Amanda Fortanier

A long day, a lot of golf and a very good reason ⛳

Some people raise money by running marathons. We have chosen golf.

Specifically, The Longest Day, Cancer Council’s golf challenge, because apparently spending an entire day chasing a small white ball around a park while increasingly questioning your life choices is an excellent fundraising model. And when we say a long day, we mean it. We expect to walk 30+ km on the course during the challenge, although the final distance will depend heavily on the quality of our golf and the number of unscheduled excursions into the sand, trees, rough and various other places golf balls really have no business being.

We’re the ARWA Albatrosses, and we’d love your support.

Behind our questionable sporting decisions is something much more important. We’re taking on the challenge in honour of our former colleague Jon Shatwell, who lost his life to cancer earlier this year. For those of us who knew and worked with Jon, this one is personal. We’d like to turn a very long day, a lot of kilometres and some almost certainly terrible golf into something worthwhile by raising as much as we can for Cancer Council.

So please consider donating. You don’t need to understand golf. You don’t need to like golf. Frankly, by the end of the day, we may not like golf either. You just need to dislike cancer.

Every donation helps, however large or small, and every contribution will give us a little more motivation as the kilometres mount up, the enthusiasm starts to fade and the golf balls start disappearing. We suspect the encouragement will be particularly valuable later in the day, when we’ve walked too many kilometres, lost far too many golf balls and are beginning to question the series of decisions that brought us to this point.

For Jon, and for all the families, friends and colleagues affected by cancer, thank you for getting behind us.