Race For Life

So this is a new and interesting experience.  I’ve never done a sponsored… well, sponsored anything before, really, and I’ve certainly never asked anyone who wasn’t a close family friend or who hadn’t just lost at chess to me to participate… but!  That said, I am, on June 13th, 2012, running a 5k Race For Life in aid of Cancer Research UK in Battersea Park.  And if anyone here DID feel like sponsoring me, well, all I can say is that every penny is going to a fantastic cause and it’d be a good deed all round.  I am going to aim to run the entire thing (I can currently do 2.5k and am going out running tomorrow morning with my mate to see if we can break the 3k barrier!) and while using my blog for fundraising purposes seems somehow… I dunno… not very literary… the cause is so good that I figure, to hell with it!

https://www.raceforlifesponsorme.org/catherinewebb667

I guess I should explain at this juncture, that of all the charities I could be running for, I’ve kinda chosen this one for personal reasons.  It’s a dubious motivator to pick a charity by, in the sense that the ice caps will still be melting and wars will still be raged quite regardless of my personal experience, but I figured a few days of my time and a lot of sweat are a low cost to pay for something which is quite personal to me.  (I hasten to add at this juncture, that I also support the Red Cross and Friends of the Earth as, while the ice caps aren’t melting personally on me, they really still are melting.)

However, in the last few years, I’ve seen close family members suffer from cancer, and more than anything else, it is a disease which eats people up from the inside out.  Not merely in medical terms – medically speaking it kinda does exactly that – but also emotionally, even spiritually.  It is an unseen poison that grows inside the body, no outward signs of the disease necessarily, but a constant gnawing awareness of this ugly thing gobbling up beneath the flesh.  Its treatment is prolonged, painful, and far too frequently no guarantee of life.  Chemotherapy is particularly savage.  For the first few days after a shot, most patients feel fine; then the nausea hits, and nausea is in many ways much harder to control than pain.  Then cramps, that dead dull pain that reaches all the way down to the ends of your legs; skin grows red and thin, gums bleed, hair falls out (as we all know) and your immune system becomes compromised to the extent that standard NHS advice is not to take public transport during most of this time.  And just as you start to feel slightly better… you get the next shot of chemo.  It is a kind of prison sentence, is cancer – a prison built by the treatment, of a chemo-compromised immune system, of time spent in distress, of a disease which can’t necessarily be seen – and more than anything, it’s this which, I personally believe, saps the soul.

So as I said, if anyone reading this wishes to sponsor me – or indeed my running buddy, Ele, or in fact anyone liable to do anything worthwhile on this theme – then please follow the link above.  As for how the actual training and run goes itself… watch this space…