Thank you for wanting to sponsor me running the London Marathon on April 21st.

Some of you may know that I have never aspired to running a marathon at all, but here I am doing one in the midst of the biggest trial of our lives!  The concept of running a Marathon is something of a metaphor that describes what James and I feel we have been in these last 8 months.  It has been a very helpful way of understanding the requisites of perseverence, endurance, strength, need for encouragement and focus on an end goal that we have needed to get through this particular "race marked out for us", just as indeed they are needed for running a Marathon.  Not only the obvious parallelism has helped but also the hardcore exercise has probably kept me physically and mentally strong during this time!

The idea to run the London Marathon came to me the day James was undergoing his first operation and soon after I approached one of our favourite charities Five Talents who had a place to offer me. Wonderful.  Just as it's name suggests Five Talents is a charity that seeks to invest donations amongst the poorest, neediest, most disenfranchised of peoples by supporting micro-finance initiatives in developing countries - providing loan capital and training.  Five Talents say they can expect original donations/investments to be 'reused' (reloaned) up to 10 times as new initiatives flourish.  What an incredibly efficient and inspiring concept that is based on the Five Talents parable and indeed the adage, 'teach a man to fish and you feed him for life'. Furthermore every pound you donate goes directly to projects and not charity running costs.  

Regarding my fundraising I'm not aiming to complete it in a supersonic time, but hope to finish somewhere between 4 -4 1/4 hours so please don't give me any time conditional donations if that's ok, just finishing is a big enough challenge!

Thank you so much for bothering to read this and consider sponsoring me and I hope that you will, however small!