Rowing in December

03 Jan 2010 posted by Dave Holby

Current Location – Macapa, Brazil

25111 km rowed… 14964 km remaining

Time for the old winter thermals to make an appearance! I always look forward to the thought of rowing in freezing temperatures to show rugged grit, manly defiance  and steely determination but as soon as it actually happens I find it utterly miserable – for the second time this year I’ve rowed in snow and if I can get away with not seeing it again during this challenge I will be absolutely delighted. Despite the numb bum, the build up to Christmas in the town centre is always exciting and the virtual plod has taken us into Brazil – this time last year we were in virtual Russia which made perfect sense with the weather… I think I’ve properly messed up the route this time round! As we hit the 18 month point in the challenge I popped into the BBC Radio Berkshire studio for the Sarah Walker show to talk about the row  - the interview starts at about 2 hours and 11 mins in and if you’d like to  have a listen please do so here. There’s also a really cool piece on the Breakthrough Breast Cancer website and I’m hoping it will help us raise some corporate sponsorship as we gear up for the last 12 months of the row- we’ve just hit the £11,000 mark which is absolutely fantastic.

Earlier in the month I met up with my good friend Andrew McCargow who works as a professional photographer… we met at night in the freezing rain in the middle of the War Memorial Park - he simply asked me to bring a rowing machine and some tight fitting tops. The result of our liason were a series of outrageous photographs involving multiple rowers – if only there were four of us… I could have had this wrapped up by last Easter! I have popped two of my favourites below.

Andrew is as cool as he is talented – if you’d like to know more about him and see his amazing work please check out his website.

A huge thank you to Sam, Andrew, Paula, Simon, Paul, Bhikhu, Rob, Gwen, Jon and Simon for donating online through the justgiving page and especially to Harvey and Carol for collecting all the left over change from an Indian meal that came to a rather wonderful £50!  I’d also like to thank my good friend Martin (who you might remember from the September blog as running as a gorilla in The Great Gorilla Run in boiling heat over the summer) for giving me a figgy pudding… it’s  like a fig roll but you can add ice cream to it and not look ridiculous!

This last year has been a great one for the row (we’ve covered 17,000km in the last 12 months and rasied over £11,000 to date) and the support has, as ever, been brilliant and utterly vital to me – without it I would have come a cropper a long, long time ago. Hopefully this coming year will bring even more pennies for Breakthrough – they deserve everything we can muster for them.

Thank you again and have a fantastic Christmas and New Year x