Hi everyone,

Recently, a friend of ours was diagnosed with motor neurone disease (MND). It’s one of those things you read about, but when it happens to someone you know, it hits completely differently.

Motor neurone disease is a progressive condition that attacks the motor neurones or nerves in the brain and spinal cord. This means messages gradually stop reaching your muscles which leads to weakness and wasting. MND can affect how you walk talk eat drink and breathe. Not all symptoms happen to everyone and they don’t necessarily appear in any specific order.

Although there is currently no cure for MND symptoms can be managed to help people achieve the best possible quality of life.

A lot of our friend group works in bioscience so we spend our days trying to understand how things go wrong in the body and how to fix them. But with MND there’s still so much we don’t know and right now there’s no cure.

Tayla and I wanted to do something that reminds us and our friend that we’re not powerless. We’re running the Rob Burrow Leeds Marathon to raise money for the Motor Neurone Disease Association. Every donation will go toward research and support for people living with this disease.

This is just about showing up helping move things forward in scientific research of this disease and for everyone affected by MND.

If you can please support us. Every bit helps and it genuinely means a lot.

Here are some examples of what your donations can fund:

£85 could pay for a chemical to preserve 600 tubes of cells when they are frozen

£280 could pay for a person with MND to download their banked voice

£500 could fund a tablet device giving someone the ability to communicate with loved ones

£1000 could pay for detailed DNA analysis to help us better understand the causes of the disease

Our friend organised his own fundraising event in April earlier this year with great success, and we want to do our part.

Thank you so much for taking the time to read this.

All the love,

Mark and Tayla