Why is a 71 year senior citizen daft enough to run a marathon? Well I am doing it for two main reasons.

The first is as a thank you to the nurses and staff at the Burnley chemo unit. My wife of 49 years has been having treatment for breast and lung cancer for over six years, first chemo and the then the expensive drug Herceptin. During this time the staff have been wonderfully cheerful and always done their work in a really professional manner, whilst retaining a good sense of humour. Well done and thanks to all of you, you all deserve a new and better environment to work in.
My second reason is to try and raise awareness for people suffering mental health issues. 3 years ago I had a total mental breakdown and was in a mess. The breakdown was brought on partly by the death of my daughter Paula over five years ago, partly by my wife’s continuing battle with cancers and my alpha male refusal to accept that I needed help. Yes, I was a typical man, afraid and ashamed to admit that I had mental health issues. I was at rock bottom; you can’t go any lower and survive, but thanks to loving family support, great help from the mental health team and high levels of medication I slowly started to improve and started to see some light at the end of the tunnel. At this time my other daughter Sheralyn tried and succeeded to get me to do a 10k run in support of a charity she was raising money for. The run was at Blackpool and on the same day as my 70th birthday. I had never run before and could not even run to the end of the street. It took all my strength to get started, doing a bit at a time but I got better and found it helped my mental health. It’s difficult to worry when you are puffing away and heart pounding and the exercise helped me sleep, a very important factor in mental health recovery. I was running in a pair of hiking boots but as my running improved I bought some running kit and I did my first 5k park run in Towneley Park. At this stage running started to hook me in and I started to believe that I might actually be able to do the 10k and not make a fool of myself. I did the 10k in less than an hour and felt great afterwards. I have continued running and my challenge for last year was the Great North Run. Therefore my challenge for this year had to be a marathon. I chose Blackpool because this was where I did my first main race and it’s flat.
My message to mental health sufferers is you can get better, it is not easy but don’t be ashamed to tell people. There is still misguided prejudice by ignorant people but they are the ones who have a problem. I still have bad times, the mental heath team call them wobbles, but I now know I can get through them with the skills and awareness that I have been taught and the running helps.
Please all support me in my fund raising for the new chemo unit and if what I have said above helps people then it makes it doubly worthwhile..