Last year I had to drop out of the Great North 10k due to injury but still  ran/walked the Great North Run and was amazed to do it in 3 hours and 11 minutes.  Since then my running has gone from strength to strength, and so has Gavin's, so when neither of us got a place via the ballot we decided we'd like to run on behalf of a small local charity, particularly one of the rescue ones, as they do a fantastic job with teams of volunteers and hardly ever get any recognition for their efforts. 

As Gavin is an engineer on board a ship we felt that the Tynemouth Volunteer Life Brigade would be a great organisation to run on behalf of.

The Tynemouth Volunteer Life Brigade is a voluntary shore based coastal rescue service founded in 1864 and is a Declared Facility to HM Coastguard for Rope Rescue, Coastal Search and Rescue and one of the last remaining trained teams for Ship to Shore Breeches Buoy Rescue. Operating from their Watch House Museum in Tynemouth on the North East coast of England, they work closely with all the emergency services including the local RNLI, (to which they have no affiliation or connection apart from that they are a declared facility like them). In recent years the Brigade has averaged over 120 callouts a year and these range from monitoring and gathering information on broken down boats to recovering cliff casualties from our coastline.