With a little over 36 hours to go before the start of this 100km non-stop hike, we've almost reached our fundraising target (with a little help from the Sun Matched Giving Scheme).

If you'd still like to donate, please don't delay any further, it will really spur us on when we're hitting the wall in the middle of Saturday night/Sunday morning.

Thanks to all the Sun staff in Guillemont Park who've donated over the last week, and for those of you who found the bag-pipes were too loud - well they do say If it's too loud, you're too old!!

If you're in Guillemont Park tomorrow watch your wallets, we'll be trying to hit that £4000 target before we leave!

Only two days left to prepare, since it's clearly too late for any more training walks (thank-fully!) all thats left to concern ourselves with is equipment and food.

We've got various checklists supplied by the Gurkhas some of which is deemed mandatory:

Each walker

• 1litre sturdy water bottle (full)
• participant number visible
• whistle
• sun hat
• sunglasses
• long-sleeved shirt
• sun cream
• warm hat and gloves (for overnight) blister care kit

Each team

• set of Trailwalker Map and Directions (in waterproof cover)
• set of OS Maps (either Landranger 197 and 198 or Explorer 120, 121 and 122)
• compass
• 2 mobile phones
• first aid kit (including blister kit, knee and ankle bandages)
• survival bag/space blanket/bivvy bag
• energy snacks
• 2 hi-vis vests/bands
• notebook and pen

Before we start we have to have all our kit checked by the Gurkhas (Health and Safety responsibility transfer!) and you don't get to walk if you don't have the kit (there's another list of kit which we need to have available in our support vehicles).

Not sure I really want to take my notebook on a 100km hike to be honest.

Nearly forgot to mention the nice people over at Cotswold Outdoor who've kindly donated:

• 48 Nakd Food Bars18 litres of GO Ergogenic Sports Fuel

Thanks to Willem and Ian at Cotswold for sorting those out for us, we'll appreciate it sometime over the weekend!

So it's almost upon us, this Saturday we'll be setting off on our head-to-head challenge against the Gurkha Soldiers. Okay they'll be running the 60 mile (100 km) route in around 10 hours, and we'll be setting off a fews hours later and hopefully arriving (around 14-20 hours after they have!).

We'd like to think it's a bit of a local derby too. For nearly 30 years the a Gurkha regiment was based at Church Crookham, just a shortish stones throw from where Sun UK is based, here at Guillemont Park. To make it all more involved, the Guillemont Park campus is built on the site of the form Guillemont Barracks, home to the Royal Engineers.

We're well connected, if nothing else!

We've yet to re-calculate our total so far, but we're doing really well, thanks to a lot of donations from the Guillemont-based staff.

More updates later in the week...

We're off again on another training hike tomorrow. We're tackling the section of the route we expect to be covering overnight on July 14th, between Checkpoint 5 near Washington and Checkpoint 8 (next to the Jack and Jill Windmills). Incidentally, there's no moonlight on the evening of July 14th so head-torches will be the order of the night!

The distance is around 16 miles, not much more than on the previous training hike, but we'll be on the actual Trailwalker route which, from our previous experience, is somewhat more bumpy than the Test Valley. The highest ascent tomorrow will be right at the start where we climb to 238M. There's another big climb on Stage 7, up to 217M on Devils Dyke, although there is actually a Public House aloft the top; no, honestly there is, take a look at grid-ref TQ249112!

On the downside, we all live a fair distance from the route, so it's going to be an early start in order to be walking anywhere near to 8AM. At least it looks like it's not going to rain!

Look out for an update early next week!