Hope you are all well, it’s Ben here from The 401 Challenge.
Thank you so much for all the help and support you have shown The 401 Challenge over the past year and a bit, its been a rollercoaster year with so many amazing things happening that I will never forget.
I wanted to bring your attention to something that we are organising for the final week of the challenge, maybe some of your club members would be interested.
As you may or may not be aware, we as a team have had to make some changes to the final marathon. Our initial plans were to hold an all singing, all dancing event in Bristol where we would charge £40.10 for people take part. After a long thoughtful process we have come to the decision that it would be best in keeping with the projects objectives to hold the event virtually.
Our objectives have always been:
- To raise £250,000 to support both Stonewall and Kidscape
- To inspire people to challenge themselves and achieve things they never thought possible
- To raise awareness of bullying in the UK
- To run the equivalent distance of 401 marathons in 401 days
If we were to hold the final marathon in Bristol as we previously had planned, the costs of holding this event would have meant that we would’ve needed to sell 1000 tickets to cover basic administration fees. This just didn’t sit right with us, hence why we are now offering this as a virtual event.
So, to explain a little further and to help you understand what this means for you and your club members:
Between Sunday 2nd October and Sunday 9th October, the ‘Marathon 401 Virtual Event’ will take place.
- This event will cost £26.20 to enter with 100% of the proceeds going to help us raise the £250,000 as mentioned above, (yes that’s 100%).
- Individuals will be able to enter either a 10k, Half Marathon or Full Marathon distance.
- They can run their chosen distance anywhere in the world.
- They will be able to run this anytime during the 7 days the event is live for.
- They will be able to run their chosen distance in either 1 day or across 7 days, its up to them.
- They can do this on a treadmill, outside on their own or even as part of a group, i.e running club event? – depends on how social they want to be.
- They can use any event they are doing during the time the virtual event is live and this will count towards their distance, so say they have entered the Bournemouth Marathon on Sunday October 2nd and they register to run a virtual 401 marathon distance, they can use the Bournemouth Marathon distance as their virtual distance.
- They can use #marathon401 to share all their pictures on all social media channels with the entire 401 audience and beyond.
- Once they have completed their set distance and logged their miles, they will then be sent a medal, congratulations letter and goodies from our event sponsors via the post to the address they registered with.
If you are able to share this information with your club members and any would like to register for the ‘Marathon 401 Virtual Event’ please click on the link below.
https://etchrock.com/challenge/info/marathon-401
Please note, if any of you still plan to come to Bristol to run on Wednesday 5th October then you are more than welcome. The route is now decided and you can follow the progress and get any details you need form the link below:
https://www.facebook.com/events/250289181973570/
The format for the day will fall in line with how everyday so far has been, turn up and run whatever you want to run – runners will need to register through the virtual challenge link and pay their £26.20 and bring their confirmation email with them on the day as proof of payment.
If you have any questions or concerns please don’t hesitate to let us know and thank you again for everything you and your club has done for us, you have made this challenge a success as much as we have.
All the best
Ben and The 401 Team
Milburn Harriers 