Greg Josey has walked more than 750km so far this month – which is more than one million individual steps – as part of his own fundraising challenge for Les Bourgs Hospice.
Having been unable to complete the ’30 walks in 30 days’ challenge in April after suffering an injury, Greg decided to raise money for the hospice this month instead.
He set himself a one-million-steps target, and a fundraising goal of £2,000, and started walking for up to five hours a day on 1 August.
His daily activity has included numerous runs too as Greg is a regular parkrunner and enters events organised by Guernsey Athletics and other charities.
During August this has included the athletics’ club’s summer ‘full course’ cross country and the Tower to Tower walk/run for Autism Guernsey.
“I do all these 30 30 challenges, and I really enjoy all of them, for Les Bourgs Hospice,” he explained.
“I got hooked in January this year with the Everest challenge that they were a beneficiary of, it was not them organising it directly, but the money that we raised this year went to them, and I really enjoyed that one. And then the 30 30 walk came up in April that I was determined to do over and above what I could. But, anyone who knows me will know that I normally do everything, and I didn’t stop racing, I didn’t stop running, and I went down during a cliff time trial and twisted my ankle on the 15th day. So that put a stop to that, and so I didn’t finish it.
“I thought to myself, ‘I’m going to do it again’. But how do I make it bigger? Especially if you go and do it on your own without them pushing it, I wasn’t sure when or how or what I was going to do.
“Then 30 Bays came up, and I’ve done it for a few years, but I’ve never done all 30 days in Guernsey. I’ve done 30 swims, but this year, I went swimming every day, including in Herm, but I didn’t make Alderney, for shame, but I really enjoyed it. I got a bit of sponsorship, and then that was it, I was definitely going to do something for Les Bourgs Hospice.
“I’ve heard about the million step challenge in the UK, it’s one of the Garmin challenges, and I’ve heard of Mark Prevel over here that had done it, so I thought, I’ll do it for Les Bourgs Hospice, and then it just got out of hand with more and more people supporting it, my work got behind it, and I just went for it.”
Greg took his one millionth step over the Bank Holiday weekend, but he has not stopped for a rest yet.
He’s determined to keep moving all month – to raise as much money as he can for Guernsey’s only hospice.
To do this, he’s going to keep walking and running including taking part in the Mind 10km race on Sunday, which will also raise money for Guernsey Mind.
“Hitting the target was absolutely fantastic,” he said. “Especially because Liz Stonebridge from Les Bourgs had said, ‘if you were going to hit it this weekend, do you want to come up and hit it here on the way to Les Bourgs’. I thought that was just too complicated. And so I said, ‘No, but I’ll do a walk, and be there for nine o’clock’. And then I had a sort of show around, they told me more about Les Bourgs, showed me things that they’d done with the money. And then literally, from there, I probably had another hour walk to get it in.
“To be honest, people that work with me said my second video (after visiting Les Bourgs) was so much better than the first. They could see that I was really excited about it and hitting it was really good for me as I didn’t know if I could do it originally, but once you get into it and you don’t want to watch TV or you don’t scroll on your phone, it’s actually not hard, as long as you’ve got support from your wife and your friends, because you don’t see them for five hours a day!”
In reality, Greg said hitting the one-million-steps target has seen him walking a minimum of four hours per day.
He has been walking for at least an hour each morning, for 45 minutes at lunchtime, and for up to three hours each evening.
He’s aiming to continue at that rate until Sunday, when he will walk to the start line of the Guernsey Mind 10k at the Imperial, run to the finish line at Grandes Rocques, and then walk home again.
“The challenge in my head was always about doing something every day,” he said.
“The million steps divided by 31 was 23,000 and I thought I can do that. You know, 20k or 25k a day, I can get there. I don’t know if I could run it every day, but I can definitely walk it.
“So it was always about doing the whole month. And that’s where Les Bourgs sort of got involved. They’ve got the 30 days, 30 swims, 30 walks, the 12 Days of Christmas, it was always about doing the whole month. So I wasn’t going to stop. If I did it a week ago rather than this weekend, I would still have kept going.”
Greg’s sponsorship page remains open at justgiving.com/gregory-josey