A brain injury can happen to anyone, at any time. When it does, Headway is here to help.

On the 22nd August 2021, my now fiancée was competing in the Ironman Vichy, the second Ironman he'd done. I saw him complete the first half of his bike in good shape, then there was a nerve racking 20 minutes where his tracker didn't move - Alex had come off.

Luckily, he came off right in front of an ambulance where he was seen to by a team of 8 medics for 20 minutes - they gave him a (rather long) once over and eventually agreed with his protests that he wanted to carry on. Alex went onto ride for another hour and a half and run a marathon in a ridiculous 3 hours 24 minutes.

It wasn't until 24 hours later that the concussion symptoms started, and from there it went down hill. Alex got diagnosed with post concussive syndrome after a trip to A&E a few days after the accident. He started getting headaches, vomiting, dizziness, fatigue, brain fog, cognitive issues and a whole host of other issues.

The severity of this syndrome is not correlated to the significance of the brain injury, but to put it this way – it has been over two years now and Alex still isn’t fully back at work, but making progress daily. His long term symptoms have ranged from loosing his balance and barely being able to walk, to an inability to hear loud noise and severe migraines to name a few - very much putting his life on hold.

Brain injuries are significantly under researched and in our darkest hour we turned to Headway for support. They gave us hope and supported Alex in making the first steps of his recovery. Whilst I won't be completing an Ironman, I will be running the Paris 2024 Marathon to raise money for this fantastic charity, and enable them to support more people suffering from head injuries. Please give generously, as your donations really make a difference.