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Today it becomes very real as we start the official countdown to our charity challenge, dog sledding in the Arctic Circle, we will be heading off on the 19th January 2019.

In 2012 our lives got turned upside down when Emma became and ill and was diagnosed with Panhypopituitarism, a rare chronic illness that affects every aspect of our lives.  Emma lives with constant pain and fatigue amongst other things and though it is a struggle we do not want this to be the rest of our lives, so we have taken on this challenge to give us focus and hopefully realise our dream of going dog sledding in the Artic Circle.  Our blog name Release the Dream stemmed from us deciding that we wanted to achieve something that we have always wanted to do.

One of the good things about this challenge for us is that it is an open charity challenge, that is we could nominate any charity and we wanted to raise funds for a local charity – Eilidh Brown Memorial Fund.  We are buying our own kit and paying  £2,000 towards the costs of challenge and about 30% of all the money raised will go towards the balance of our costs the rest will go straight to the Eilidh Brown Memorial Fund.

It may seem a long time to go but we want to raise as much
money as possible for the Eilidh Brown Memorial Fund between now and then, aiming to raise a minimum of £8,000

The Dog Sledding challenge is graded as “Moderate”. This is
the perfect challenge for participants who are of an adventurous spirit and an open mind, but perhaps haven’t taken on a strenuous challenge event previously and are hoping to put themselves out of their comfort zone!

The Dog Sledding Challenge we will be:

• Sledding for around 5-7 hours per day
• Covering approximately 180km across 5 days of hiking
• Using your core strength to control the sled
• Sleeping in temperatures that can reach -40 Celsius
• Over-nighting in very basic wilderness cabins, where the toilets are outside and you will room together in one room
• Taking charge of and looking after your own set
  of dogs. You will see to their needs before yours

This is getting all a bit real and scary now, what have we done?

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