Peterborough fitness studio’s 28-day around the world challenge to raise £10,000 for MCF

The “Elevate Around the World in 28 days” challenge will consist of a team of 36 people, who will be running, biking and rowing a total of 41,075 km in a virtual relay around the world.

The team will be covering an average distance of 1467km between them every day to clock up enough kilometres to complete the challenge and meet the fundraising target of £10k.

Dan Cumberworth and Darren Fox, co-owners of Elevate Fitness Studio, have been hosting online fitness classes throughout the lockdown and keeping their gym members motivated and healthy with regular social media posts.

“To keep motivation going as the lockdown continues, they were keen to set their members a challenge at the same time as raising funds for Médecins Sans Frontiers (MSF).

“We are passionate about fitness and wanted to challenge ourselves and our Elevate members to keep pushing their fitness goals during the lockdown” said Dan. “The motivation to reach our challenging £10k fundraising target comes from seeing the amazing work of Médecins Sans Frontier in countries that are least able to respond to the coronavirus pandemic.”

“We’ll be recording the number of kilometres each participant covers each day and tracking our progress around the globe on Facebook and Instagram” explained Darren. “I’ll be on my static bike and rower every day getting the distance done and motivating the other team members to get their distances covered too.”

Supporters can follow the challenge on the Elevate social media pages using the hashtags #elevate28, #ElevateAroundTheWorld and #ElevateMSFcovidappeal.

The challenge will see the participants virtually passing through 28 countries and their website (www.elevatefitnessuk.com) will be updated daily with facts and information about each place as they visit, as well as the work that MSF undertake there.

The team hope to raise £10k for MSF who, as COVID-19 continues to spread, are racing to respond to the pandemic in the more than 70 countries in which they run programmes, while opening projects in new countries as they become pandemic hotspots. Across the world, MSF teams are training and supporting local health authorities on infection prevention and control methods and detection and triage of patients with COVID-19 to prevent health facilities from becoming amplifiers of the pandemic.

The Elevate team have set up a Just Giving page here: https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/elevatefitness and will be posting regular updates as the challenge progresses.

Supporters can also follow the challenge on Instagram (www.instagram.com/elevate_fitness_uk/) and Facebook (www.facebook.com/elevatefitnessukgym/)