Can you imagine being on the motorway and going to put your foot on the brake and not being able to? Can you imagine waking with the heaviest tiredness you have ever felt with a strong metal taste in your mouth? Can you imagine sitting in your garden weeding to distract yourself from how weird your body has begun to feel only to find you can’t get up to get back to the house because your legs are no longer working? Can you imagine that in less than two hours after this point you find yourself on a hospital bed and you can no longer talk, walk or move any part of your body and slowly all your bodily functions are closing down? And yet your mind is completely aware of everything that that is happening to you but you have no way to communicate this to anyone else because a few hours later your body won’t even cry? You lye trapped in this body which is abandoning you and you can’t say anything to the friends and family who have come to your bedside, you know that in what they are saying and from the looks on their faces that they are preparing to say goodbye you want to say so many things back but you try and there is nothing but silence……. as luck would have it you make through the night, the following morning as you slowly wake just as you come to consciousness you   feel pain in your body which is the most excruciating, toe curling and hot pain that you have ever felt, you can’t tell anyone or try to move to become comfortable and your total there is no cure just time. You have no idea how you will make it through the next 10 seconds, it is so unbearable but in fact over time you look back and find you have woken up every day for the last ten years and you have found ways to live with the pain. You are told your running, climbing, surfing and teaching days are over maybe you should set your sights on something a little more realistic like walking across the room.

But maybe you don’t have to imagine because like me you have had Guillian Barre.  A rare and serious condition of the peripheral nervous system that occurs when the body’s own immune system attacks part of the nervous system damaging the myelin sheath that cover nerves. Some people recover, some people die from this condition and others are left with permanent disabilities and/or pain. On Saturday the 2^nd of May 2015 I will be running 105 miles over 1600 feet of elevation over the Malvern Hills throughout the day and night to raise money for Guillain-Barre & Associated Inflammatory Neuropathies (GAIN). GAIN who offer specialist support, awareness and conduct research in to these life threatening and debilitating illness which are still poorly understood and have few effective treatments.