Patron needed!

Image source: http://tinyurl.com/44n294x

Next year, the big adventure is Dog Sledding in the Arctic Circle -- courtesy of Across the Divide.

To self-fund the challenge will cost me £2,860, including the £500 deposit I have to pay on registering. All fundraising money raised between now and the trip would be donated 100% to Cancer Research.

Alternatively, I can choose to raise a minimum of £4,720 in sponsorship for Cancer Research and pay only the £500 deposit from my own money.

I only need £500 to sign up with this option, but that's money I don't have lying around, going spare. But I do have some ideas on what I can do about this.

What I need as "The Flat Footed Adventurer" is some kind of sponsorship, or support -- in other words, I need a patron. The idea is if this challenge and the resulting publicity is successful to turn "The Flat Footed Adventurer" into a Free Range Career.

But we need to focus on this challenge first, and my ideas need some explaining I have made a list of as far as I can tell everything I need to make this challenge happen, and it looks something like this:

• Finance: This is most important, as I don't have £2860 -- corporate support towards this target will allow me to register and begin the charity fundraising.
• Fitness: This will be a challenge in the true sense of the word, and will require me to be dedicated to getting into the best physical shape I can be -- and have ever been. To do this I will need expert training, guidance and support.
• Publicity: I am a talented writer, and I want to document every step of the challenge, from signing up and raising money for Cancer Research, to the days spent sledding through the Norwegian wilderness. I will need help in getting my journals publicised -- and later, hopefully, published.

I have tried making contact with several large financial institutions. 8 out of 10 did not give me the time of day to even respond. One replied, curtly, that they do not support individuals. One replied and was both warm and helpful, sadly they could not help but they wished me luck. That was a bust.

The trouble is, I don't know who to contact. Surely, there are companies out there who could help and would want to help. When I hiked the Inca Trail in 2009, it was largely due to the help of transport giant First Group who were very generous in their sponsorship -- and they, in return, received a wealth of publicity, both in print and online. There is a tremendous opportunity for positive PR for any companies supporting me with this -- helped my own background in Public Relations. I am hoping this will help me to at least find people who might know people who can help.

Without the finance in place, I can't begin to find contacts for help with the other parts -- because the trip can't happen. I can get as fit as I like, learn to speak Norwegian and have a stunning network of people eager to help publicise my writing, but it's all for nothing if I can't even afford to go.

Cancer has directly affected my family. In 2008, my aunt Margie succumbed to the illness after a long battle -- she had loved to travel, and loved walking, and she was my inspiration for the trip to Machu Picchu. In 2010, my uncle John (my aunt's -- and my Dad's -- brother) was the victim of an aggressive brain cancer. The illness took him so quickly that there wasn't time to receive any nursing at home, but the family requested any donations to be made to Cancer Research UK. My uncle loved dogs, and this seems like a fitting way to remember both my aunt Margie and my uncle John, who were my Dad's two oldest siblings. I want to be able to raise awareness as well as money for Cancer Research. In the UK alone, someone is diagnosed with cancer every two minutes.

To summarise, what do I need from you? I need you to help spread the word. Please share this post with friends, with family, with followers. Please. Take 10 seconds just to think if you work for, or know, a company that would be able to help me achieve this challenge. But most of all, please help spread the word -- or if you have a spare few grand, and want the publicity, get in touch!

The Flat Footed Adventurer

I started a new blog today.  Not to replace this one, but instead to combine all my travel writing &adventure writing in one place.  At the moment, it only has the Inca Trail in it, because that's the only non-tourist adventure I've had -- but over time, it will be fleshed out with more adventures.  I want it to not only document my journeys themselves, but also my journey from London based, working in office in marketing, to becoming a professional adventurer and writer.  I can dream, right?

Shamefully, I found on importing my Inca Trail blog that the posts were never completed.  There's three whole days missing -- including Machu Picchu.  What a lousy writer I am.  Confusingly, there's extracts from a paper journal I kept at the time -- but I don't know what paper journal I used, or where that is now, so I don't know if all the paper entries have been transcribed.  I'm going to have to work from memory, with factual prompts to remind me of what was when and photographs to finish the story of that adventure -- almost two years after it took place.

It's proving very difficult to find the money to even pay for the deposit for the next trip, and while I have some ideas, that's another story for another day.

Read: The Flat Footed Adventurer

Things fall into place

Image source: http://tinyurl.com/2353vye

Things today have felt a bit like they are falling into place.

I mentioned in a previous post about Marianne Cantwell's Escape Your Corporate Cage career course that I had enrolled on, after things failed to take off for me with the similar Screw Work, Let's Play programme.  This Tuesday will be the second teleclass of the program, and I have been working on my accompanying worksheets.

The first set had me start with imagining my dream life -- not so hard to do, it involved things like writing and living near the sea and working from home.  I came a little unstuck around having to come up with a kind of project the first week -- I just drew a blank.  Like with Screw Work, Let's Play and the book's "Play Wednesdays", it should be something that's fun to do and you enjoy and would ideally form a part of your ideal life.  It's pretty sad when you can't think of anything.

To try and make some progress, and because it comes highly recommended by Ms Cantwell and John Williams, I took the Wealth Dynamics test.  I voiced some reservations at first.  In some ways it isn't too dissimilar to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator -- that I took last year when I was out of work, and has no scientific validity its profiling.  While I wasn't assured of any kind of scientific validity to it, I was told that it would help with supporting me on the course if I did know what my WD profile is.

I wasn't exactly surprised when -- $100 later -- of the 8 personality profiles, I turned up the "creator".  I'd read that most people guess their profiles wrong before they take the test, but I would have been very surprised had mine turned up anything other than that.  Recently at work we were giving interviewees psychometric tests, to rate their scores in various aspects, such as creativity and organisation.  I scored off the chart for creativity.

Considering I score so highly for creativity, I was a little disheartened that my muse was absent when I wanted to think of something to do.  I could think of my plans and free range career options, just not some little thing I could do for a taste of it.

Fortunately, today that has all changed.  I have worked through my worksheets for week 2, and was required to outline 3 or 4 ideas for my free range career.  My ideas were as follows:

1. Writing childrens books, in particular books about a naughty zebra who won't do things like have a bath or get ready for bed.  Why a zebra?  I just like them, and while I like things like Bongos and Zedonks more, they are a little obscure for childrens books.

2. An adventure sport company that benefits local communities.  It's an idea I have written on here about before, and it's a fairly simple concept.

3. Feature writer.  Essentially, I write about what I am passionate about.  In this case, I plan to talk to passionate and inspiring people and write about them.

I was then required to eventually narrow down my ideas to just one I am going to pursue for now.  It was hard. It was extremely bloody hard.  I wasn't worried so much about choosing the wrong thing, but I didn't want to not pursue something I was excited about.  In the end, I have decided that my third option gives me all of the elements I want most for my free range lifestyle, and can work other parts into it.

Starting immediately I am going to make contact with people I want to interview for my features.  Since I promised this year I would contact Carol Ann Duffy and Simon Armitage, they can be the start -- and my meeting now will be less "Can we have tea?" but more "I'd like to talk to you about your work".

I am excited and enthused to be starting on this -- the Zebra books can wait a little while.  I'm so excited I am ignoring that I have to go to work tomorrow, because this is really what my life is about...