Hello and thanks for visiting my JustGiving page.

I am delighted to have been chosen by St John Ambulance to be one of their nominated charity runners in the 2019 Virgin London Marathon. This is a dream come true. To be able to run it in John's memory makes it an incredibly proud moment for me and I hope, with your help, to be able to hit my target of £2000 which will help this incredible charity immensely.

There are two main reasons why I have chosen St John Ambulance as the charity I'd like to run for. My brother John was living in Perth, Australia when he was in a motorbike accident. He crashed and was found by a passer-by who heard the accident. It just so happened that this gentleman was a first aider as his young daughters are surfers and he performed CPR on my brother for 20 minutes until an ambulance arrived and rushed him to hospital. John sadly died a week later, on the 19th November 2016, aged 30. Without this hero being there at that time, John would have died at the scene. The fact that he didn't, meant that some of my family and myself could rush out to Australia and spend those last precious few days by his bedside. That will forever remain a source of comfort for my family & I and many of John's friends that got to say their goodbyes. It really did hit home how important it is that people know basic first aid and St John Ambulance are the leading charity in that aspect.

The second reason that I would like to support St John Ambulance is because they also help with repatriations which is something we may have needed had John survived his accident. We did manage to fly his body home to Preston for his funeral because of an amazing show of support from all of John’s family & friends in setting up a JustGiving page and raising the necessary funds to fly him home. Other families may not be as lucky.

A little about myself....

After becoming a Dad, working full time, studying in the evenings and dealing with the grief of John's death, I'd not been looking after myself and was feeling as low as I ever had. I decided to get healthy and took up running again in the summer of 2017. I currently run around 3-4 times a week and am just about comfortable up to half marathon distance in training. I regularly compete in local races and parkruns and am now at the stage where I want to start pushing up to marathon distance and feel like London is the perfect one to have as my first marathon.

For anyone who thinks this is a natural progression for someone who can already run a half marathon, I'd agree to a certain extent, but for someone like me who has never run more than a mile or two further than a half marathon, to be told to basically run that whole distance again immediately, it is a very daunting task. To make it an even harder challenge for me, I will be attempting to run my first marathon in under 4 hours.

I will have to put in hours and hours of running every week to get close to hitting this target. I often can't get out running until after 9 or 10pm due to family life so your donations will be greatly received and will be all the encouragement I need to keep going on those extremely long training runs when otherwise I may not have had the willpower or strength.

In the updates section below you can find links to a few blog posts I've written, which go into more detail about why I am running this marathon.

Many thanks for taking the time to visit my JustGiving page and reading about my reasons for wanting to raise money for this wonderful charity.

Any donations, no matter how big or small, will be gratefully received. Thank you

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