On Saturday 12th July, I will be running a 100km ultramarathon!!

As some of you may know, in the past few years we have faced a number of pregnancy complications, with two late losses and a difficult pregnancy with our wonderful son Luca.

During this time, and just like in the bad old days of COVID, I found that running helped with my stress and processing things outside of my control. Whilst that was my way of coping, the charity "Abigail’s Footsteps" also provided fantastic support, especially for my wife.

Abigail’s supports families facing pregnancy loss in several ways. They create compassionate delivery spaces for parents in hospitals; providing much needed equipment for parents to spend longer with their babies; bereavement training to midwife’s; and provide specialist baby loss counselling sessions.

I signed up to run 'Race to the Stones' last year, before we found out we were pregnant again. My training was going great, and I hit all the key milestones; half marathon, 30km, Marathon, 50km... then in March we were blessed with the birth of Luca, albeit sooner than expected. Despite my amazing extended paternity leave, I was naive in thinking I could carry on with my training in the same way with a 6 week premature baby and 4/5 hrs sleep at night. However I have stuck to what I could and can't wait to see how far I can push my body on 12th July.

Your donations will serve two purposes:

1 - supporting the amazing work Abigail's does

2 - a mental note to me when I'm in my low points to push on for fear of failing my donors

Thank you so much for your donation and please visit www.abigailsfootsteps.co.uk to find out more about the charity and the work they do.