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To persevere

When do you call it a day? What does it take to finally break your spirit and you decide to just sit back and let things go by? Fall back into your rut and be satisfied with what is going on around you, that your effort, was so small it would of not made any difference anyway as it was just too insignificant. How wrong I would have been. The days months and hours that I spent researching and organising this journey I still hear the echoes ringing in my head of how crazy the whole plan seemed the total insanity of not only doing the run, but just to even entertain the idea that I would be able to put the whole plan together. If I sit back and look over the whole scenario, I think of the behind scene planning that nearly took as much toll on me as the journey itself. So often projects like this are taken on and are really viable, but the onslaught of negativity of those around you, as well as the financial strain that it puts on people in the planning stages is so crippling that the projects are never carried through to fruition. Trying to run my businesses as well as the relentless task of getting this run off the ground, I think if I had not pushed on and refused to take no for an answer, no from sponsors, no from team members, no from China, I would have failed in my self-belief and would have regretted not attempting this or perusing my dream for the rest of my life. “Rather regret doing something that regret not having done it.” In a way I became so driven that at a stage this became an obsession. This is when things started to go wrong. I then sat back for a few weeks and let things settle, reassessed and looked at things from a different angle. I had to get to China and just see what I was up against. See how thing worked in China (I still have difficulty in understanding the workings of China), I felt that I had hit a dead end, I was chasing this dream, but it seemed to be clouded, I needed new inspiration as well as to create some excitement for myself and motivation for Braam to believe that this project could be pulled off. I contacted William in China and we spent the next 3 months setting up a 2 week reconnaissance trip to China to fact find and experience the wall for ourselves. I had to look at myself again, what was driving me and what was motivating me, I feel that this was essential to regain my focus as well as to know what I wanted out of this and was it going to be worth it on all levels of my life. Yes I wanted to do it few numerous reasons, for myself to test myself understand myself better and reassess my values in life , I think everyone looks at this in different ways and you all reach a time in your life where there is a void that needs to be filled and only you can do that. I did not want this to become just another adventure, I wanted it to be meaningful to more that just myself, I wanted to inspire others, our children, my children to live their dreams go out and reach for them, to install a sense of nothing is impossible, you can do it! After returning from China I for the first time began to see the enormity of the project as well as the necessity to get some more people on board to help, on my own this was never going to happen. Finance, this became the most important factor, without finance this was going nowhere and I could no longer finance it. Slowly I began to assemble a team.
I had approached Braam from the outset to do the run with me that was it. We now needed a support structure. Logistics, a registered company structure, media, web site, bank accounts and the rest. By chance a friend from childhood had just returned from living abroad, Geoff Smith, and had been working in the sport sponsorship field and offered to join up with us to head up the team as project director and take care of the day to day running of the company, finally some structure was taking place and I could concentrate on finding funding. Reading up on this, every adventurous biggest hurdle is the sponsorship. It is fact that most projects only find funding just before the are about to happen, or just after they have started and how true this turned out to be.

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