Playa del Carmen

February 2016

Team Triathlon Challenge

Objective
To fundraise $2,000 USD for the GVI Charitable Trust. This money was raised in order to fund 6
months worth of Dog Therapy at Escuelita, to pay for equipment needed at the new Cocos Animal
Welfare clinic, including a new set of scales for weighing the animals, and also funds for developing
the Invasores project.
Summary
In February 2016, a group of volunteers and staff members from the Mexico Community Projects took
part in a Team Triathlon with the purpose of fundraising a total of 2000 USD for childcare and animal
welfare projects. The volunteers were split into 3 competing teams and each team swam 1km, cycled
20km and ran 7.5km between them. Since the fundraising goal was exceeded, the additional money
was decided to be donated towards GVIs Fiji disaster relief campaign.
Report
This monthly achievement report is focused on the GVI Charitable Trust Event GVI Playas Team Triathlon. Volunteers organized themselves into three teams of three participants; The Snakes, The
Monkeys and The Jaguars. One person from each team was to participate in and complete one section
of the triathlon each.
The runners and the cyclists from each
team made their way down to
Playacar in Playa del Carmen.
The running was the first event in the
triathlon, they ran three laps of the
pre-planned route at Playacar, which
came to a total of 7.5km. The team
members who were to cycle observed
the runners, taking count of how many
laps each runner had done and recording their times.
Once the runners had finished the cyclists set off to do 8 laps, equaling a Figure 1The team ready to start the challenge
total of 20km. The runners observed
the cyclists, also taking count of how many laps each cyclist had done and recording their time.

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The swimming was the next event, which took place at the Kiin Ha swimming pool (where we help
with Aqua therapy). Unfortunately one of the volunteers who was to swim took ill and was unable to
swim so there was need for a slight change of plan. The swimmers were to swim 3km between them.
The original plan was for each participant
to swim 1km, however this was raised to
1.5km each due to the one participant being unable to compete. The volunteer
who could not swim took note of how
many lengths of the pool each swimmer
had done and took note of their times. A
third of each swimmers time was taken
off their own time and these were added
together to get the third teams swimming
time.
Figure 2 Swimmers making up for their ill team mate

The times each team member took during

each section of the triathlon were added up and the winning team was worked out.
Running up to the event each participant set up an account on JustGiving and joined the team page
for the triathlon. Each individuals page had information on the Charitable Trust event, where the
money would be going and how much we were aiming to raise. Throughout the week leading up to
the event volunteers were encouraged to raise awareness of the event through social media posts
and emailing friends and family in order to encourage donations. This worked very well as we exceeded our target by $669 USD.
While planning for the Charitable Trust event Fiji was struck by the Category 5 Severe Tropical Cyclone
Winston and many families lost everything. We made a group decision of donating any money raised
which exceeded our goal of $2,000 USD to GVI communities in Fiji in order to help them rebuild their
communities.
A massive thanks to all our volunteers who participated in the challenge and to their friends and families for their support. We will be able to continue supporting our partners in the community projects
in Playa del Carmen.
If you would like to know more about the community projects in Playa del Carmen, please visit:
http://www.gvi.co.uk/location/yucatan/

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