On Sunday 2^nd October, I will be running the London Marathon, in memory of my late Dad, Peter Ivor Clark.

In 2018, I returned home to Northumberland for Christmas. I noticed that my Dad was limping.

This wasn’t an unusual thing for a proud Welshman who’d enjoyed more than a few rugby games in his youth. Built like an ox, he was always accident prone, though usually nothing more than a rolled ankle taken while out chasing down Coco, our runaway Westie. Still, somewhere in between playing an Oscar-worthy Santa for his four grandsons or dominating the rest of us at University Challenge, he’d quietly gone to get checked out.

A few weeks later, as I was leaving work, I got a call from my Dad. He had been diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer, which had spread to his hips, legs, and spine, causing that limp.

Over the next eleven months – unexpectedly – we had many highs as a family. Birthdays became grand events, with the whole Clark clan descending on a gastropub. Once or twice, we even entertained my Dad’s utterly dweeby passion for birdwatching, all together along the coast. My Dad was even there, beaming, at the finish line of my first-ever race, the 2019 Great North Run.

But, out of nowhere, there came a point where my Dad’s health just seemed to drop off a cliff. In a blind rush, I packed up everything and came back home. A very scary week in hospital followed. And on Saturday 7th December 2019 - at just 67 - my Dad passed away surrounded by his family.

Nothing can prepare you for the loss of a parent and, at the age of 24, I felt robbed. I felt a loss for him, working forty plus years to provide for his family, then savouring retirement for less than two. I felt a loss for my Mum, my siblings, my nephews. And I felt a deep, inexplicable loss for myself.

That loss will never fully wash away. But since 2019, I have tried my best to find positive ways to commemorate my Dad and express any little bit of love left unsaid. A lifelong science geek with a career making life-saving drugs from vaccines to penicillin, my Dad also ran regularly and raised money for charity: a legacy which I have tried to continue, raising over £4,000 for cancer research charities since his death.  

And so – in memory of my inspiration, my anchor, and my ultimate phone-a-friend Peter Ivor Clark – I will be running the London Marathon on 2^nd October, raising money for World Cancer Research Fund.

Any donations of any size at all would be extremely welcome, and if you are in London, please come down and cheer on.