Hey, people! My name is Chris von Csefalvay-Bartal, I'm a graduate of Oxford University and currently a trainee solicitor with Dechert LLP in London. I love rowing, running and cycling, and I'm a total nerd for my job. In my free time, I draw people in the news, and when I was a teen, I wanted to be a courtroom sketch artist. Or a demolition expert. Guess which one I came closer to! I'm also famous for my utter lack of taste in ties, and, on occasion, for doing rather silly things. 

That all is me. But there's something else. I have been fighting an incurable, untreatable and ultimately terminal condition called idiopathic gastroparesis and intestinal motor neuropathy (a mouthful, eh?). In short: my stomach is broken, and my guts are going the same way. It causes vomiting, pain, malnutrition and ultimately breaks down organ systems. It cut my sports career short, and I went from an endurance athlete, long distance runner and aspiring triathlete (who hates swimming) to someone who had trouble getting up the steps in his home. Few things annoyed me about my condition than losing my strength.

Fortunately, help came, and with a palliative therapy regimen that includes enteral feeding (= feeding tube in the stomach/guts), I've managed to stop the weight loss that dropped me from 118kg to 78kg, started to regain strength and am now able to work full days at the job i so love. And I'm so, so eager to go back to running! What better than the run that started my racing obsession in the UK, the London Santa Run in Battersea Park? It's a fun and not too challenging race, so it'll be an ideal introduction to get back to racing. And because it's a fairly silly thing, I thought it should benefit someone. I chose Sobell House, a hospice in Oxford, which I have visited a few times. Every single time, the efforts of staff and doctors to provide the maximum independence, dignity and life to those at the end of theirs has amazed me.

Sobell House cares for people with life-threatening illnesses in the last weeks or days of their lives. Pain management, emotional support and other important matters are better provided by hospices than the failing and overburdened NHS. Hospice care, however, is very expensive, and hospices rely on financial support from all of us to continue their vital work to allw people to end a life lived with head upright in dignity and peace, rather than abandoned in a dirty hospital room among dozens of other patients.