Mr Bowden's 2020k Challenge

Well done to Head of Athletic Development, Mr Ed Bowden, who by the end of this week will have completed his personal challenge to run 2020 kilometres in 2020 - an amazing achievement!

To reach his goal by Christmas he will be running three marathons this week, the Brighton route on Tuesday and Thursday, and the London Marathon route on Sunday. And, all this on top of running 20 kilometres every day last week!

At the beginning of 2020, Mr Bowden was talking to a friend about covering 2020k in the year across a mixture of disciplines, running, swimming and cycling. However, when lockdown started, it became easier to keep it to a running challenge for charity. The three charities Mr Bowden chose were Prostate Cancer UK, Young Minds and The Harlequins Foundation. Mr Bowden's girlfriend Emily also took part in the challenge and set herself the goal of completing 2020 burpees in 12 hours, which she smashed in 8 hours 49 minutes!

He said: "Charities on the whole have really struggled with fundraising this year. I wanted to do the challenge for charities that were important to me. I chose The Harlequins Foundation because I worked with them and they do amazing things to get young people physically active. Supporting the mental health of young people is vital, particularly during the year we have had, and the charity Young Minds connected with me most. I also wanted to support Prostate Cancer UK as prostate cancer charities are generally more underrepresented than others."

Lockdown really encouraged Mr Bowden to get creative with his running and combat the boredom of running the same routes. So as well as his herculean effort this week, he ran to all 14 London football stadiums and completed three 10k runs on his rooftop during the summer! In total Mr Bowden has completed 151 runs this year which have taken him 163 hours. That's seven days of continuous running!

So what's next?

"I'm going to enjoy Christmas and take some time to relax, but I quite like the idea of a group of Shiplake staff doing a charity cycle from London to Paris at some point, and perhaps run the Thames Path from origin to source - around 300k over 3 or 4 days."

Huge congratulations and well done Mr Bowden!

Mr Bowden has raised almost £10k for his charities and you can support him and the three causes here.