A team of good friends and ex-athletes are pushing me around the Great North Run this year. However this time, we're going for a Guinness World Record!

After the success of the last 2 years where we raised over £20,000 collectively for the Matt Hampson Foundation and Gym Possible, we're back with an even bigger challenge.

In 2023 we did it in 2 hours 1 minute.

In 2024 we did it in 1 hour 26 minutes.

In 2025 we are aiming to go as close to 1 hour 15 minutes as possible which will be a new Guinness World record of “Fastest Half Marathon pushing a wheelchair by a team (male).”

We’ll be hoping to raise as much as we can for Gym Possible along the way! We are delighted to announce that we have the generous backing of Puma who are kindly sponsoring our record attempt through their top sports retailer Start Fitness. They are supplying us with running clothing and trainers. We have the support of New Levels Coaching who have supplied us with tailored half marathon training plans to help us all improve our fitness levels, and also Science in Sport (SiS) who are kindly supplying us with sports nutrition products. This year thanks to funding from Regain, Drew has a carbon race chair, this hopefully should improve our time rather than using a standard NHS chair. Finally, thank you to the team at RunThrough who are giving us free racing opportunities in their events calendar and helping promote our efforts.

The 2025 team is-

Team Captain

- Drew Graham

Pushers

- Alexander Smith

- Jonathan Graham

- Matt Bond

- Matt Nicholson

- Nick Hooker

- Ryan McLeod

The money we raised over the last 2 years has been used to support and grow the charity I founded- Gym Possible, a fully wheelchair accessible gym in the North East of England.

Thanks to the help from the Matt Hampson Foundation and all of the generous fundraisers for Gym Possible the gym has gone from strength to strength. We opened a brand new fully accessible gym at Gateshead Leisure Centre in 2024, which has been a huge success with our membership numbers continuing to grow.

The gym not only provides those with physical disabilities a safe and fully accessible space to exercise, it is a community of motivated like minded individuals who support each other.

100% of your donations go directly to Gym Possible and really do help us to change people's lives for the better.

Please consider donating to this brilliant cause so we can continue to make exercise accessible, thanks.

www.gympossible.co.uk

The Matt Hampson Foundation inspires and supports young people seriously injured through sport through its unique Get Busy Living centre in rural Leicestershire. The centre provides expert physiotherapy, specialist personal training, support, mentoring and advice to people suffering a life-changing injury.

The centre’s doors were opened in 2018 by Founder and ex-England and Leicester Tigers rugby player Matt Hampson, who himself experienced a life-changing injury in 2005.