Caroline Freeman
Caroline's Wobbleberry Challenge
Fundraising for Hannah's Willberry Wonder Pony Charity
Story
Hannah Francis was a teenage event rider who, like my daughter, had come up through the ranks of Pony Club and was competing at British Eventing affiliated events. At the age of 17 Hannah was diagnosed with an aggressive bone cancer known as Osteosarcoma. During her fight against this disease, Hannah set about completing her bucket list and was determined not to let anything get in her way. In the process she succeeded in raising a lot of money to help fight this disease and set up the Willberry Wonder Pony Charity which aims to continue her good work finding a way to battle this awful disease and also to help grant wishes of an equine nature for seriously ill young people and their families through Willberry's Wishes. Sadly she lost her fight against illness on 1st August 2016 at the age of just 18.
Four founder members decided to set themselves a challenge - the Wobbleberry Challenge as a means to raise money #kickingcancersbutt. This then developed into something much larger with the original four looking to see if anyone else wanted to join them in their wacky challenge to complete a BE 80 competition before the end of 2017. They were amazed at the interest and now an enormous number of people have taken up the challenge, including myself.
The key characteristics of a Wobbleberry are:
* not currently fit enough to get round a cross country course - that's a tick from me and doing this challenge for charity will give me the kick up the backside that I need to lose weight and get fit again
* not currently brave enough to get round a cross country course - well I haven't ridden round one of them since 1989 so I don't know, but I'm definitely not brave enough to jump the stuff my daughter does (fortunately I only have to jump 80cms!)
* old enough to know better, and know that this will hurt! - yup, that's me
* dedicated to raising money, to training and to conquering the fear - another tick from me, and there will definitely be plenty of fear to conquer, having not ridden for over 12 years and had hip and knee replacement operations in that time, I don't even know if I can actually ride, let alone do a dressage test, jump a round of show jumps and complete a cross country course all in one day!
We are all supportive of each other, aiming to be weeble-esque
"we wobble, but we don't fall down".
#kickingcancersbutt
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