Hey!

thanks to everyone for your incredible support which helped motivate me today as I and an incredible 12,000 other runners took to the streets of Oxford for the 2021 Oxford Half. My usual pre-race worries about whether I could do it proved unnecessary as the peer pressure of all those runners  meant I actually did it almost 15 minutes faster than I expected. But no world records broken: it still took 2 hours and 17 minutes!

Thanks again

Dave

Hello everyone,

Thank you for visiting my page. Many of you were kind enough to sponsor me in both 2019 and 2020 to run the Oxford Half Marathon in order to raise funds for Refugee Resource, a local charity doing great work to help refugees and asylum seekers here in Oxford https://www.refugeeresource.org.uk/about-us. They provide counselling and psychotherapy, mentoring, specialist services for women and young people and provide advice, advocacy support and training. All of this has continued throughout the pandemic.

They are the only dedicated refugee therapy service in Oxfordshire, offering long-term, tailored support to promote peoples' mental health and well-being.

This support has been more crucial than ever during the coronavirus pandemic. These are resilient people, many of whom have experienced unimaginable trauma and have seen major disruptions in their lives. But having been forced to flee everything they knew (country, language, culture and often their entire family) to seek safety, they have then faced the lockdown, often alone, and far away from their loved ones.

Your support for the work of Refugee Resource is therefore perhaps more important than ever not just for the incredible practical support that they provide but also as a message of solidarity, compassion and defiance in the face of those who deny and demonise people who have had to seek refuge from the horrors and dangers of their home countries.

Any donation - however small - will mean a huge amount to me, and to Refugee Resource. Please consider supporting and sharing their work.

Thank you!

P.S. In 2019 I ended up running the half marathon in Malawi instead of Oxford because of a last minute change to my work plans and you kindly stuck with me: the first (and probably last) “Oxford Half Marathon in Malawi!”. Then last year the COVID pandemic meant that everyone had to run a “virtual half”: hopefully that also will have been a “first and last.”

The 2021 Oxford Half - scheduled for 17th October - is being planned on the basis that it will be run as a mass event around the streets of Oxford. But who knows what will happen in the coming months! Whether it ends up as a mass event or a virtual one, it will still involve running 13.1 miles or 20 kilometres followed by me telling myself that I’ll never do it again!