A six-year-old Devizes girl with a rare muscle-wasting condition is planning to walk 26 laps of her personal therapy assault course, in her garden, on 26 April, starting at 2.06pm, to be live-streamed on Facebook.
Carmela Chillery-Watson, who lives with LMNA-CMD, has set her own massive effort for The 2.6 Challenge, launched for every charity in the UK to benefit, in place of this year’s Virgin London marathon day.
Her mum, Lucy said,
Carmela usually manages two or three laps of the specially created course, so for her to get out of her wheelchair and walk for 26 laps is an incredible challenge.
I’m not sure how she’ll cope because that's a lot for her little legs, but knowing her, she'll just pause and then carry on.
The therapy assault course was created a year ago at her home when she was no longer strong enough to attend playgrounds and soft play sessions.
Lucy said,
Therapists told her to do gentle daily mobility exercises on her feet to help keep her strength and fitness going for as long as she can.
Catherine Woodhead, Chief Executive Officer at Muscular Dystrophy UK said,
At MDUK we are 100 per cent behind Carmela’s challenge, what a fantastic way this family have found to show how much muscles matter - we’ll be watching her every step of the way.
Catherine is planning her own family 2.6 Challenge. On 26 April she will do 260 yoga sun salutations while son Eddie and daughter Flossie will tackle a ‘climb Snowdon at home.’ She said,
I’ve chosen something that uses a lot of muscles, I’m not sure if my kids really understand how mammoth their task is! It would be great to get lots of our MDUK families and households to take on the challenge in their own way.
The loss of income to charities from this pandemic are well known, at MDUK £2.8m has been lost, [and] activities like this are essential to fund helpline support, guidance and virtual events for children and adults living in isolation at high risk from coronavirus.