I can’t cure cancer, but I can run and raise £1000

This week the very tragic reality of why I’m running the Edinburgh Marathon came home to me, sadly again.
Cathy Ellis, the former news editor of the Western Daily Press and Western Gazette, died of cancer. Far too young and, you can’t help feeling, unnecessarily.
I wasn’t a close friend of Cathy’s but I have known her for a long time as she was the chief reporter when I started my newspaper career on the Western Gazette, in 1999.
She was only a couple of years older than me, and we both moved to Bristol within a couple of years working on different papers but sharing the same open plan newsroom which was once the centre of the Bristol media world. Or so we thought.

Julie Harding

Cathy Ellis

Cathy is one of a number of people I’ve known and worked with down the years who have fought and lost that battle with cancer. Notably Julie Harding, the talented and indefatigable former chief reporter of the Bristol Evening Post, who sadly died last year after a long illness. An illness she refused to make her stop doing the job she loved.
In my personal life there are many people who should be walking, talking, laughing and loving here today who we’ve had to say goodbye to before their time. My grandparents Rose and Wal, our friend Emma Pitcher. And there are many others who are living with the ravages of the disease, somehow finding the courage to make it through every day.
Happily we also know people who have come through it and are able to get their lives back in one piece.

All this is why I am running the Edinburgh Marathon and raising £1,000 for Cancer Research and the Bristol-based St Peter’s Hospice, both of whom deserve our support.

My place in the marathon is not a gold bond place, with the condition of raising the money, I have chosen these charities because I feel personally moved to try to do something, well, useful, in terms of trying to fight cancer.
Obviously I’m not a doctor, a research scientist or the kind of person with the endless compassion to work in a hospice. But I can run, and I can raise money to help those people do the job that could one day lead to the kind of breakthrough that we all hope for.
I know £1,000 won't in itself cure cancer or fund a new piece of equipment, but it will pay for pain-relieving drugs, or a little more time for research, and it's something we can all do, so easily.
Sadly it’s too late for Cathy, Julie, Emma, Rose and Wal and all those others we’ve known and loved.
But I implore you, please help me to raise the £1,000 I’m aiming for, by giving what you can, and give future generations a chance of surviving this most tragic of diseases.
If you can help, please go to my Virgin Money Giving page. All the money goes to the charity by using Virgin Money Giving.
Thanks for reading this, I hope you can help.