I never carry a water bottle with my when I'm out on a run because I find that in adding extra weight to only one side of my body my balance is changed and slowly, but surely, I veer off course. It might seem like it would make no difference, but when you're a top athlete, like me, you can't afford that kind of distraction, so you get used to being thirsty.

But then I get home and I've got clean water on tap. So do you. So do millions of people in the developed world. In rural Sierra Leone, it's not so simple: the majority of people get their water from hand-dug wells, often walking many miles every day. Aside from the danger of drinking water from open, often contaminated sources, this system keeps women and girls out of education, as they are often the ones whose job it is to fetch the water in a village.

My father's a trustee of a charity called Developing Technologies, and I've seen lots of the good work they do through his involvement with them over the last few years. It's a small charity that gets final-year engineering students at Imperial College and City University to work on low-tech projects in the developing world for their final project. One of these schemes - the one I'm raising money for - has been to create a portable drill rig powered by a motorcycle engine that can be used to cheaply create safe, efficient wells that last about ten years. Developing Technologies' implementation of these wells was part of a long-term project in and around the Gola forest that was put to a stop by the Ebola outbreak which began in 2013. It's now safe for our engineers to return to Sierra Leone, but we need some money in order to get the project running again.

That's why on the 25th September I'm going to compete in the Ealing Half Marathon with a team of ot. It's an event I've done twice before, but I hope to set a new personal best time, and raise lots of money for DT. Please help me out by donating! It's for a genuinely good cause - by almost any metric, the people of Sierra Leone are the world's poorest - and your money goes a long way.

I'll keep you updated with how my training's going, alongside memes and fitness tips. Please support me and help make sure everyone has access to clean water.