Mountain climbing may be totally out of the question during the coronavirus lockdown but that hasn’t stopped some Norwich youngsters from scaling the height of Mount Everest in aid of a good cause.
Ella and Tom Boag, aged 12 and nine respectively, wanted to raise funds for homelessness charity St Martins, that their father Iain works for as head of residential care services. So they came up with the idea to use the trampoline in their garden to bounce their way to the equivalent height of the world’s highest peak - with help from friends living nearby in the Golden Triangle.
“It was a lovely response that the kids had to the lockdown,” explained Mr Boag. “I work for St Martins and they’ve been hearing a lot of the conversations around the difficulties that we face and responded in a very creative way, it’s very sweet.
“It started out with my kids and we’ve got a local Whatsapp group and the kids started messaging each other, so up and down the street there have been three or four houses all joining in and reporting back with the amount of bounces that they’ve done, so it’s been quite a community thing as well.”
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The height target was 29,029 feet (8,848 metres), the equivalent of the peak of the Himalayas, with a poster outside their house to update the community on their progress when people went out for their daily exercise.
And after some extensive bouncing efforts the youngsters have almost doubled their initial target of £300, with £570 raised so far.
“They’ve now made it to the top and they’ve just started bouncing all the way back down again!” Mr Boag added.
“It was an awful amount of bouncing but they had separated it out into different houses, for up to 3,000 bounces a day. So some could do about 500 but definitely over 1,000 each, so were basically running in and out of the house to do it.
“I think the biggest one was 3,000 but that was quite tough so they reduced it down - but it took them five days to get to the top.”
You can donate to the youngsters’ efforts for St Martins at justgiving.com/crowdfunding/iain-boag.
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