Almost 4,000 children and young people are diagnosed with cancer every year in the UK. That’s ten every day. Children with Cancer UK is the leading national children’s charity dedicated to the fight against childhood cancer. We fund life-saving research into the causes, prevention and treatment of childhood cancer and we work to protect young lives through essential welfare programmes.

I am dedicating this run to Oliver who in January 2016, just a few weeks before his third birthday, he was sadly diagnosed with Stage 4 High Risk Neuroblastoma. Neuroblastoma starts with an abdominal tumour and in Oliver's case, as with most children his age, it has spread throughout his bones and bone marrow. Oliver has since then been through the gruelling sixteen months of treatment including aggressive chemotherapy, major abdominal surgery, an autologous stem cell transplant, high dose chemotherapy followed by three months in hospital (much of which was spent in isolation and resulted in a serious liver disease), radiotherapy, immunotherapy, trips to intensive care and high dependency units, 82 blood & platelet transfusions and over 60 scans, X-rays and tests. He's had countless infections requiring more time in hospital on antibiotics and temperatures in the middle of the night have meant some very late night visits to the hospital in his pjs!

Chemotherapy has damaged his kidneys, which will hopefully be reversible with time but there are likely to be other long term side effects from the strong drugs he has had. So much more research needs to be done into childhood cancers like neuroblastoma, to help develop better and kinder treatments - sadly these types of cancer are often underfunded and need more support to help ensure more and more children survive - currently at this stage of diagnosis chances of survival are about 40-50%.

I ran last year for cancer research and with all your generous donations I really think we can do it again and really make a difference.  I am honoured to be running for such a worthy cause and hope I do them proud x