Over the last couple of months Dumfries and Galloway Disability Sport branch have been working hard to keep our athletes engaged and physically active during the latest lockdown restrictions and the winter months.
To keep active safely we have . . .. .
January Miles Challenge
With plans to start some weekly sessions put on hold, we started the year positively by planning a January Miles Challenge. How many miles can we collectively complete in the month of January and where can we virtually travel too! This challenge was available for all our athletes and their families to take part in and involved any active method of travel such as walking, running, cycling, horse riding etc to get their miles total. Each participant who entered received their daily miles tracker sheet to keep track of all their miles throughout the month and at the end of the month, all miles were added together to create our grand total! With over 60 athletes and their families taking part, everyone did amazing, working together as a team to achieve an incredible collective mileage of 2421.08 miles! So where could we travel to??? After working out the miles, as a team we could travel from Dumfries to the North Pole!!
The January Challenge was very well received by our athletes and their families. Through the feedback we have from our athletes, all who participated highlighted that the January Miles Challenge increased their physical activity. We also received the following feedback from some of our athletes and parents:
“I had the incentive to walk further because it was a challenge.”
“Kept us healthy and helped cheer us up.”
“It was nice for Eleanor to be part of something in the current times.”
“The challenge helped us tone up and I lost a couple of pounds! Also kept my sanity on days which were hard going.”
February Fun Bingo & Miles Challenge
Following on from our January Challenge we launched our February Fun Bingo Challenge, an individual challenge where each participant received their own bingo sheet which had 25 exercises on it with the aim to try and complete as many as they can within the month of February. The challenge was entirely up to the individual, they could aim to do 1 exercise per day or 1 exercise per week and see if they can, complete 1 line or 2 lines of the sheet or see if they can complete all the challenges for a full house! We also continued with our miles challenge for the month of February to encourage everyone to keep getting out and about, staying active and counting the miles they complete for the month and we will see if we can beat our January total! Our February challenge was again very successful with 53 athletes and their families signed up to take part. At the end of our February challenge athletes were able to see how many lines of the bingo they had completed with some even managing a full house, and we counted our miles as a team for the month of February. With a high total to try and beat from January our February Miles did amazing and although we didn’t beat our January total, we did travel 2,227.5 miles, which was brilliant and virtually we could travel from Dumfries to Cyprus!
Again, our February bingo and miles challenges were very engaging for our athletes and their families and the feedback we have so far is very positive, with some examples as follows:
“I walk everyday just now so the challenge gave me a focus to set goals for myself.”
“Good, looking forward to the next challenge.”
March Wordsearch Challenge . . .
With the great feedback we have received from our previous challenges we have keep our challenges going and have a new challenge just launched for March, our March Wordserch Challenge. While out staying active, increasing your miles we are asking our athletes and families if they can complete the wordsearch of D&G Special Olympic Sports. The words can be made up form an item, building, place, nature etc We are also going to keep track of our miles for March and again see if we can beat our January and February totals. Our March Challenge is now live on our Facebook page and we look forward to seeing everyone staying active again during the month.
Zoom Catch Up and Activities . . .
We have been keeping in contact with athletes, parents, coaches and volunteers through our Zoom catch up and activities. These sessions are held every second week on a Tuesday and help keep everyone in contact through our catch up and fun sessions. To date we have held a quiz which was organised and delivered by our athlete Lennon Hughes and a treasure hunt organised by Laura Vickers. We have another couple of sessions due to take place over the next few weeks and we look forward to seeing everyone on our zoom calls.
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