A few weeks ago, I temporarily lost my marbles and decided to run the 10 mile Great South Run....with only 3 weeks to train for it.....having not run at all for 4 years!

Not the wisest choice I've ever made admittedly but I wanted to do something to honour my friend Dan Lewis who sadly lost his 10 year battle with a brain tumour in January of this year.

I know that a lot of you reading this will know all about Dan as we had many mutual friends but for those that didn't I'd like you to tell you a little bit about him.

Dan was hands down the funniest person I've ever met (I would never say that to his face though obviously!). I hate the term 'life and soul of the party' but this really was Dan. As well as being the clown he was also a very genuine, generous and selfless person.

I first met Dan at a mutual friends BBQ. Within 30 minutes of meeting him I mentioned in a throw away comment how I really wanted to go to a particular gig the following week but had no luck getting a ticket. Dan immediately said he was sure he had a friend who had a spare ticket and despite my protestations spent the next 30 minutes ringing through all his friends trying to find out who it was. With typical perseverance Dan did eventually find the person who had the ticket but sadly the person had sold it the day before. Dan then spent the next 10 minutes apologising to me!

What makes the above story more remarkable was that not long before this Dan had a major brain surgery to partially remove a brain tumour. I couldn't believe that someone so happy, funny and seemingly care free could have recently gone through something so horrific. I found out later that the truth was, of course, Dan was actually in great emotional and physical turmoil but Dan was always more worried about making sure that those around him were ok first.

The biggest example of this Generosity of self, to me, was last year when my Dad lost his battle with lung cancer, Dan was always in contact with me checking how I was. This was despite him being in the final stages of his own battle. I would always try and ask him how he was or how his treatment was going but he would always say "Dont worry about me mush, how are you feeling? How are you coping? Is there anything I can do for you"

Dans battle with his brain tumour lasted for 10 years. If you look up the statistical likelyhood of surviving this long it is miniscule but if you knew Dan you knew that he was going to wring every last drop of life that he could.

And boy did he Live!!

In those ten years he and his partner Sarah had triplets - Joel, Jarvis and Leila! If that wasn't enough he then wrote a book called 'Brain tumours for dummies' which humurously and earnestly chronicalled his brain tumour battle and the journey he and Sarah went on having the triplets. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Brain-Tumours-Dummys-Daniel-Lewis/dp/1514707462

Dans thirst and determination for life and his showing that anything was possible made me determined to honour my friend by doing something that seemed impossibly hard. While ten miles isn't long for some, for a fat bloke like me with only 3 weeks training, this will be like a marathon! Yes I've done the GSR twice before but always with a lot more training (and I was younger!) so this is going to be tough for me. However I know that I will not stop until I finish because no matter how hard it gets I know that it will be incomparable to what Dan went through. I also know that somewhere Dan will be laughing his head off at the thought of me waddling round Portsmouth, especially on a Sunday morning as this was usually the time of the week that we would meet up for a drink or six!

Having talked to Dan I know that the main reason he wrote the book was to try and leave some form of nest egg for Joel, Jarvis and Leila, unfortunately while the book sold well considering he self published, it never reached the sales it needed to achieve this in the manner Dan wanted. With this in mind rather than raise money for a brain cancer charity, I decided to donate any money raised to Dans beloved children. I know that people have already been fantastically supportive of Dans family and various brain tumour charities in his honour so I'm not expecting much but if you could even spare a few quid it would be greatly appreciated.