochaber mountain rescue teams, because the week before I did the race in 2013 my old race partner for most of these races were was killed in an avalanche and they picked him up. I'm clear about that when I ask for money, and pay the cost of the event and travel (and broken bike costs!) myself. Over the last three times I've done it we've raised about £30k.
That seems alright to me. But I'd agree that sponsoring someone to do a 5k run, something anyone can manage, for a charity they've picked at random then I'm much less invested.
Sponsored events should be something interesting, not this bike riding guff.
A few years back my mates set a world record for the three legged walk, that was sponsored and made money for a kids' charity.
Now some kid wants me to sponsor her to do swimming (she's the school swimming champion), she can do one 'cos it's not interesting enough.
Anything short of Snowdon on a pogo stick and I'm out.
Does it matter what the challenge/task etc. is as long as the money raised goes to the Charity? Everyone is different and we all find things challenging - me I'm scared of heights so an abseil of a bridge/building would be a huge challenge for me.
With some of the bigger challenges i.e. Everest Base Camp, Kilimanjaro, Machu Pichu etc. there is the self funding option where you pay the trip costs upfront and the sponsorship raised goes to the charity - if I were to do one of these it would be the self funded route.
I agree with not being too impressed with the "pay for my church choir to tour Japan" type things though.
Yep, in the same boat as the OP. Sponsor me to grow a beard...what?? A bloke I know decided to raise money doing this and it really boiled my piss. For a start, he was one of those blokes that could tear the hair out in the morning with gorilla tape and by 4pm he'd have a beard. The second point was that he was a scruffy bastard anyway and he was a network engineer so it wasn't like anyone expected him to shave. So basically sponsoring him to be lazy and continue his scruffy appearance...no thanks.
I did a sponsored ride to work - which was 90 miles each way and I decided to do it in December to make it extra hard. It was miserable, on the first attempt I fell off on the ice at 4am and had to call my mum to come pick me up. I'm not saying everyone should come up with an idiot idea like mine, but as mentioned you're going to do a sponsored event, make it well beyond your comfort zone or do something like the cake baking above (but that's not really sponsoring).
