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Watching the London Marathon in 2017, I started to wonder - could I do that? I was a half marathon runner with an amazing and supportive running club, GoodGym, but inspired as I was, I didn’t think I could finish a half marathon race and do another one immediately. I emailed my trainer Ana to ask what she thought and got back a message with the subject line “Your training plan”. 

I ran my first marathon in October 2018, and I swore I would never run another one again! I even flew to Germany so nobody would witness my first attempt, in case I didn't finish. It was the Sparkasse 3-Laender-Marathon, 26.2 miles through Germany, Austria, and Switzerland along the shore of Lake Constance. My kind (and Austrian) friend Lizzie did venture out to cheer for me. At mile 21, I told her I was dying. When I finished, in about 5 hours and 9 minutes, I signed up for 2 more full marathons.

I've since run the Stirling, Edinburgh, Reykjavik, Moscow, and Florence marathons. I've enjoyed (ugh) all of them and cut my time down by 53 minutes to a personal best of 4h 16 - an improvement of 17% - and love the combination of travelling and running. But none of them are quite like London, of course! 

I'm honoured to be running the London Marathon for the British Red Cross. The Red Cross is my former employer Aviva's partner charity, and as a copywriter, I had the opportunity to learn so much about the great work the Red Cross does at home and abroad - from first aid training to global crisis response. Thank you for the opportunity, and for supporting the Disaster Fund. 

The British Red Cross Disaster Fund enables support to be given within hours of a disaster striking around the world. In recent years this has included responding to Cyclone Idai in Malawi, Mozambique and Zimbabwe, the devastating tsunami in Indonesia and the Manchester Arena attacks in the UK.