Thank you for visiting my fundraising page.

In late 2019 and early 2020 I trained to run the London Marathon in April 2020 to raise money to support the amazing work of JDRF who fund Type 1 Diabetes research to improve lives and - one day - eradicate the condition for good. Friends, family and colleagues raised nearly £3,000 but - unfortunately - after training hard for the race all winter it was cancelled due to Covid and I deferred my place to October 2022. I'm very grateful for the generosity already but I know there are many others who wished to support me so I have a new page on justgiving because virgin money giving has closed. All the money donated in 2019/20 has already gone to JDRF to support what they do.

T1D is an autoimmune condition and it’s not caused by an unhealthy lifestyle or anything someone does or doesn’t do. Instead, and for reasons we don’t fully understand, the immune system - which is meant to protect you from viruses and bacteria - attacks and destroys the insulin-producing cells in the pancreas.

What does this mean for my family?

On the 5 October 2017 life changed for all of us when our son Ollie, then aged 7, was rushed to hospital and diagnosed with T1D.

Ollie immediately started on a regime of at least 5 injections a day and battling dangerous low and high blood sugar levels. He now has an insulin pump attached to him 24/7 and a sensor reading his blood sugar levels. Whenever Ollie wants to eat something or do some exercise he tests his blood sugar and either has some insulin to stop him from going too high or some fast acting sugar to stop a low. But everything from the weather, emotion, activity plus a 100 or more other variables affect blood sugar levels for every moment of every day; even with the best available technology it’s a rollercoaster and we are not able to always prevent the dangerous lows where the threat of coma is real nor the extended period of high blood glucose that are contributing to medical complications . It's hard to get across quite what T1D means for our family and lots of families like us but this BBC Lifeline Appeal for JDRF sums it up pretty well - you can watch it here.

T1D is tough; it’s scary, it’s painful and it’s relentless. Ollie never moans though or asks why this happened to him. He works hard to get his levels good enough so he can play rugby for his lovely, supportive local club. He enjoys playing Gaelic football as well as swimming and playing ping pong! He loves maths and science as well as his pet cat and though he won’t admit it much, he loves being big brother to Freya.

I hope that when I run (jog or walk!) on 2 October 2022 I make Ollie and Freya as proud of me as Fran and I are of them.

Thanks

David