The 25-year-old from Glossop has spent more than a decade watching the show religiously with his mother and it was a storyline about motor neurone disease that convinced him to take on one of the most gruelling challenges imaginable. Over the course of the next year, Whiston is going to walk from Sydney, all the way around the Australian coastline, while pushing a wheelchair, in order to raise money for charities battling MND. Among those charities is the My Name’5 Doddie Foundation, one of two UK-based charities and an official charity partner of The British & Irish Lions, with Whiston having set an ambitious target of £250,000 for his daunting challenge. He explained how he came up with the project: “Last January, I was having a think about stuff that I wanted to do in the future. I wanted to do some sort of challenge but didn’t know what yet. I also wanted to travel Australia at the same time. “It got to April and I was sat in the front room with my dad, and we were watching the rugby league. My guilty pleasure is watching Coronation Street with my mum. “She came in at half-time in the rugby because she’s been watching Coronation Street and she starts talking about how good the actor Peter Ash, who plays Paul (Foreman) who had MND on the show, she was saying how good he is at acting it and the deterioration over time. “I wasn’t really too aware of MND at the time, but I knew that is what Rob Burrow had, he was still alive at the time. “And then my dad mentioned that Doddie Weir had that. In that moment, I said ‘what if I walked around Australia pushing a wheelchair around for Motor Neurone Disease?’. My mum said ‘Do it!’.” Everything went very quickly from there, with Whiston firing out emails to MND charities who were immediately receptive. With the wheels in motion, he flew out to Australia last December, initially to Perth to buy a van, with the original planned start date on January 2. That has been pushed back a couple of times, with the new start date now March 3 for a challenge which will see him travel a route of 14,418km, or approximately 8,500 miles over the course of a year. That equates to around 24.7 miles a day, every single day, for a year with no days off. Whiston has been training hard, even if nothing can quite prepare you for something so daunting, with girlfriend Lucy joining him in Australia to drive the van and provide support on the journey. He said: “It’s hard to get ready for something like this, it’s walking and walking and walking. One thing I was doing, at the peak of getting ready for it, I would do a massive walk in the day, hours and hours and then I would go to the gym and do an hour on the stairs and an hour on the bike after that, just to get the extra burn out of my legs. So I’m used to getting the muscle soreness. “I’ve got to the point that I don’t feel that soreness as much. You will get it a bit, but once I get going, it goes. I’ve kind of got my muscles used to it. “I’ve got used to the heat a bit as well in the time I’ve been here. It’s the polar opposite to Glossop!” Whiston has received plenty of support on both sides of the world with Permobil providing a top of the range wheelchair that can even turn into a trike that is suitable for off-roading. His route will see him start in Sydney before heading south as he travels clockwise around Australia, with the hope that he will arrive in Perth at the end of June, just as The British & Irish Lions land in Western Australia for their opening Tour match against the Western Force on June 28.
He added: “I’m starting and finishing at the Sydney Opera House. I’ll do the full loop, it will go towards Melbourne first, then Adelaide, Perth, up towards Darwin, across to Port Douglas and back down the east coast to where I started. “The plan is, with regards to how we are doing it, I bought a Mercedes Sprinter van and I’ve had it converted into a camper van. “It was once an ambulance so I’ve left all the shelves in, I’ve got a little bed frame on there, the electrics are being done. I’ve got a 100l water tank, we’ve got all the cooking stuff we need. There are portable showers, it’s all ready to go. “The first Lions game is in Perth on the 28th June and with my guesstimations, if I set off on the 3rd March, I should be around the area on that date.”
By that point, Whiston will be more than three months into his year-long challenge, raising money for My Name’5 Doddie Foundation and the MND Association in the UK, as well as looking to raise A$75,000 for Fight MND and MND Australia Down Under. So as he prepares for such a monumental challenge, what is the aspect that worries him the most? The answer to that one is easy: “I’m petrified of spiders and will hide behind my 5ft1 girlfriend if a spider is in the way, but other than that, I’m absolutely fine. Hopefully I don’t see too many of them running up my foot.” To support Billy on his challenge, please give generously on the links below:
Linktree
