As many of you know I lost my husband John suddenly and unexpectedly last August. John had metastatic Bowel Cancer and midway through his chemo treatment he suffered a pulmonary embolism. I was so shocked and numb at the suddenness of everything that happened but I remembered a promise me and our friend Kieran had made to John - that we would do the 2023 Staines 10k for Bowel Cancer research!

The only running I normally do is when the buffet is open, so this is taking me massively out of my comfort zone. But that’s why I was doing it - to show John how amazingly proud I was of how he dealt with everything thrown at him last year with the operation and treatment. He may not be here but I’m still intending to keep my promise to him.

Although I said this to John last spring, I’m totally unprepared and I haven’t run for about 37 years! I only started running doing the couch to 5k in January 2023 and it’s been tough! But thankfully I’ve had great support and there are a few more people now in TEAM JOHN as well as Me and Kieran - Liz, Laura, Vic, Ben, Charlotte, Alec, Leigh-Ann, Carmen, Alex, Daniela, Sarah, Kayleigh, Dave, Mac & Jeff.

Every 15 minutes someone is diagnosed with Bowel Cancer. That’s nearly 120 people, every day - around 43,000 people a year. Bowel Cancer UK has a vision of a world where nobody dies of Bowel Cancer!

So please dig deep and donate to Bowel Cancer UK and help work towards eradicating this horrible disease in my husbands memory.

And for info in case people are worried, I wont be doing this all the time - this is definitely a one off and never to be repeated!