April 2020, the force of Covid 19 shook the entire world, and lockdowns began, we started seeing and experiencing firsthand the effects of being locked down on ourselves and friends and family. Our kids felt like lions in a zoo!
As a sport driven family, with no freedom to go for a run or a family walk, and with our running event and our running holiday business impacted heavily by the covid restrictions we sat on our kitchen table finding ways not only to make our lives and our 3 children’s lives more bearable but also the lives of people within our network what “we thought” would be a few hundred people at the most.
How wrong could we be?
Participants
Countries
In May 2020 we launched our first Virtual Lands End to John O Groats Event to help motivate people who were struggling during the lockdown. We wanted something a little more than your everyday virtual event so we decided on a virtual event you could track yourself on a map and you receive postcards along the route which would give you the incentive and motivation to carry on.
This attracted a couple of hundred people and we were thrilled!
We took our kids camping for the weekend as it was the only thing we were allowed to do during this time, little did we know chaos was erupting and in one weekend our Lands End to John O Groats 3rd Cohort had received over 2000 entries! We came home to online chaos… Our feelings were a mixture of excitement and fear and come launch day, almost 3000 people excitedly waiting to get started on their journey started to log their mileage… our system crashed, blew up… IT WENT KABOOM!
For the following 5 days we worked around the clock with a team of developers to quickly rebuild our system so it was able to handle the new volume and more. We call these the “Peanuts and redbull days” because Tori worked around the clock for 5 days living off peanuts and redbull!
It took us some time to get the right team and now we’ve found it we’re not letting go. Each person on our team brings great value and laughter to the team. We are now expanding into other areas and our team keeps on growing.
Nathan is the Co Founder of End to End and works with the Sales & marketing team. Nathan is also an Elite athlete, running for Great Britain in the 24 Hour squad and Wales in the 100KM.
Tori is the Co Founder of End to End and Nathan’s wife. With a background in Design, Technology, Marketing, NLP and Psychology she is very much involved in all aspects of the business.
Valerie is our Admin Manager and deals with all the administration of the company including managing Tori and Nathan. She is the first point of contact and will go above and beyond to help.
Milo is our administrator and community manager, he is the person who helps everyone if you need it and manages the facebook community of over 20,000 people. His job is not easy but he manages to do it with a smile.
Saurav is our head developer and has been with us since the very beginning of End to End. He controls the tech build and maintenance of the challenges to make sure all is running smoothly.
Jo is part of our marketing team along with our Corporate Wellness team, she brings the strangiest ideas to the table and we love her for it. Jo’s creativity is unique and she is amazing at what she does.
Sheryl is new to the team and is our new Graphic Designer. She creates designs that are like pieces of art and is involved in the design of all the incredible T-shirts and medals we have at End to End.
Rachel is in charge of the blog and PR, making sure we give our participants great tips and advice via free articles on our website. She also takes charge of all the PR work.
Sean is our Junior Developer, helping manage and build the tech side of the challenges for our corporate and charity partners.
When we started on this journey the plan was 1 route, 1 challenge, 1 year. We’ve now got 12 virtual Challenges from a range of routes from all over the world and who knows where this journey will take us next. We love every minute of creating these challenges and seeing people achieve great things.
We help to fight hunger by donating meals to those in need through food banks, charity partners, homeless shelters and more when a participant reaches 50% on any of our challenges.
At 20%, 40%, 60% and 80% of everyone's challenge trees are donated on behalf of each participant to contribute to a more sustainable future. Totalling 4 trees per finisher.
We help charities fundraise through our charity partner program, which gives them access to donations from signups and money raised through fundraisers.
We pride ourselves on being able to give back to our comminuty, we are grateful for what we have and believe that being kind can make a huge difference in this world.
Every school from around the world get's access to Free School Challenges in our education program. Children are our future let's make them fit and healthy in both mind and body and help tackle child obesity.
We pride ourselves on being able to donate to various charities each year and not just one, we support charities close to us and more by donating throughout the year for various causes.
Giving back is one of our most important values, we are grateful for what we have and believe that being kind can make a huge difference in this world.
Join others within our challenges in our ultimately incredible facebook community, It’s like no other support network you have ever seen. Thousands from all over the world will encourage you, support you, motivate you, and share their own stories, tips, and advice giving you a great sense of community spirit to help you achieve your goals.
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