Hi, firstly thank you so much for reading my page :-)

So what's my story?

In October 2021 I picked up covid, but unfortunately things didn't go to plan. I carried on working for the first week (albeit from home) but on the Monday I was sat on the sofa and found it becoming increasingly more difficult to breathe so we had no option but to call an ambulance.

The first night wasn't too bad, but after that it went down hill, and on the Sunday the doctors felt there was no choice but to put me on a ventilator, advising that there was no guarantee I would wake up. That left me having the hardest conversation of my life with my wife and kids.

After 2 weeks they felt I was well enough to come off the ventilator and I could start slowly getting back to normal. What is astounding is that for every week you are on a ventilator you lose 20% muscle mass. My legs were literally half the size and had no strength whatsoever. I couldn't even put enough pressure on my phone to unlock the key pad! I also found that despite being quite fit and healthy 3 weeks before and running 10 miles without a problem I found I could just about stand up let alone walk. Every action that we take for granted whether it was standing to brush your teeth or even going to the toilet was a mammoth effort. I had sweat literally pouring off me doing even the simplest of tasks. To add to that they had also given me a trachy so had to also learn to eat properly again. Suffice to say a challenge lay ahead of me.

They do say that recovery is 90% mental and I have to agree. I was determined that this wasn't going to beat me and every day kept pushing myself to push that little bit further than the day before.

With that will power it meant I was allowed out of hospital weeks before they expected and by mid December was able to walk several miles whereas the expectation by that point was to just about get out of the house

At the end of December I tried my first run and got to about a minute before my lungs objected to anymore. Though I was building strength in my legs it was evident that my lungs were far from right.

I left running over the next couple of months and waiting for the weather to get a bit warmer. But then since March I have been trying to run a couple of times a week and slowly continue to build.

My aim is to run a virtual marathon on the same day as the London marathon on April 23rd 2023. My aim is to raise money for the intensive care units for Poole and Bournemouth hospitals who helped keep me alive. I am planning to create my own route starting at Poole Hospital, running past Christchurch hospital and finally finishing at Bournemouth hospital.

The AOne group has kindly agreed to support me in my venture and some of their staff will join me on certain legs of the journey. To help keep me on track I have signed up for the Bournemouth half marathon in October 2022.

Update as of the 24/10/2022. Sorry had to redo my Justgiving page as there is a time limit it seems.

So today I have official entered the 2023 Virtual London Marathon so no turning back now :-)

And I managed to complete the Bournemouth half marathon in 2 hours 6 minutes, so over the moon with that considering this time last year I couldn't actually walk