Donate to Lucca Froud’s fundraiser here…

I’m Lucca Froud. I am taking on a huge challenge - running from London to Paris, completing 7 marathons in 7 days.

I am doing this to attempt to raise £35,000 (£5,000 per marathon) to support the amazing work done by WildFish to protect our fish and the waters that they live in.

I will be running approximately 300 kilometers from the 13th of September with Marble Arch and L’Arc De Triomphe as my start and finish lines.

For context, I started running this year and have only ran one marathon.

Why am I doing this?

The climate crisis is the single most significant threat to humans and the natural world. 

The destructive effects that it has on our planet are immense and glaringly obvious. 

When I was a child I spent most summers fishing off the beach in Dorset. I loved it. Most days we would only need to fish for an hour to catch our dinner. I remember one day in particular hundreds of Sea Bass schooling right on the shoreline and swimming amongst them. Today as a 20-year-old fishing and swimming with fish are still two of the things I love most in life. Unfortunately, as things stand my children likely won’t have the chance to experience them.

Fish and their waters are more threatened than they have ever been. It is estimated that by 2048 our ocean will be empty. Each year 2.7 trillion wild fish are caught from rivers and the ocean. To put that into context that would be like killing the entire Earth’s human population 306 times every year. In addition to the obvious issue of overfishing, our fish and waters are also being decimated by the toxic waste dumped into our rivers and the diseases spread by fish farming meaning that every single UK river now fails to meet pollution quality standards.

What makes the whole situation illogical is that the Earth’s waters are not just beautiful ecosystems, but they are also pivotal in preventing climate change. Far bigger than any rainforest, the ocean is the greatest carbon sink on Earth storing 93% of all Carbon. It holds marine plants that store as much as 35 times more carbon than land plants, and fish that deposit 16% of the ocean’s carbon at the bottom of the sea through digestion, respiration and their physical bodies when they sink down after they die.

Central to protecting our oceans is defending our rivers. Rivers are the veins which supply the ocean with freshwater, nutrients and fish. However, in the same way that river flow can nurture the ocean it can also inject it with waste when polluted. In 2022 raw sewage was dumped into UK rivers 825 times a day by companies with insufficient infrastructures leading to the mass killing of fish and the degradation of the UK’s coastal health.

The case for protecting fish and their waters has never been stronger. The survival of fish and mankind is inextricably dependent on the other. Governments must be persuaded to clamp down on the disposing of sewage in rivers, fish farming and industrial trawling and allow our waters the chance to breathe.

This is exactly the work that WildFish completes day to day. The charity helps to protect fish and their waters by campaigning and actively holding the government to account on these issues in a way that few other organisations do quite as proficiently. Therefore your generous donations to my run will directly help this work. 

Please see this link if you would like to see WildFish’s work in greater detail: https://wildfish.org

Thank you for taking the time to read this page.

Please give generously. Every donation makes a difference.

I will be posting updates on my journey:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/luccafroud/?hl=en

Strava: https://www.strava.com/athletes/54654823