I've often felt conflicted about asking people for charitable donations; particularly for doing something that I would have been doing for myself anyway. Often you see people raising money and you think, do you actually care about Donkeys with Anxiety Disorder? Or did you want to go skydiving / abseiling the Forth Bridge / whatever?

I'm running this year's West Highland Way race.

Full disclosure: this is something I've wanted to do since I first heard it about it nearly 25 years ago. This was before I'd started running and certainly before I'd run any sort of competitive races; no marathons, half marathons, not even a 5km. There were no parkruns or couch to 5ks at the turn of the millenium.

The West Highland Way race follows the 95 miles of the iconic walking route from Milngavie train station, on the outskirts of Glasgow, to Fort William. Many people are familiar with it as multi-day hike that ordinarily takes between 5 and 7 days. The race needs to be completed in under 35 hours.

It starts at 1am on the Saturday closest to the longest day of the year (June 22nd this year), and you run through several hours of darkness. Unless I'm extremely fast I'll be running through into a second night and will finish in darkness. The terrain is varied and challenging; the 20 miles along the east side of Loch Lomond are particularly hard. Rooty, lots of boulders, steps. Very hard to sustain any sort of a running rhythm. Over the course of the 95 miles, there'll be 14,000ft of ascent and descent (about a half Everest).

This will not be enjoyable in the conventional sense of the term. To even enter you need to demonstrate that you have run comparably hard events and stand a fighting chance of finishing.

This will be the hardest thing I've ever done (and possibly ever do).

Given all that, then why are you reading about it on a JustGiving page?

Recently, a friend and colleague was given the shock diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. In these situations we all want to be able to do something positive. That's when I thought well if I ever do anything that I feel is worthy of asking people to contribute to then this is it.

He wanted the money to go to two charities, Pancreatic Cancer UK and Maggie's. I've set up two pages and you can contribute to whichever you wish (or both).

When you are all soundly asleep on the 21st I'll be running in the darkness towards Conic hill and Loch Lomond beyond. As you get up and have your breakfast, I'll be running, somewhere beside Loch Lomond. At lunchtime, I'll be 12 hours in, still running and probably not half-way. As you are starting to think what to have for your tea, I'll hopefully be crossing expanse of Rannoch Moor. As you are thinking about getting ready for bed, I'll still be running and watching as the light fades and I hopefully see Kinlochleven disappearing behind me.

A special shout-out to Ross and Paul, who have kindly volunteered their time to help me do this.

To give you a feel for the challenge and the people who do these sorts of things then I'd recommend the 2005 documentary about the event "Closing Distance" that I've linked below.