No turning back now then!

So here we are, first serious blog of the adventure! We first started talking about doing these challenges back in January, so to finally be telling everyone about them feels like the first big step (of many!). There is no hiding that when we think about everything that lies in front of us over the next few years, it is somewhat daunting/ terrifying. The array of responses from people when we tell them about it has been brilliant, starting from the obvious, simple question of “Why??” and then, “You’re Mental” and then finally to the true support from some of our closest friends of “Whatever guys, you’ll never do it”. While those thoughts and views may be very well founded (especially since neither of us has done a challenge which comes close to any of these three challenges individually, let alone signing up for all three), they only serve to drive us on harder.

We are deep into our first block of training, with our trainer Rich Hume (www.challengechaser.com), who has rowed the Atlantic before and completed several double iron mans, so we are in good, knowledgeable hands! We would say training is going “well”; at times it seems to be just a brutal tour of the gym’s most sadistic contraptions, with seemingly never ending reps to complete on each (some clips of us both in large amounts of discomfort during all of this to follow soon for your amusement…), but we know that these will help us to build up our base strength and endurance at these early stages which will be so important going forward. It has been a bit of a baptism by fire, but taking things one day at a time, each session will get us one pedal/stride/stroke closer towards the finish line!

It has been an exciting month or so, having finally got the website and all our social media up and running. On the last count we had:

• Website Sessions: 450

• Page View: 2,170

• Facebook Likes: 215

• Twitter Followers: 63

• Instagram Followers: 37

So things are going well at this point, but we now need people’s help to continually spread the word, so please tell friends/family/colleagues/post man/barista/people on the tube (our cheekiest tactic to date has been going into all the Apple stores in central London and putting our website as the home page on every ipad/macbook possible)...

Now we have a website and training is underway, the next big phase is to start reaching out to some corporate sponsors to really get this off the ground. So we are busy sending out emails/presentations to people in the hope they might know someone who can support us.

If you think you might know someone who would be interested, please do let us know!

Let’s hope the next couple of weeks in the lead up to Christmas are as productive as the last month has been, then bring on 2015!

Thanks for all the support so far everyone - it’s been awesome.

Until next time,

Team Saddle Sand Sea

#saddlesandsea