Today, April 6th, marks one year since local hero Captain Sir Tom Moore started his birthday challenge hoping to raise £1,000 for the NHS.
The WW2 veteran, who lives just down the road in Marston Moretaine, wanted to walk 100 laps of his garden before his 100th birthday on 30th April 2020.
MKFM was one of the very first media organisations to back his campaign, with MKFM Drive presenter Michael Blades speaking to Tom's daughter Hannah Ingram-Moore about her father's fundraising goal - which seemed to be rather ambitious at the time.
Just hours later, news of Captain Tom's challenge spread like wildfire, and within days he had already hit the £1,000 mark with no sign of stopping.
The money soon doubled, tripled, quadrupled... and then started to go up by tens of thousands of pounds each minute.
By the time Captain Tom completed his 100th lap on 16th April, the total stood at a whopping £12 million.
The JustGiving page, which is where people were donating, eventually closed its donation portal when the total hit £32,796,155. That is nearly 33,000 times the amount that Captain Tom initially wanted to raise!
He quickly became a national treasure, received a knighthood, released a number one single, a book, and so much more - all in the last year of his life. Captain Sir Tom Moore died at Bedford Hospital on 2nd February 2021 after testing positive for COVID-19.
And now, to mark one year since Captain Tom started fundraising, and the run-up to his 101st birthday, his family has unveiled a new fundraising challenge that everybody can get involved in.
The 100 challenge asks people to set themselves a challenge centered around the number 100 which will be completed on the May bank holiday weekend, from 30th April to 3rd May.
It can be anything from running 100 laps of a field, baking 100 cakes, writing a 100-word poem, or scoring 100 goals - whatever you like!
Hannah Ingram-Moore, Captain Tom's daughter and voice of the Captain Tom Foundation, said: "We want people to go crazy and create their own 100 - a challenge around the number 100.
"Because he was 100 and he was so proud to be 100.
"We thought of whether it should be 101, but it's definitely 100 because that year he lived being 100 was the best year of his life, almost certainly."
Let us know what you plan on doing for the #CaptainTom100 Challenge and we may feature it in an article! Email news@mkfm.com with all the details.
READ MORE - Captain Tom: How one local man captured the heart of a nation
