The Artemis Great Kindrochit Quadrathlon is recognised as one of Scotland’s toughest one day event. Participants must swim one mile across Loch Tay, walk/run 15 miles over 7 Munros, kayak for 8 miles before finally finishing the challenging event with a 34 mile cycle around the entire loch. 

Every pound that you donate will levarage four times its worth for the project - enabling communities in Guatemala to have access to their land, and to make that land profitable so that they can improve their quality of life, send children to school, and access health care.   

It's been a long time since I did any proper exercise and so I began training back in the dark winter mornings and am now looking forward to doing some outdoors training at the weekends, although I suspect no amount of training will be enough for this event!!  All costs of entering are covered and so every donation will go straight into the programme in Guatemala.

The reason behind getting involved is to raise money for a Mercy Corps project in Guatemala, working with indigenous communities in Alta Verapaz and Quiche to enable them to secure rights to their land, and then to make profit off that land through improved farming and marketing of their produce.  If you want to find out more about the project, take a look at these short videos:

- Owning the Land: In rural Guatemala, Mercy Corps plays the role of neutral mediator to help farmers and finqueros resolve land conflicts peacefully, setting the stage for economic advancement. 

- Tilling the Soil:  Training newly landed farmers and helping them sell to lucrative markets is the second step in Mercy Corps' approach to rural economic development.

 You can also see this brief description 

It is an important programme and money has to be raised in order to implement and so please give generously so that me braving cold Scottish waters at 6am and running up 7 mountains and so on will be worth it!