Race to Kenya

During February, we, – as a school community – will be trying to run or walk 6,631 miles, the distance from Edinburgh to Kenya, Africa.

Heriot’s has been running a 2-week trip to Kenya for 15-30 S5 pupils every year, for the past 8 years. During that time, we have worked with local builders to improve the infrastructure of 3 different Primary Schools, renovating classrooms, building toilet blocks as well as fundraising for other initiatives. For schools like Mitero, Irura and Ethi Primary, this support has been transformational to the well being of hundreds of children. 

It was decided that any surplus money raised, should be spent in a long-term and sustainable way:

• Paid for lunches for the most in need students, for the whole year
• Funded a student with disabilities to attend school for 3 years so that her parents can get some respite
• Paid for 50 low carbon sustainable cooking stoves for those most in need in the village as well as 8 stoves for the schools to use.

It doesn’t matter how fast or slow you are, we would love for the whole Heriot’s community to get involved in this walking/running challenge – pupils, parents, staff, former pupils and the wider Heriot’s Community.

All you have to do is sign up to the ‘Strava’ App on the App Store, in the three easy steps detailed below.

Once you have joined the public group on Strava, all participants can see your progress and profile so please bare this is mind when joining the group.

• Strava has a minimum age of 13+ to join
• In Privacy Controls, this must be set to ‘Everyone‘ to see – as this will allow the group to capture everyone’s distances
• For your privacy, you can set a ‘privacy zone‘ around your home location
  • Sign in to your account, go to settings then click on Privacy control
  • Then, click on privacy zones and ‘add a privacy zone’
  • Type in your postcode and then click how far you want to walk or run from this address and set

How quickly can we make it to the 6,631 miles? Remember to click ‘record’ on your app every time you are out running/walking, and make sure to set the activity as ‘run’ so that it shows up on our group challenge leader board.

We would love for you to share any images of you taking part too – you can send in photos via any of our social media platforms or use #heriotsracetokenya