John, whose daughter Hope graduated from our AVT programme aged three with age equivalent language, ran the London Marathon in 2015 raising over £4,500 for AV^UK! Here he shares his fundraising story…

Having run numerous Half Marathons in the past, the following thought always crossed my mind when crossing the finish line:

‘There’s no way I could run another lap!’

And there it was, a vow to myself never to run a full Marathon.

However, my vow lasted as long as it took Auditory Verbal^UK to ask me if I’d take a London Marathon 2015 place to raise funds for them.  Having benefited as a family from the incredible work AV^UK do with deaf kids like our daughter Hope, I could hardly refuse such a request and so, at the end of December 2014, I began a series of long, early morning weekend training runs with the goal of achieving Marathon fitness in time for 26th April 2015.

The contrast between months of training runs in all weather conditions with only one or two other runners for company, and the sheer scale and noise of the London Marathon itself couldn’t be greater.  I felt strangely calm on the start line, in amongst 35,000 other runners with PBs to beat, funds to raise and goals to achieve, but the rise of emotion when the race began was indescribable.

For those who haven’t experienced it, the London Marathon is a wall of noise from start to finish as you run past some of the most famous sights and landmarks in the world, with total strangers screaming encouragement to you as if you were Mo Farah himself.  And then there’s the extra boost you get at the 12 mile mark when running along Jamaica Rd past the AVUK offices, with all the staff and well-wishers out to support the AV^UK runners.  Impossible not to get a lump in the throat at that stage!

As the miles passed, the legs hurt more & more but my determination to justify all those winter morning training runs grew greater too and I was delighted to have run the full distance and cross the line in 4hrs 3mins.

To anyone else who may be thinking ‘There’s no way I could run another lap!’, the reality is ‘Of course you can!’,  and you couldn’t possibly do it for a more worthy cause.

 

If you’d like to take part in a sponsored event on behalf of AV^UK get in touch with us today!