Eight friends over Three Peaks in 24 hours!

Jonathan Benton recruited seven friends to take on The National Three Peaks Challenge. This meant climbing the highest peaks in England, Wales and Scotland within 24 hours, including walking a total of approximately 42 kilometres and driving 462 miles. They were inspired to do this as Jonathan's sister was diagnosed with colon cancer in December 2014 at the age of 32, and is a patient of Professor Stebbing.

In preparation for the event, the trekkers tried to make their training as specific as possible to the challenge and so it mainly involved practice treks on steep terrain, carrying a rucksack with full equipment. In addition they did approximately 16 weeks of cross training and resistance training.

On the day, the team managed to achieve the challenge within 24 hours despite terrible conditions which made it very tough. There was a lot of snow on Ben Nevis, misty, dark and damp at Scarfell Pike and horrendous icy rain and high winds at Snowdon!

All of this hard work resulted in a tremendous fundraising result, with approximately £18,000 raised in total! In the week of the challenge, the team were in the top ten of of fundraising totals on the whole of the BT MyDonate website and were featured on their social media page!