Category: Next Challenge Grant
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2017 Next Challenge Grant Closed for Applications
This year’s Next Challenge Grant has now closed for applications and donations. Applications: 208 people applied for the grant. Donations: 79 people donated a total of £412 which, after PayPal fees, translates to £382. A big thank you to everyone who donated. Adventurers: Ten adventurers contributed a total of £1,300 and I contributed my usual…
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Applications for The 2017 Next Challenge Grant close on Friday
The deadline for applications to The Next Challenge Grant is midnight on Friday, 7th April. You can apply here. The application form is online and should only take about five or ten minutes. All I need from you is to check you meet the criteria then hear a very succinct summary of your idea. If…
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Failure is My Fear (Worse Would Be Not Trying)
Heather Jones is about to set off to cycle between, hike up and swim on the slopes of the Welsh Three Peaks. She was one of the winners of last year’s Next Challenge Grant and has very kindly been loaned one of Simon Stanforth’s excellent expedition bikes for the trip. Below, Heather explains what’s motivated…
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Walking Every National Trail in England and Wales
This time last year, a 19-year-old Abbie Barnes wrote an article for this blog declaring her ambition to walk the length of every National Trail in England and Wales. Now, a year later, she’s reporting back on how she’s get on… (Abbie won £200 from my adventure grant. You can read more about it, make…
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Would You Donate £3 Towards Someone Else’s Adventure?
Background to The Next Challenge Grant Every year I put forward £200 of my own money as a grant to pay for someone else’s expedition. Several other ‘adventurers’ chip in too. Now I’m looking for 100+ members of the public to donate £3 each to put into the pot. I first did this in…
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Nate’s Big Commute
We’ve had some big expeditions come through The Next Challenge Grant: running 5,000 miles around the coast of Great Britain and crossing Kyrgyzstan on foot to name two. But we’ve also had some smaller adventures too like cycling the Berlin Wall and up Alpe d’Huez and today we have another. Nathan Freeman’s idea was as…
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2017 Next Challenge Grant Open for Applications
The Next Challenge Grant is now open for applications. Apply here. The grant typically awards between £100 and £200 for expeditions and small adventures. It’s open to anyone, anywhere in the world. The money comes from me (£200), several other adventurers (£100-200 each) and, hopefully, donations from a hundred members of the public (£3 each).…
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5 Nights in 5 Bothies with a 5 Year Old
Anyone who applies for The Next Challenge Grant has to summarise their idea in a single sentence. I get people to do that partly because I think it’s good practice to be get your pitch as succinct as possible. It’s also partly because it takes ages to read the hundreds of applications I get so…
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Running Across Kyrgyzstan
Grant winner Jenny Tough has recently returned from a remarkable trip: running the length of Kyrgyzstan. My first ever expedition was to Kyrgyzstan so I’ve got a soft spot for the place but even without my rose tinted memories it would be hard to conclude that running across a Central Asian mountain range was anything…
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Cycling the Berlin Wall
It barely seemed as if last year’s grant winners had finished their adventures when this year’s lot got under way. Nick and Nell, in particular, did not hang around. They set off the very morning after winning the award. Their challenge was to hire a pair of bikes and pedal them the length of the…
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Difficulty Isn’t Proportional to Distance – A 5,000 Mile Run Around the Coast of Great Britain
At the start of 2013, Elise Downing was not a runner. But a little over two years later, she was setting off to run 5,000 miles. Her remarkable run around the coast of Great Britain kept me constantly entertained, inspired and mind blown for its entire ten months’ duration. How could someone run that far?…
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Eight Times Up Alpe d’Huez
Everest is a mountain. ‘Everesting‘ is the act of climbing 8,848-metres. I once ran up 2,500 flights of stairs thus Everesting the Royal Geographical Society. Somewhat more impressively, 2015 Next Challenge Grant winner Mikey Bartley cycled up the iconic Tour de France climb Alpe d’Huez eight times. Here’s his account of the trip… [divide] Eight…