12/4/19 — A quick update to say THANK YOU to everyone who has already donated to my fundraising campaign! Your support means a lot to me and really boosts my motivation to train in the cold of winter.

Here's the story of why I'm fundraising for Unique and why I'm going to run the London Marathon 2020 for them:

In April 2019, my wife and I received the diagnoses that our unborn daughter Martha had a rare gene disorder: part of one chromosome was missing. She was stillborn a few weeks later.

We are very grateful for all the help and support we received during this difficult time – from friends and family, colleagues, doctors and medical staff. They helped us to deal with our loss and to look ahead, while keeping Martha forever in our thoughts and our hearts.

We came across Unique, a charity based in London, when our geneticst gave us a print-out of a brochure, one of Unique's Gene Disorder Guides. Unique's mission is to provide information and support to anyone affected by a rare chromosome disorder; and part of that is to compile and publish information on the very few documented cases for each known genetic disorder.

Unique is the only organisation that we know of that provides this kind of information. In our case, it was tremendously helpful to have at least some idea of what our daughters chromosome deletion could mean. To thousands of other families, these 250 medically-verified guides show  that their not alone on their journey, no matter how rare the disorder that they are dealing with.

Unique also provides a first point of contact for families when they first learn of their children's disorder. They organize conferences and events, put families in touch with each other and arrange local support through volunteers and online groups.

Shortly after our daughter was born, while browsing Unique's website, I discovered that each year they put together a team for the London Marathon. I asked if I could join and fundraise for them and they invited me to the team. We are now a small international group of runners in a WhatsApp group, motivating each other remotely and getting ready for the race in April 2020.

Please, if you have a minute, support my fundraising campaign and help support Unique and their work. Thank you. And if you're in Berlin – let's go for a run!