Darren Steele
Darren's Barcelona Triathlon 2010
Fundraising for Oxfam GB
Story
Post Race Update!
Thank you very much to everyone who donated below (or is about to donate!).
I finished the triathlon in 2 hours 15 minutes and 14 seconds, beating my target.
(I should point out that the cycle section of the Barcelona course is only 34km rather than the standard olympic distance of 40km, which makes the course a bit quicker!).
The generosity of everybody has led to a total (including the giftaid) of over £1000 so I'm really pleased.
As most of you know, my lovely girlfriend, Cat, has escaped me for 6 months whilst working for Oxfam in Senegal.
She's helping to coordinate the response to a food crisis in the Sahel region of Sub-Saharan Africa (an area covering the three countries of Niger, Mali and Chad) which currently affects over 10 million people.
We don't hear very much about this in the UK as its not "exciting" news, but the problems there are serious and getting worse:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/africa/2010/04/100428_nigerhunger.shtml
This situation leaves me with (a little) more spare time than usual, so rather than spend it all in the pub I decided that a productive way to use this would be to raise money for Oxfam by competing the the Barcelona Triathlon on 17th October 2010.
Whereas Cat's sacrifice is not seeing friends and family for 6 months, mine is somewhat shorter, I just have to spend less than 3 hours swimming 1.5km in the sea, cycling 40km and running 10km round the city of Barcelona. Oh and a couple of hours here and there preparing...
I'm obviously covering all the costs myself, so all your donations go directly to Oxfam, not to fund my weekend wearing lycra, but if you would particularly like to see pictures of me in sweaty lycra to prove I did it, I will of course email them round!
So I would really appreciate any donation (the larger the better, but every little helps!) to support the work Cat's doing in preventing the shortages turning into an actual famine.