Danny Mavor, a tetraplegic veteran, is preparing to travel 79 miles along the Great Glen Way in an off-road wheelchair to prove that life goes on and can still be “extraordinary”.
Challenge details
Mr Mavor, 41, from Glasgow, served in the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards in Iraq and was paralysed from the neck down after a motorcycle accident six years ago. He is now based at Erskine Hospital.
The journey will take him from Fort William to Inverness over three days, using a chin-controlled wheelchair. He is raising funds for Regain, a charity dedicated to improving the independence, mobility, and quality of life for individuals living with tetraplegia.
Motivation and obstacles
Mr Mavor said the challenge will push him to his physical and mental limits, but he wants to help support other tetraplegics facing similar life-changing spinal injuries. He told the Press Association: “All my life, I’ve always enjoyed that feeling of a challenge. You break your neck and your previous life is kind of history – who you were, what you were, everything you identified as – there’s a lot to get over.”
He said he wants to struggle on this challenge because he believes sitting still is slowly killing him. He struggles daily with pain he has felt since the moment he broke his neck. “It intensifies when I’m doing things like this [or when] I’m talking about the past, but it also gives me a little bit of a buzz thinking about my old life,” he said. “I just know that I’m struggling anyway, so why not do the things that I loved, like mountains, like a challenge, like hanging out and [enjoying] camaraderie with the boys?”
Terrain and support
Mr Mavor previously said attempting 25 miles a day through Scottish terrain feels somewhere between “inspiring and absolutely idiotic”. There will be at least two or three obstacles throughout the journey where he will need to use harnesses and rely on his support team to traverse steep inclines.
“The path is going to be walkable, and drivable in a wheelchair,” he said. “It’s going to be bobbly, it’s going to be bumpy, and I’m going to have a very sore chin.” He added: “This chair is all-terrain, and that’s great, but there’s still bumps – like stones and just little cambers, things like that that are all going to make a huge difference to the start and the end of each day.”
Mr Mavor’s fundraising page can be found at www.justgiving.com/page/dannys-big-challenge-2026.
