Supported by Harry Kane, these golfers took on an insane Longest Day Golf Challenge at Lofoten Links

The inspirational Project 24 team helped raise more than £50,000 for The Golf Trust.

While everyone else was playing 72 holes at their local course on the longest day this year, eight men flew 2,000 miles to play golf for 24 hours at the world’s most northerly links. What awaited them will make you wonder how they ever completed it…

“I think we lost over 250 golf balls and we’re all half-decent golfers. That’s literally how bad the weather was. I mean, I’ve never played golf in a fisherman’s jacket before. I came off looking like Captain Birdseye!” Cae Menai-Davis is only half joking as he starts talking about a 24-hour golf marathon that took him and seven friends to Lofoten Links this summer. Their journey – and the inspiring story behind it – has just been told by Reflo as part of a short documentary, which premiered on Sky Sports earlier this month.

Longest Day Golf Challenges tend to involve a large amount of suffering, but it’s hard to think of many which have lasted the full 24 hours and led to one man playing golf in his underpants for 10 minutes. But we’ll get to that later.

They say the best ideas happen in the presence of alcohol, though Menai-Davis is quick to point out that he had only had “one or two” when he first concocted his “bonkers” idea in a Manchester hotel.

“I mean, it became real pretty quick,” explains the man who founded The Golf Trust as a means to help bring people together through golf.

“Me and Adam Baker, who is one of the coaches for The Golf Trust, were starting to get the hump that all our work and everything we do with disability is rarely on people’s minds. If you were to run a marathon, you always do it for something close to your heart, but no one ever picks disability in sport. It’s neglected in terms of fundraising, so we wanted to do something that puts it on the map.

“We’d just done a piece of work which highlighted that 24 percent of people in UK have some form of disability, so we got talking about what stupid thing we could do that could prick people’s ears up. We were like, ‘There’s 24 hours in a day, so why don’t we play golf for 24 hours and call it Project 24?’ We laughed it off, sent an email to Lofoten Links in Norway that night and got a reply straight back saying, ‘What can we do to help?’ I was expecting a bit of to and fro, but they were all for it. That’s when we were like, ‘Oh, we better go and do it now’.”

After scrambling together a team of eight golfers and three support staff, the Project 24 team set a fundraising target of £24,000 to help fund the purchase of a Paragolfer, a remarkable piece of machinery that enables wheelchair users to play golf standing up. They even received a good luck message from footballers Harry Kane and Aaron Ramsey to set them on their way. 

“That was one of the best things about it; the amount of people we reached and the support we had,” says Menai-Davis. “We did loads of pre-game fundraising, getting sponsors on board, and we pretty much hit the 24 grand mark before we even started. We knew that would pay for one Paragolfer, so then we were like, ‘OK, let’s see how much more we can get’.”

Menai-Davis comes across as extremely positive, but even he admits that travelling to Lofoten Links from the UK was a challenge in itself. Because there is no direct flight, they had to make do with a stopover flight in Oslo, followed by a two-hour flight to Evenes and then a four-hour drive to the northern reaches of Norway, 100 miles from the Arctic Circle.

“It sounds crazy but when you drive to Lofoten Links, it’s like travelling through Narnia,” he smiles. “You’re driving through mountains, inside 6km tunnels. Then you turn left and there’s a golf course right in front of you. It’s incredible, it almost pops up out of nowhere. Pictures don’t do that place justice, they really don’t.”

In an attempt to take full advantage of the surroundings, Menai-Davis booked a private sauna on the beach and arranged for a midnight swim “as a kind of team bonding”. Everything, he says, was going according to plan until they opened their curtains the following morning.

“We were greeted by the type of weather that makes you cancel your tee time,” says Rory MacFadyen, co-founder of Reflo, who supplied the team kit. “I think I realised it was going to be pretty disastrous the moment our lodge started shaking overnight because of the wind rattling against it. I don’t think any of us slept particularly well and it was rather disheartening to look out the window and see what we were walking into.”

Menai-Davis isn’t exaggerating by comparing it to a scene from Armageddon. It rained for 21 of the 24 hours, which ruined any hopes they had of playing under the midnight sun or Northern Lights. It prompts me to mention that Viktor Hovland shot an 83 at Lofoten in what amounted to a three-club wind. MacFadyen reckons it was closer to four for them.

“It was the worst weather I’ve ever played in, by a distance,” he says in response. “At one stage, I was wearing a base layer, a t-shirt, a polo shirt, a hoodie, a mid-layer and a waterproof jacket. That’s a lot of layers to wear when you’re trying to play golf.

“I’ve actually got a video of one of the flagpoles and it’s bent 90 degrees to the left. It’s almost on the ground because the wind was blowing that hard. It made The Open at Royal Liverpool (in 2023) look like a holiday in the Algarve.”

The terrible conditions did at least offer a degree of mitigation for the first shot of the day, which Menai-Davis ‘struck’ at 12pm. He topped it in front of everyone. “It didn’t even make the water,” he adds incredulously. “It was sitting there in a seal’s nest or something. It was absolutely horrendous, really embarrassing!”

In truth, it could have been a lot worse. He made a bet with playing partner Eddy Foggy later that afternoon that if England beat Denmark in the European Championship, he would play a hole in a pair of ‘budgie smugglers’. Only an equaliser for Denmark saved him from further embarrassment.

“That was brilliant because I remember we were looking at Eddy, just waiting to see if he was going to strip down to his underpants. And fair play to him, he did it.”

The worst of the conditions hit just after midnight, which is when Menai-Davis arranged for everyone to sing happy birthday to Anthony Davies, who was also presented with a cake beside the 10th tee and a surprise video message from his family. It proved to be a rare high in an otherwise grueling third round, which ended with several players returning to the clubhouse to buy new golf shoes.

“Some lads ended up buying two pairs,” laughs Menai-Davis. “I went through three pairs of socks but because I wear orthotics, I couldn’t take the risk of changing shoes. But after about hour five, they were absolutely sodden and I genuinely couldn’t wear shoes for the next two weeks because of the amount of swelling around my ankles and feet. Everything just hurt too much. I lived in flip-flops when I came back home and I left my golf shoes at Lofoten. I don’t want to see them ever again.”

Though there was never any suggestion of giving up, Menai-Davis believes there were a handful among them who were left questioning their decision not to swing within themselves from the very start. MacFadyen admits that the adrenaline and camaraderie got him through the first two rounds, which is when the enormity of the challenge started to take its toll.

“When we got to eight hours, in the back of the mind you’re thinking: we’ve still got 16 hours to go. That’s when I was like, ‘OK, now we’re in trouble’,” he says. “It really started to get tough after midnight, when the weather was absolutely at its worst and the body was feeling it after 12 hours of swinging and walking.

“Some of the boys were having trouble with their feet and legs, but my back seized up pretty bad. There was really no place to stretch because the ground was soaking wet, so I just had to grin and bear it. I was trying to swing steady and nudge it around, but when you’ve got holes with a 240-yard carry over water into a four-club wind, there’s not much you can hit other than a full-blown driver. I imagine I played the kind of golf I will do when I’m 70 – and I’m currently 35.”

Despite the many aches, pains and bad shots, all eight members kept swinging until the 24th hour and fell just shy of looping the course six times. Menai-Davies says they stopped keeping score well before that, though he reckons that they lost around 250 golf balls between them. MacFadyen thinks it could have been more.

“Cae still gets messages to The Golf Trust Instagram page from people who have finished a round at Lofoten and found six golf balls with The Golf Trust logo on,” he laughs.

“I don’t think anyone played particularly well, but it was just about getting through it and surviving. I would say it was one of the hardest golf courses I’ve ever played, due to a combination of everything. It’s super tight, it’s unforgiving and if you’re offline, you’re finding rocks or wilderness. The wind just made it so hard.

We were all a disheveled mess by the end of it, but we got together and played as an eightball for the last 18 holes. The team element really made it and that was the big highlight, making friends for life in bonkers conditions, and raising a load of cash for a great charity.”

Since completing the challenge, the team has managed to raise more than £50,000; enough to pay for two Paragolfers, which have just been delivered to Roehampton Golf Club in Surrey and Walmley Golf Club in the Midlands.

“That takes us up to 10 now in the UK,” says Menai-Davis, whose goal is to create a network of publicly available Paragolfers that will be within an hour’s drive of any wheelchair user in the UK. Asked if this means another marathon is in the works for 2025, he merely confirms that discussions have taken place. Happily, MacFadyen helps fill in the blanks. 

“I think we will do another Lofoten trip,” he says tentatively, “but we’ll definitely make it even bigger and invite people to buy a place. That’s one thing, but Cae’s got an even bigger challenge planned called Project 25, which will be a bit closer to home. The idea is: seven days, three rounds of golf and hopefully finishing up at St Andrews. 

“We had to talk Cae down from playing four or five rounds a day, but we’ll be zooming around the UK in electric campervans so it will still be a little bit bonkers. But I think enough time has passed that people have forgotten the physical pain they were in and are already like, ‘Yeah, of course I’ll do it again’. But this time we are definitely bringing physios to give us a helping hand. I think we all learned that we probably need to be more diligent in our preparation.”

This feature first appeared in the December issue (458) of Today’s Golfer.

About the author

Michael Catling – Features Editor

Michael Catling is an award-winning journalist who specializes in golf’s Majors and Tours, including DP World, PGA, LPGA, and LIV.

Michael joined Today’s Golfer in 2016 and has traveled the world to attend the game’s biggest events and secure exclusive interviews with the game’s biggest names, including Jack Nicklaus, Jordan Spieth, Tom Watson, Greg Norman, Gary Player, Martin Slumbers and Justin Thomas.

Get in touch with Michael via email and follow him on X.