With the nights dark and the weather cold, keeping motivated to go out and exercise can be a challenge, but staff working for one of Welsh Water’s partner companies stepped up to the challenge.
The Morgan Sindall Infrastructure team, who work on a number of different schemes for the not-for-profit water company, wanted to encourage staff to get outdoors during the winter months to exercise to improve mental and physical wellbeing. While some of the team are key workers working on projects to improve services to customers, a number of staff are like thousands of others, now working from home, and they wanted to challenge themselves individually, and as team to get fitter and get outdoors and came up with a Walk across Wales challenge.
The team came up with the challenge to virtually walk from Cardiff to Llandudno over six weeks – a distance of nearly 160 miles, which was no mean feat.
18 of the team took up the challenge, but one team member who is also a Mental Health First Aider, Mike Taylor, smashed the target by virtually walking the distance from South to North and back down again!
Mike, who is currently working on site in Wynnstay Avenue, Wrexham said; “As a Mental Health First Aider I noticed that in a recent Teams meeting people who were working from home talked about the challenges of fitness and isolation due to being at home all day due to COVID restrictions . So, I suggested we challenge ourselves as a group to walk from South wales to North Wales in six weeks. I managed to complete this in 21 days, so I decided to walk back down to South Wales totalling 320 miles – Approx 637,00 steps in 38 days.”
Mike does admit that he had a slight advantage over some of the others in the team as he currently works on a £2.3 million investment scheme on the waste network to prevent flooding from the sewers in the Caia Park area of Wrexham which means he’s constantly on the move during the day, but having been at work all day, persuading himself to go out again after work wasn’t always easy.
Mike added; “I do a lot of running but still had to push myself mentally and physically seven days a week to achieve my target as I was walking up to eight miles a day in work and running a few miles most nights - on some days my legs did start to feel a little numb which wasn’t much fun! But talking to some of the others who were also doing the challenge I noticed that a lot of the team we’re more upbeat as they had something to focus on which was more pleasing than actually completing the challenge.”
The team managed to collectively walk nearly six million steps during the challenge which is nearly 3,000 miles – which is the same as from Cardiff to Greece and back! Congratulations to all that took part in the challenge.
For more information about work being carried out by Welsh Water at Caia Park please visit In Your Area