We need your Support!

We are planning a very special racing event all organised around Joni - a very incredible lady who spends her life in a wheelchair. Following an unfortunate event, Joni is now left with an anoxic brain injury and endures severe long term neurological problems accompanied with full body spasticity.  Although Joni was lucky not to have too many disturbances in cognition, memory and language, she is however fully dependant on carers to dress her, clean her and feed her. Joni is under great care at The Pines Nursing Home in Putney, where she receives daily medical care and manual therapy.

Joni has an amazing husband who takes her out to make sure she maintains a social life as best she can, but this is not enough – Joni wants to do more!

Jessica (physiotherapist), Roxane (osteopath) and Madison (data scientist) have decided to help Joni accomplish one of her dreams:  to compete in a running event! We are so happy to announce that we will be pushing Joni in a special racing wheelchair, on Sunday the 10^th of July at the ASICS 10k run.

Organising this has been a challenge from day 1 - finding an adequate sport wheelchair was way more  complicated than we anticipated. Many mental health/brain injury charities, Facebook groups, hospitals, and universities were contacted, but none of them could help; only extremely pricy sport wheelchairs could be found. After months of frustrations and disillusions, we succeeded: Wheels and Wheelchairs have agreed and will lend us a chair! Wheels and Wheelchairs are a group of volunteers, wheelchair users and skaters who accompany disabled persons in sport activities, every Saturday, in Battersea Park. 

Our second big challenge was finding a race event. And, again, we did not anticipate the difficulties here. We were refused participation either for safety reasons, inadequate running surfaces on the pathways, or requirement of the disabled individual to self-push their wheelchair etc … After months of battling, we finally managed to enter the ASICS 10k run on Sunday the 10^th of July 2022.

Joni is looking forward to her special day.