Martin Parnell will be kicking off his10th and final Quest for Kids Wednesday, Sept. 17 at 9:30 a.m. and everyone is invited to stop by.
The event will take place at Cochrane Toyota and will see Parnell and the “Questmobile” begin the start of his 14,000 km adventure across Canada.
On this final Quest, Cochrane’s ‘Marathon Man’ will attempt to set 10 Guinness World Records at 10 universities across Canada from Sept. 19 until Oct 14.
“It’s going to be a pretty busy time,” said Parnell as he was getting prepared just weeks before the final Quest.
Parnell will be starting at the appropriately-named Quest University in B.C. and then moving on to universities in Alberta, Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick and finishing up at Memorial University in Newfoundland.
He will be at the University of Calgary Sept. 22 attempting the largest Quidditch exhibition.
All of the records that will be attempted to be set will have to do with sport and play according to Parnell.
“(Sept.) 19 is the first event. The biggest exhibition game of volleyball ever and they are looking at having 320 people,” said Parnell. “Then I’m on the road for the next 26 days.”
He has been doing a series of 10 quests over five years with the goal of raising $1 million for the organization Right to Play and helping 20,000 disadvantaged children. He started in 2010, when Parnell ran 250 marathons in one year raising $250,000.
Parnell has completed nine quests so far and raised over $600,000 and hopes to raise the remaining $400,000 in this final quest.
Right to Play was founded in 2000 and is a global organization that uses the power of play to educated and empower children facing adversity. Parnell pointed out that just $50 gives a child the Right to Play program for one year.
As Parnell explained, the inspiration for these quests began in a place pretty far away from Cochrane.
It happened in 2005 when he did a four-month bike trip across Africa from Cairo, Egypt to Cape Town, South Africa. Along the way he was able to play a lot of sports with local children.
Parnell recalled playing soccer, basketball and running with the kids. He talked about a fond memory of hopping off his bike and playing table tennis on a rickety old table in Ethiopia with two kids.
“Those four months were more about me playing sports with the kids, and the power of sport, than even what I saw in Africa, and I mean I saw some great things,” said Parnell. “But it was that kind of spirit – that really uplifting spirit with sport. How it’s a great equalizer and a great communicator.”
But Parnell admitted that although he enjoyed that discovery – he didn’t know what to do with it. That was until a friend introduced him to Right to Play in 2009.
He said that he and a group of others started fundraising in 2009 raising $10,000 through doing races and marathons.
“One day I came home and said to Sue, ‘I want to do a big fundraiser for Right to Play and I want to run 250 marathons in one year.’” he said. “As you can imagine, we had to talk about that.”
Sue Carpenter-Parnell is Parnell’s wife of nine years, and as he described, his biggest supporter.
She said that Parnell had originally wanted to do 365 marathons in a year and she told him to go check with a doctor.
He returned from the doctor and told her that they had compromised and the doctor had said that he could do 250.
Carpenter-Parnell said when she had first met her husband he had just retired from his career as a mining engineer and moved to Cochrane to start a new life. Parnell’s sister introduced the two.
Carpenter-Parnell said at this point he had planned to go to Africa to go cycling and that Parnell’s sister had assured her that once he had completed that, he would get it out of his system and settle down.
“But here we are seven years later. He says it stops of the end of this year but we’ll see. Maybe it will be my turn then,” Carpenter-Parnell said with a laugh.
She admitted that is has been hard at times when she has worried about him during his quests, but she truly believes in what he’s doing.
“I’m a great supporter of what Right to Play does. So we know that it is for a good cause and that is the important thing. To go out and do it for somebody else – that is amazing. The fact that he has literally helped thousands of children and spread the word,” she said.
Parnell also credits the Cochrane community as being a huge supporter of the quests.
He said he is a member of the Rotary Club of Cochrane and they have been supportive both locally and internationally. He also mentioned the Spray Lake Sawmill Family Sports Centre who have hosted quests and Cochrane Toyota who have provided him with the “Questmobile”.
“Without the support of this town, I don’t think I could have done this,” Parnell said.
Besides Quests for Kids, Parnell is also a keynote speaker and author – two passions he said he plans to peruse when he is finished with this final Quest.
“I’ll definitely be focusing on talking about what I’ve done and the lessons I’ve learned and how we can all make some changes that will allow us to do things that we never thought we could do,” he said.
For more information on Parnell, and how you can support the quests, visit quests.martinparnell.com or canadaquestforkids.com and for more information on Right To Play visit righttoplay.com.
