The Great British Dog Walk is a walking challenge where you and other dog lovers across the nation come together this October.

You set your own challenge – whether it’s 5 miles, 50 miles, or even 100 miles – and complete it however suits you best. Walk solo, with friends, family, or your dog, anywhere and at any time between 1 and 31 October.

Every mile you walk and every pound you raise makes a real difference to deaf people’s lives.

The Great British Dog Walk is open to all ages and abilities. You can walk or wheel your challenge - whatever suits you best! If you have any health concerns, we recommend checking with your doctor before getting started.

Walk your challenge in one go or split it across days or weeks in smaller chunks throughout October.

Everyone who signs up gets one free dog bandana. If you would like more than one, you can purchase additional bandanas when completing the registration form. Extra bandanas are £2 each plus P&P costs.

Please note: we can only post bandanas to UK addresses

We encourage everyone to raise at least £50 and, as a thank you, you’ll receive a Hearing Dogs T-shirt. Raise even more and you can unlock extra rewards at £100 and £200. Every pound you raise will help us train more life-changing hearing dogs for deaf people.

When you sign up your fundraising page will be set up for you, and this page includes your personal distance tally so you can track your distance. This is a great way to keep your friends updated on your walking challenge!

If you track your walks with Fitbit, Strava, MapMyFitness or Garmin your distances will automatically add to your tally.

Follow these steps to track your distance automatically:

• Log in to your fundraising page.
• Under the heading ‘Connect your preferred Fitness app’, click your chosen app.
• Follow the prompts to connect your account.
• When you next walk, select start your workout in your fitness app. Once you end your walk, save your workout and your distance will be published to the tally on your page the following day.

Manually adding your miles

You can manually add your walk distances to your fundraising page. This is a great option if you’re using a pedometer or a different method of tracking your distances.

You don't need to buy a fitness tracker to take part. If you have a smartphone, it is very likely that you'll already have a free pedometer (walking tracker) pre-installed onto your device. For Android users look for an app called Google Fit (logo: a heart in red, blue, green and yellow). For Apple users, this app is called Health (logo: a white icon with a pink heart in the top-right corner). Both of these apps will track how many miles you've walked each day.

Follow these steps to manually add your activity:

• Log in to your fundraising page and select ‘My Fitness Activity’.
• Under ‘Add activity’, enter the required fields - using miles to record your distance.
• The logged activity will now appear on your fundraising page 

The Great British Dog Walk is even better with friends! Spread the word and get your friends, family, colleagues and their dogs involved in the challenge.

Create a team after you've signed up:

• Log in to your fundraising page. You can do this by clicking on the symbol in the top right corner of the Great British Dog Walk homepage.
• Once logged in hover over your name in the top right corner and select 'Dashboard' from the drop down menu.
• In your dashboard select the 'Create a team' button.
• Complete all the details for your team fundraising page. For your fundraising target we suggest a £50 target per person but you can change this to any target you decide. 
• Choose whether you would like your team to be private, or make it public for anyone to join. If you select private members will be able to join through invitation only. 
• Click the 'Create team' button at the bottom of the page.

Join a team during registration:

• Select sign up and select next step.
• Complete your personal details and select next step. 
• When on the 'Your fundraising page' step, complete your details for your fundraising page and then select 'join a team' at the bottom of the page.

Join a team once signed up:

• Go to the team's page you would like to join or ask for the page link to be sent directly to you from a member of the team or team captain.
• Under the team name, there will be a button which says 'Join us', select this.
• Or, you can join a private team by receiving an invitation from the team captain to your email.

Fundraising Rewards Terms and Conditions:

• Only participants who have registered for The Great British Dog Walk at https://www.hearingdogs.org.uk/greatbritishdogwalkand have raised or donated £50 or more via sponsorship on their individual fundraising page are eligible for fundraising rewards.

• Individuals taking part as a member of a team, who have registered for The Great British Dog Walk as above, will qualify for fundraising rewards if they have individually raised £50 or more on their own fundraising page. Team totals do not qualify for the fundraising rewards.

• Fundraising rewards are non-transferable and there will be no cash replacement.

• We can only post bandanas and fundraising rewards to UK addresses.

• Fundraising rewards will be posted by mid November using Royal Mail 2nd class.