I have witnessed it twice now, two large Muslim charities who should know better, scheduling the challenge in winter’s depths, perhaps pursuing some misguided notion of authenticity.
One on a December night so cold that frost turned the ground to glass, forcing participants to trek through darkness in temperatures that stole breath and feeling, then spend the night in tents that offered only the thinnest barrier against the cold.
The other in frigid February, an obstacle course that demanded wading through water so icy it numbed bodies completely, surely gifting every participant sore throats and fevers for the week that followed.
When I learned what they were planning, and then saw them implement it, I could only sigh with a heaviness that comes from watching good intentions curdle into something else entirely. This is not what we advocate, at all.
The difference between challenge and endangerment
The Trials & Tribulations challenge is meant to be exhilarating: a test of grit, a celebration of teamwork, a confrontation with personal limits that leaves participants transformed rather than merely traumatised.
It should push boundaries, yes, but it should also feel rewarding, even joyful in its difficulty. There is a crucial distinction between an experience that challenges and one that simply punishes, between difficulty that strengthens and conditions that merely endanger.
Those who have undertaken winter challenges speak of them with a particular tone, not pride or exhilaration but a kind of grim relief at having survived. They describe experiences that were uncomfortable beyond measure, punishing in ways that overshadowed any sense of achievement, barely survivable rather than meaningfully difficult. This is not the transformation you should be offering as organisers, nor the gift you were meant to give.
Why winter works against you
Winter brings dangers that have nothing to do with the challenge you are trying to create and everything to do with the body’s fragile relationship with temperature. Hypothermia does not discriminate; it creeps in through wet clothing, through prolonged exposure, through the simple mathematics of heat lost faster than heat generated.
Even with the best preparations, winter conditions bring intense discomfort: the shivering that becomes uncontrollable, the numbness that spreads from fingers and toes inward, the fatigue that weighs heavier than any mud-soaked garment.
The question you must ask yourselves is not whether participants can survive such conditions (clearly many have) but whether mere survival is what you are called to offer. Running through freezing mud is not just challenging; it edges toward genuinely dangerous. And for what purpose? What lesson is taught by cold that could not be taught more safely, more wisely, in temperate months?
Consider too the practical dangers winter multiplies: frost-covered terrain that turns every step into potential injury, slippery surfaces where falls become likely rather than possible, the way cold reduces dexterity and slows reaction times just when participants need both most desperately.
For women wearing modest dress, these risks compound. Wet, cold garments gain impossible weight, movement becomes restricted just when agility matters most, and the very clothing that connects them to refugee women’s experiences becomes a liability rather than a teacher.
Some will argue that winter conditions simulate what refugees truly face, that authentic solidarity demands authentic hardship. But this argument crumbles under examination. Refugees endure winter conditions not by choice but by cruel necessity, without the safety nets you provide: no medical support standing by, no dry clothing waiting at the finish line, no warm home to return to afterwards. They face these conditions not for hours but for weeks, months, sometimes years.
Your challenge exists in a controlled environment designed to test resilience, not to literally replicate suffering. There is profound difference between creating conditions that teach empathy and creating conditions that simply harm. Refugees would not wish winter’s dangers upon anyone; they know too intimately what cold can steal from the body and spirit.
True solidarity lies not in matching every hardship refugees face but in understanding the essence of their experience: displacement, loss, the requirement to maintain dignity whilst the world strips away comfort. These truths can be taught in April as clearly as in February, in September as powerfully as in December. The lesson does not require frostbite to be learned.
As organisers, you are architects of transformation, guardians of an experience that has the power to change how participants see themselves and the world. This sacred responsibility demands wisdom about where challenge ends and cruelty begins, about the difference between pushing boundaries and breaking bodies.
The challenge should test resilience but also reward effort. It should simulate hardship whilst maintaining safety. It should leave participants feeling accomplished rather than simply relieved that it is over. Winter’s extremes work against all of these purposes, turning what should be a profound experience into merely an endurance test against the elements.
The grace of temperate months
Between mid-March and mid-October lies a window where challenge and care can coexist, where you can push participants toward their limits without pushing them over the edge into danger. These months offer weather that still demands everything from those who undertake your course. The exertion remains real, the obstacles no less daunting, the fasting equally difficult, but without the added burden of fighting for survival against the cold itself.
Warmer weather allows participants to focus on the challenge you have designed rather than on merely staying warm enough to continue. It permits the ground to be difficult without being treacherous, allows wet clothing to be uncomfortable without becoming dangerous, enables exhaustion to be instructive rather than debilitating. The mental challenge remains intact, perhaps even clearer, no longer obscured by the simple biological imperative to escape the cold.
In temperate months, genuine exhilaration becomes possible at discovering strengths they did not know they possessed. Camaraderie flourishes when participants can speak to each other without teeth chattering, when they can encourage one another without worrying whether their companion is sliding toward hypothermia. The sense of achievement is not diminished by gentler weather; it is amplified, no longer competing with sheer physical misery for attention.
Wise leadership in practice
Schedule your challenge between mid-March and mid-October. Choose dates when the earth has thawed but not yet frozen again, when water chills but does not numb, when exhaustion comes from effort rather than from the body’s desperate fight to maintain core temperature. Give participants the gift of engaging fully with the challenge you have designed rather than spending their energy simply trying not to freeze.
This is not making things easier; it is making them right. The obstacles remain formidable, the trek no less demanding, the combination of fasting and physical exertion still pushes participants to their limits. But those limits are tested in ways that teach rather than merely punish, that build understanding rather than simply inflicting hardship.
When participants arrive on a spring morning or autumn dawn, when the air is crisp but not cruel, when the ground is sodden but not frozen, when exertion will warm them rather than merely slow their descent into cold, this is when transformation becomes most possible. This is when they can fully engage with what you are offering: not just survival of an ordeal but participation in something meaningful, challenging, and ultimately joyful in its difficulty.
Your wisdom in choosing the right season is not a compromise. It is an essential part of the care you owe those who trust you with this journey. It is how you honour both the participants who come to you seeking transformation and the refugees whose experiences you ask them to glimpse.
May your choices reflect this wisdom. May those who walk your course in temperate months discover that the challenge is no less real for being safely bounded, that solidarity is no less genuine for being wisely practised, that transformation comes not from surviving the worst conditions but from choosing to step into meaningful difficulty and finding yourself changed by what you discover there.
