About me:

Hi, I’m Mike from Barnsley, and on the 19th of October I’m running the Yorkshire Marathon on behalf of Barnsley Hospice.

Three years ago I might’ve been out of breath from just typing marathon. Back in 2022 I had type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and I clocked in at 30 stone. I was 37 and I’d been a similar size my entire adult life.

I started to worry about my heart so I decided it was time to have another crack at getting fit. I discovered that technology had made it a lot easier to track calories and, it turns out, removing that guess work was a real game changer for me. I started to make progress that I hadn’t really expected. In the beginning I was just walking as much as possible, then I joined a local gym (Your Space Hoyland, awesome folks). After a year, I wanted to see if I could run. It turns out…

No.

No I could not.

Armed with a brand-new level of stubbornness, I decided to try Couch to 5k, and I slowly developed the masochism they call running. (I highly recommend it if you want to get started. It’s brilliant, it’s free and it works. Steve Cram has no idea how many times I’ve sworn at him.)

I used to daydream about running a marathon the same way you would imagine scoring an FA Cup winning header or becoming the heavyweight champion of the world. It wasn’t that I specifically wanted to be a runner, but it was nice to imagine what it would feel like to achieve something impossible.

Since then I’ve lost over 16 stone and managed to reach a level of fitness I genuinely would’ve thought was unattainable for someone whose favourite hobbies were smoking and Pringles.

It’s time for me to have a crack at it.

May God have mercy on my soul.

Barnsley Hospice:

For 31 years, Barnsley Hospice has been offering care and support to local families going through the hardest of times. End-of-life care isn’t something most of us like to think about, but we are incredibly lucky to have people who provide love, expertise, and compassion when they are needed most. The hospice offers palliative care, physical therapy, counselling, and practical support with a variety of issues. It’s a service that preserves dignity in the most difficult moments.

You probably know this already, but hospices receive very little government funding. Barnsley Hospice has to raise £3.5 million every year just to keep its doors open. I’d love to help with that in whatever way I can, even if it means sharing the least flattering photos of me that have ever been taken.

My family’s connection to the hospice goes back decades. It was originally proposed in 1984 by Dr Sarala Mahatme and her husband, Mr Sharad Mahatme. Dr Mahatme was my GP when I was a kid, and Mr Mahatme removed my adenoids. (I’m assured he had medical reasons for this, he wasn’t just bored.) They did a huge amount for our community and have been great friends to my family ever since. A huge number of people have carried the torch since then to keep that dream alive and they need our help to carry it further.

Please donate if you can. Do it for Barnsley, and do it for the heroes that keep the hospice running. It’ll keep me running too. I’ve been hungry for three years.

Thanks for reading, I appreciate you.