 A marathon Taekwondo class whereby over 240 students from the Mark Farnham School of Taekwondo participated rose over £25,000 pounds for the Macmillan Cancer Support charity, with many students managing to complete the full fat 24 hours. A huge range of people took part from 5 years to over 60 and every colour belt to black. Many of the instructors were also teaching for the whole duration and managed to stay enthusiastic and motivated, as well as sane! A marathon Taekwondo class whereby over 240 students from the Mark Farnham School of Taekwondo participated rose over £25,000 pounds for the Macmillan Cancer Support charity, with many students managing to complete the full fat 24 hours. A huge range of people took part from 5 years to over 60 and every colour belt to black. Many of the instructors were also teaching for the whole duration and managed to stay enthusiastic and motivated, as well as sane! This event also attracted much local press coverage and was featured in most of the regional newspapers as well as by Anglia Television. It is also hoped that this event could be considered a world record attempt by the Guinness Book of Records, although this is yet to be confirmed.
I have to confess I only managed 12 hours of the class during the day but that didn’t stop me grumbling as I rolled out of bed at 5.30 am for a brisk 7am start on a cold Saturday morning but this soon dissipated as I joined my friends who had already done 12 hours. The room was divided up into five grade groups from white to black, with many of the black belts taking on the responsibility of instructing. We rotated round in four 30 minute blocks doing a variety of Taekwondo tasks with a 30 minute break for food and rest. A huge amount of Pot Noodles and tea were kindly donated by a local supermarket and I was caught on camera scoffing a Beef and Tomato one. An experience I hope never to repeat. We covered a full range of aspects including floor work, patterns, technical lessons in kicks and hand techniques and lots and lots of stretching! We avoided expending valuable energy by sparring although there was a fun tournament run during the night that included some sparring and competition patterns. Fortunately one of my friends managed to record some of this, the highlight of which was a highly entertaining sparring match with Head instructor and school owner Mr Farnham being given a run for his money by his son Dale.
Losing Sleep
Sleep deprivation wasn’t a problem for me but after eight hours or so my feet were aching and I was starting to lose my concentration. However, whatever fatigue I was feeling was literally two-fold for the others as they had started at 7pm the previous evening and had carried on throughout the night. Event founder Claire Moore said that, “everybody seemed to have a tough time at different stages of the event. Mine was between 5 and 7am,” but she combated this by, “not paying attention to the time and helping each other socially with a lot of humour and encouraging words from the guys I was working with.” Humour was definitely the key here; in our red belt group we kept each other going with our rubbish jokes and comedy-kihapping. I was amazed at Mr Farnham’s energy as he led from the front, constantly cheering and driving us on and encouraging us with his enthusiasm, never once showing his fatigue apart from his croaky voice at the end. Mr Farnham says, “Despite the physical and emotional strain, it was like a big party, people were laughing and cheering, we had so much fun.”
Although this event was primarily about lasting the course; testing a good two or three of the tenets of Taekwondo, “perseverance” and “indomitable spirit” being the ones that spring to mind and raising a lot of money for charity, there were some serious Taekwondo lessons going on. The structure and discipline of this Korean martial art were the lynch pins holding this event together and driving people to the end of the day. The teaching never lost its quality once, a virtue that is upheld within all of the Mark Farnham Schools and I myself managed to improve some of my kicking techniques thanks to the teaching team of Lynsay Williams and Charlotte Simpson. How these two women managed to keep looking fresh and glamorous after about 20 hours of continual training and instructing is a mystery to me, I had only been there for eight and I looked like hell!
Growing Event
One thing that was unforeseen was how quickly this event grew and its scale as no-one could have anticipated how many people came and lasted the duration. I first heard of the event at the colour belt grading back in October but from then on, peoples’ gusto increased exponentially to fill a massive sports hall that was never once sparsely covered. Claire Moore spoke of first formulating the idea of raising money for the Macmillan fund as her friend Ross, “wanted to do a fun run but whilst checking out the Macmillan website I thought lots of people were doing this and it would be more fun to do something else. As we all do Taekwondo, it seemed the way to go.” But even Claire was surprised as, “I hadn’t anticipated so many people being there.” Nor even of raising so much money, the total which is currently standing around £25,000 or just over £1,000 per hour.
The end of the event was one of the most moving as there were at least 200 students lined up to finish the class, the majority of whom had done the exact same 24 hours earlier. The class was finished off with some stretching and with the knowledge that the students and instructors have completed one of the hardest challenges of their lives with Mr Farnham paying tribute to his students by saying, “What a fantastic group of people, I’ve been so impressed by every single one of them and it went better than I ever could have imagined it would.” With that, we bowed and hobbled home to crawl into our beds; hoping to never eat a Pot Noodle again.
If you would like to make a donation to Macmillan Cancer Support, please contact Mark Farnham via his website www.markfarnhamtaekwondo.co.uk
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