When a friend of mine from another firm sent out an email back in January about the Oxfam Trailwalker Lawyers’ Cup, I was intrigued. So I, in turn, forwarded the email to a number of my colleagues to see if anyone else was interested in finding out more about the event. Only then did I take a look at a map and realize that 100 kilometres is A REALLY LONG WAY! That is the Oxfam Trailwalker challenge: 100 kilometers; 48 hours; teams of four. The rules are that each four-person team starts together, stays together throughout the 100 kilometre hike and finishes together in under 48 hours. And as if that isn’t intense enough, the Lawyers’ Cup pits a whole bunch of competitive A-type lawyers against each other to see who can finish in the shortest time.
So Blakes’ Walk in the Park team took up the challenge. Our team is primarily composed of associates from the Intellectual Property Group in Blakes’ Toronto office. I can’t speak for my teammates, but my motivation for taking up this crazy challenge was twofold. Firstly, I am really pleased to be supporting Oxfam Canada. As a member of the Oxfam international confederation of organizations, Oxfam Canada works with local partners in over 20 countries to fight poverty and injustice, with a particular focus on women’s rights and gender equality. Secondly, I was excited to try to complete such an intense physical challenge.
I should make it abundantly clear up front that neither I nor the members of my team are natural born athletes. We’re more of the picked-last-in-high-school-gym-class types. In fact, I was going to call this blog post, “If we can do it, anybody can,” but then a colleague pointed out that we have not in fact “done it” yet. But we’re confident that we will. While none of us are likely to be running any ultra marathons or iron man triathlons any time soon, this is actually the perfect event for us. Because we can all walk. And we’ve been training really hard to make sure that we can walk a REALLY LONG WAY! We probably won’t be fast, but we’re committed to finishing and we think that will be a pretty great goal to have achieved.
We’d like to express our thanks to Blakes for supporting our team as well as to many of our colleagues in the Blakes IP Group and to other friends and family who have donated individually. And if I’ve inspired you with this blog post and you want to sponsor our team, please visit our our fundraising webpage. (I’m not really sure if I’m allowed to use this blog to promote our team, but I guess if you’re reading this nobody stopped me). [Ed. Note: It’s fine with us, and if any other Lawyers Cup team wants to promote their fundraising pages, they should email online@lawandstyle.beta-site.ca!]
My teammates Pei Li and Wilfred So will be giving you updates from our team in future blog posts just before the event and after we’ve completed the challenge, so keep your eyes open for us.
Dara Lambie is an associate at Blake, Cassels & Graydon LLP Toronto