This donation page has now closed but please visit http://www.justgiving.com/spana-marathon to support the 2010 SPANA London Marathon team!

 

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Monday 27th April - We're thrilled to report that Jeremy, Simon and Peter successfully completed their marathon challenge! We're extremely proud of our three SPANA donkeys and apart from a few nasty blisters, they're all doing fine!

Click on http://spanablog.blogspot.com/ to read their reports of this amazing day.

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The idea to compete in the London Marathon came from the enormous support and interest shown in Peter Muffet’s heroic completion of the Great North Run wearing SPANA’s famous donkey costume. The costume itself was never designed to be worn for an event like this, and when Peter said he wanted to do it we thought he was mad, but it was such a great publicity for SPANA and our work that he proved us wrong!

We've now had two more donkey costumes made and we think it will take our team 12 hours to complete the marathon. We hope there will be plenty of people cheering us on, although we imagine most will have gone home by the time we get to the end!    

Completing the marathon this way is a very graphic reminder of the enormous burdens that working animals have to carry every day of their lives and the distances they have to carry them. It’s true that many donkeys and mules have to complete a marathon every day of their working lives  - we have to do it just once.

We hope that the SPANA team will raise some funds for our work but even more importantly that many people will see us on the course and hopefully on TV and be motivated to find out more about our work and the role of working animals around the world.

To read about our training for the big day, please have a look at SPANA's blog: http://spanablog.blogspot.com/

Jeremy, Simon & Peter