Thanks for taking the time to visit our JustGiving page. Don't forget to check out our updates. We post regular updates on our training progress every week.

Who are we?

We are Matt and Becky. We are bikers and runners and this is our chance to bring together our hobbies to benefit others.

What are we doing?

We started running by following a Couch To 5K app in June 2022. After spending a year training to run in the Great Manchester Run 10K in May 2023, we finished the race and then immediately signed up to the Half Marathon event in 2024.

On the way to the big day, we'll be running 'practice' races, parkruns, treadmills runs and long runs and clocking up hundreds of miles of our own to aim for the best result we can. Updates for every run we do will be posted in the Updates section on this page.

Why are we doing it?

In my professional life as an IT engineer, I work with healthcare technology and witness the never ending challenges faced by the NHS to reduce costs and deliver value for patients.

As runners and bikers, we saw this as an amazing opportunity to combine my personal and professional interests to do our bit to help support the NHS through challenging and pushing ourselves further than we ever have before.

Who are we running for?

The North West Blood Bikers cover the Lancashire and Lake District areas and provide a zero cost courier service to the NHS to transport vital life saving equipment, test samples, donor breast milk and documents between healthcare settings in the evenings, weekends and bank holidays when the NHS's courier service isn't in operation.

Without the Blood Bikers, the alternative choice for the NHS is to send items between hospitals using taxi services which creates significant costs, especially during bank holiday periods.

The North West Blood Bikers operate out of hours all year round, regardless of the weather, even using their own cars when it isn't safe to ride a motorbike. The service relies entirely on volunteers and no one earns a salary in NWBB. Every penny donated is spent entirely on providing services for the benefit of the NHS.

Imagine getting a call at 11pm on Christmas day when it's cold and wet outside to transport test samples between 2 hospitals. That is the kind of service that the Blood Bikers provide and they do so at absolutely zero cost to the NHS.

In 2023 alone, North West Blood Bikers saved the NHS in their area over £865K in costs with all that money able to be reinvested into providing high quality patient care.

As bikers ourselves, we fully appreciate the dedication that goes into providing this service, and it all happens behind the scenes. As a patient, you might never even realise that their service was involved when you receive treatment.

This is our opportunity to give something back.

What are we asking?

Each NWBB liveried bike covers on average over 20k miles per year. 20k also happens to be about the number of steps required to complete the 13.1 mile distance of a half marathon.

We are asking you to help us raise just 5p per step for a sum of £1000.

It costs around £14,500 to insure their fleet of 24 liveried bikes for 1 year so our fundraising could help to keep the bikes insured on the road for a whole month.

For every £1 that NWBB spends, the benefit to the NHS can be up to 10-fold, so this target could have a benefit value to our healthcare services of up to £10,000!

Donating

Donating through JustGiving is simple, fast and secure. Once you donate, they'll send your money directly to the charity. It's the most efficient way to donate - saving time and cutting costs for the charity.