Dear Friends,

Hope you are all well.

I have decided to raise money for a very worthy cause and have set myself a stern challenge in the process. All proceeds will go to a 6 year old girl called Vanessa who is in the same school as Rhiana at Queen’s College.

Vanessa has unfortunately been suffering from cancer since 2012. She has one of the most aggressive cancer’s in childhood, stage 4 Neuroblastoma. After going through 26months of treatment at Great Ormond street, where she underwent chemotherapy, a bone marrow transplant, radiotherapy, 3 major surgeries and immunotherapy, in January this year an inoperable tumour was found in her skull on her last day of treatment.She now faces another year of chemotherapy, radiotherapy, proton therapy and lastly immunotherapy. This last treatment promises some hope of stopping this cycle of toxic treatment and relapse. This treatment is only available in New York at Sloane Kettering. I need all your help to raise money for her treatment in New York. Her Parent’s need to raise $1 million. Pls find below an email from her parents with all the details on her treatment as well as where this money would go to if Vanessa didn’t make it to have this treatment.

My challenge:

As most of you know I have been lifting weights for 5 years now. When I received this email from Vanessa’s parent’s I asked my trainer what would be a “good challenge for me”.

Well here it is….the exercise I hate the most in my training is Squatting. I normally squat a maximum weight of 60 kgs, so he thought we should set a target of 75kg(!) which would be both aggressive and challenging.

I have now been training for 4 weeks towards this and probably have another 3 weeks to go until I am able to squat even close to 75 kgs. I promise to send a video of the successful squat to all those that decide to sponsor me!