From his ‘darkest hour’ to SSAFA fundraising

25 October 2023

Buckinghamshire-based Russ Chittenden is has set a blistering pace since stepping off from Land’s End in August on an anti-clockwise fundraising walk around the UK coastline.

The former Para, who lives in Aylesbury, is on a journey for SSAFA. He has already clocked up hundreds of miles and is now in Aberlady, East Lothian, having crossed into Scotland just last week.

His story is not an uncommon one. Leaving behind the camaraderie of Forces’ life – especially in such a tight-knit regiment as the Paras – can result in a void, and habits where once your muckers looked out for each other can become problematic if continued.

As Russ says: “Nothing was going right. I was really missing my work mates from the Army. You build up such a bond and then when you leave there’s nothing like that. I’d got into the habit of drinking quite a lot with my mates when we were serving, and when I left, I didn’t have that group of people around me, so I carried on alone, which was a big mistake.”

But in what Russ has described as his “darkest hour”, he looked for help, which he found in the form of SSAFA, the UK’s oldest tri-service charity.

Russ joked to his brother about needing to: “…take a long walk to sort things out”, and, by chance, this coincided with seeing a post on Instagram from fellow former Para Chris Lewis, who walked the UK coastline for SSAFA.

“That was it,” he added. “I knew what I needed to do. I’d pick up the fundraising baton for SSAFA from when Chris stopped. I decided to walk the other way around Britain so that Chris’s up-hills will be my downhills. We’ll have looked at the same coast, but from different perspectives. A bit like life, really.”