As many of us adjust to the confines of varying degrees of lockdown restrictions and working from home, fitness and wellbeing activities have seen rising interest as we struggle to fight our lockdown bellies and maintain good health.

Defying the national mood, the team at Wildfire decided that Christmas was the ideal time to lift spirits by setting a team challenge where we could all feel connected, do good, keep fit and learn new things, while simultaneously raising money for charity.

You may have already read about our Christmas raffle extravaganza, where we raised £1,143 for the Trussell Trust, but we also wanted to do something that involved physical activity together, albeit remotely from each other.

Enter the Wildfire Winter Walkers challenge. For a month in the lead up to Save the Children’s annual Christmas Jumper Day, for which we also set up a Just Giving Page, everyone would make time every day to go outside and take a walk.

To track progress, we installed the Stridekick app to our phones to count our steps, and by setting up a group challenge in the app we could count our collective achievement. Wildfire pledged to donate £1,000 to Save the Children for every million steps we walked as a team.

Alongside this initiative, we enlisted the help of photographer Alex Rumford to give us a workshop about photography, and combined these activities so that each day we could take and share photos from our walks.

Over the course of 30 days, our team took it in their stride to find new routes to walk, whilst snapping pictures on their phones that caught their eye. At the challenge end, Alex shortlisted and commented on our best pics and you can view some of the highlights on our Instagram.

Many walkers clocked up above and beyond the daily average – although it was very much a team effort and not a competition (honestly, some people just can’t help themselves!) Joking aside, every step counted and evidently some great distances were covered, with the collective total steps at the end of the 30 days totalling 3,196 258!

We are glad to be able to make our contribution and it was a fun experience that helped us to all feel connected while we’re working remotely from home. We hope 2021 brings us all opportunities to find more ways to be positive and to unite in these challenging times.