STOP PRESS: Jonathan Thomas, Richard Bennett & David Gordon are running the Preston Marathon on Sunday 28th October. Amazingly they've offered to help raise money for the Teenage Cancer Trust too so please support them (and of course the TCT) by donating on this page. Thank you – we (and especially Isobel) are all really touched by your generosity.

On 29th November 2011 my teenage daughter was diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer called Ewings Sarcoma. Since then she has had intensive chemotherapy sessions every three weeks and an operation on her spine to remove the tumour. Currently she's receiving a specialist 8 week course of radiotherapy called Proton Therapy to get rid of any remaining cancer cells. This therapy isn't available in the UK and so our wonderful NHS have paid for my daughter to have the treatment in Jacksonville, Florida which is where we are now. Alongside this she's still having chemotherapy and will continue to do so until late October 2012 when the planned course of treatment will end.

She's been incredible through all this and is doing really well. We're hopeful that once the treatment is complete we'll be able to say goodbye and good riddance to cancer. But our nightmare journey over the last year has taught us a lot about this pernicious disease and sadly we've met many families with teenagers who don't have such a good prognosis as our daughter.

I hope you'll support me in raising money for The Teenage Cancer Trust which is working hard to improve the diagnosis and treatment of teenage cancers whilst providing resources and support for children with the disease.

I'm going to be running in the Run Preston 10k race. I know 10k isn't that far but for me it will be a major achievement. Until a few weeks ago I had never run any distance before – I'm a cyclist at heart but a scaphoid fracture has kept me off my bike for the last 6 months. I've started training (in the Florida heat) and I hope to complete the race in 55 minutes. If I don't I'll contribute £50 for every minute longer that it takes me. So far I'm a long way off reaching the pace and distance I need to make my target – you can keep track of my training progress on Runkeeper. 

I'm teaming up with the amazing 3hundredand65 project which is also raising money for Teenage Cancer. Conceived on New Years Eve by my good friend Dave Kirkwood, the project takes place over the 365 days of 2012 and uses Twitter in a unique exercise in storytelling. Every day a new storyteller contributes no more than 140 characters to the emerging narrative. Though the contributions are finely crafted, for the storytellers it’s an easy undertaking. Dave on the other hand has his work cut out providing daily illustrations to accompany each tweet. So far this year storytellers have included Jonathan Ross, Stephen Fry, Ian Rankin, David Baddiel, Minnie Driver, Irvine Welsh and Bill Bailey amongst many others. I'll be adding my own contribution to the story on 12.12.12. You too can take part by sending a tweet to @3hundredand65.