Story
As many of you know, every June I organise a team to take part in the London Football Marathon, which raises money for Tackle Africa - an organisation which uses football to educate young people across Africa about HIV and other important sexual health messaging.
You can read about them here: http://tackleafrica.org/ - but, essentially, they provide football coaching courses with drills specially designed to help kids visualise and understand how HIV is spread and the danger it poses. Tackle Africa have already been shown to have a big impact on infection rates for the communities they’ve worked in and have also been working alongside other charities to campaign on other, related sexual health issues including FGM.
The charity relies almost entirely on these annual summer events for their UK fundraising but, thanks to a certain other virus, all this vital income is now under threat for 2020.
So, on 13th June - the date for which the London event was originally slated - I'll now be doing my own marathon-length run (26.2 miles) to try and raise some of the money that the charity's missing out on.
I've never run a marathon before and, to make things trickier, I'm only just coming back from almost a year out of any kind of sport after a bad injury. On top of that, I’m reliably informed that mid-June is often fairly warm.
This will not be pretty. Please give generously.