Howdy! On 19th April 2026, I’ll be running the Manchester Marathon. Woop woop!

It'll have been almost 11 years since the last one, when I ran the South Downs Marathon with three of my oldest friends while we were studying for our A Levels (sighhh... good times). That one had nearly 900m of climbing, while Manchester has... about 55m. It's one of the flattest marathons in the UK, so yes, I will be trying to run it significantly faster than my previous best of 4:35h. I reckon I could shave off an hour or two ;)

I'll be running to support Manchester Urban Diggers (MUD)

10 minutes from where I lived in South Manchester, there's a green oasis. A magical garden you can enter to find all your worries drifting away, replaced by a deep sense of wellbeing, connectedness to people and the rest of life, and, most importantly, grubby hands.

MUD are a not-for-profit organisation who make beautiful gardens in urban spaces, where people grow, cook and eat delicious, healthy food together. These gardens are hubs for thriving, connected communities, havens for nature, and visions of a fair and sustainable alternative way to supply the food we need.

Through volunteering at Platt Fields Market Garden, MUD's original site, which sprang out of a disused bowling green back in 2017, I got to experience first-hand the social and ecological benefits that community gardening can have. Every time I spent a morning there, I heard stories from other volunteers about how the garden had helped them through difficult times, provided them with purpose and community, and renewed a relationship with the natural world which they'd lost sight of. This video tells some of those stories.

And personally, it reconnected me with the reasons why I work in the environmental sector, why I moved to Manchester to study for a Masters in Climate Change in the first place. Being in a place like that brings you face-to-face with birds, trees, worms, funghi - the other beings we share (or must learn to share) the planet with. It shows you how food can be grown and enjoyed in a way that benefits everyone - humans and "more-than-humans" (to quote ecologist and philosopher David Abram) alike. Volunteering at the market garden always left me with a feeling of hope that there are better ways of living than our dominant systems of extraction, growth and exploitation - and a desire to do more to help them flourish.

Community gardens like Platt Fields exist all over the country! You can find your local one here to get involved :)

Whatever you can spare to support MUD will be massively appreciated! All their gardening clubs, wellbeing and community programmes are free, and often dependent on precarious, short-term charitable funding - so your donations will really make a difference to keeping these gardens and everything that happens there going. Money raised will help pay for things like the vital resources and materials needed to maintain the gardens, equipment for use by volunteers, additional food and sundries for community meals, and staff time to plan and co-ordinate free volunteer gardening and wellbeing sessions in MUD's gardens.

I'll leave you with this quote from their brilliant fundraising officer, Joey:

Donating through JustGiving is simple, fast and totally secure. Your details are safe with JustGiving - they'll never sell them on or send unwanted emails. Once you donate, I will withdraw funds directly. It's the most efficient way to donate and saves time and costs.