For some years now, I've struggled with lower back pain cause by osteoarthritis. I've tried multiple physiotherapists, osteopaths, chiropractors, multiple pilates sessions per week, stand-up desks, foam rolling, massages, but nothing worked. After reading almost every book ever written on back pain, I found relief in an unlikely activity - running! That’s why I’m raising money for Spinal Research.

Why donate to Spinal Research? Every day three people in the UK and Ireland are paralysed following an injury to their spinal cord – that’s over 1000 people per year. Over 50,000 people in the UK and Ireland are currently paralysed due to spinal cord injury, and that number rises to more than 2.5 million people worldwide. This is a staggering number that have had their life permanently and irreversibly changed, and the number of people impacted rises when you consider that the spinal injury will also affect their partner, children, family, colleagues and community.

An example of this is Bel, who was just eight years old when she fell from a climbing frame and sustained a spinal cord injury that left her paralysed from the top of her shoulders down. She relates “I was playing in a neighbour’s garden, I lost hold of the climbing frame and fell. I couldn’t breathe and had to be given mouth-to-mouth until the ambulance arrived. I was rushed to hospital where the doctors found I had broken my neck.” Bel spent ten months in intensive care and, eight years later, she remains paralysed with a C3 injury. Bel’s injury has also affected her ability to control her diaphragm, so whilst she has learnt to breathe via her tracheotomy and using her shoulder muscles in her wheelchair, she is dependent on a ventilator at night. She says
“If I had more control of my arms I would be so much more independent. Little things like brushing my hair, putting my make-up on, writing at school.” For more of Bel’s story, please visit: https://www.spinal-research.org/bels-story

Spinal Research will use your donation to fund vital research into effective treatments for spinal cord injury. In one year alone, Spinal Research funded:
- scientists that engineered olfactory ensheathing cells to produce sustained expression of the enzyme chondroitinase that are known to digest the scar tissue formed after a spinal cord injury
- scientists that engineered a treatment that enabled extensive long-distance regeneration of regions of the spinal cord

There is still a lot of research to be undertaken before damage to spinal cords can be reversed, but the research is a marathon not a sprint (zing!), and your donation will go a long way towards winning this fight.

I appreciate that you likely receive multiple requests to support a charity every month, so any donation made is greatly appreciated by me, but more importantly those suffering spinal injuries. Your donation will not only help fund valuable life changing research into spinal injury, but it will also motivate me in the gruelling hours of training to come.

Please click on the "Give Now" button, and donate to this worthy cause.