Right royal challenge
You could call it a one-in-a-million challenge.
Yesterday afternoon, New Zealand time, Queenstown's Carlos Bagrie, who owns Royalburn Station with his wife Nadia Lim, started the first of five six-hour shifts on an indoor rowing machine in London's Paddington Station.
Part of a team of 12 participating in the 'Thanks a Million Challenge', he hopes to help break a Guinness World Record, and raise £169,000 ($NZ380,841) to run an exercise programme for kids undergoing cancer treatment at Southampton Children's Hospital (SCH) for the next three years.
The brainchild of long-time mate Gihan Ganesh, an anaesthetist at SCH, the challenge involves two teams of six, working in shifts.
Each rower will spend 60 seconds on the erg every five minutes during their shift, rinse — possibly sleep — and repeat.
To break the record, the combined team needs to row a million metres in 61 hours, 58 minutes and 41 seconds.
As Bagrie, 39, puts it, "we need to be flying, really".
"It's one thing to go on those erg machines and row for a minute quick, most people can do that.
"It's to repeat it over and over and over again, and then combine it with the exhaustion that we're undoubtedly going to face.
"The thing that is really stressing me out is the fatigue — realistically, can we sleep?"
But there's no doubt they'll find untold motivation thinking about the little girl who's inspired the challenge, Ganesh's daughter, Lola, 4.
Two weeks after Ganesh's family moved to London from Perth, when Lola was a year old, she was diagnosed at SCH's Piam Brown ward with a rare, advanced and complex pelvic tumour, which had metastasized.
Ganesh says it was "pure fate" Lola was diagnosed in a hospital where she had access to the best care she could have received.
Despite some bleak possible outcomes, after 169 days of active treatment — Bagrie got a front-row seat for some of them — Lola is now "amazing".
Wanting to positively contribute to the Piam Brown ward team's future work, Ganesh launched the fundraiser to support a new collab between it and Momentum in Fitness Charity, to deliver targeted exercise therapy for all paediatric oncology patients.
"They get really deconditioned, lose all their muscle mass, so it's a preventive/rehabilitative intervention," Ganesh says.
"All the stuff through a kid's cancer journey is really negative, it's pretty miserable ... This is maybe one thing we can do which is treatment, but is positive."
He picked indoor rowing because it was the only exercise he could manage during her treatment, and given the mental and physical strength required, he figured it's a "fitting micro-representation of what my daughter had to go through".
And he chose Paddington Station — "probably the most public place you can think of, actually" — because 250,000-odd people pass through each day, and almost every day of Lola's treatment, they watched Paddington Bear.
Bagrie, who's been training since October, says he's lost about 5kg, and "hopefully gained a few muscles" in preparation.
"You know, I'm in the beer industry, so I wouldn't say I have an elite sportsperson's physique," he laughs.
"[But] the way I see it, is this is an incredible opportunity to raise awareness and funds for a charity that provides a huge amount of benefit to the wider community when it comes to a child's care and helping families through what's a pretty arduous time.
"Just seeing what these kids go through and how hard it is on the families, it really does give you motivation to push on through."
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Carlos rows into the record books
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