Featured Members
Anthony Davis
I am Anthony Davis. I am 32 years old. When I was 21 I was in a job that involved a lot of sitting around, that combined with fast food, beer and fags soon saw my weight creeping up to almost 16 stone. As you can imagine I was extremely unfit. It was at this point I decided to put my trainers on and start running. It all started with struggling to reach the end of the road without being out of breath, I stuck with it and before I knew it I was up to 3 miles a day. The weight started to move and soon I’d lost 5 stone. No beer, fastfood or fags – I felt great! The better I felt the more I ran. A year soon passed and I was running about 80 miles a week. I decided to enter the London marathon for the first time in 2002.
Eleven years later this brings me to today, I’ve now run 5 marathons, half marathons and many other races.
For the next 18 months I am running Ultra distance races/events starting with 40 miles (161 times) around an athletic track. Other races include 45 mile races, three Marathons in 3 days, Marathons, many other long distance races and finally finishing with the Marathon des Sables in 2010 (awaiting confirmation), the worlds toughest footrace, 151 miles in the Sahara Desert with temperatures of around 50 degrees celsius. This will take my training up to about 110 miles a week.
Race results so far:
Barry 40 miler. Completed in 6hrs 7mins 35secs – 4th in the Welsh Mens 40 mile Championship
San Domenico 20 miler. Completed in 2hrs 18mins 30secs – 16th place
London Marathon 2009. Finished in 3hrs 15mis 33sec
I am doing all this to raise £25,000 for The Children’s Society.
If you would like to sponsor me however small please visit my secure Just Giving page and click on sponsor me.
Thank you.
Paul Bigmore
Chloe was diagnosed with a very rare cancer called Desmoplastic Round Cell Sarcoma after an initial misdiagnosis at only 13 years old. This Cancer only affects about 6 people a year and because it is so rare there is no research into this particular cancer.
This cancer targets young fit people which makes it very much of a surprise and because it manifests itself by many tumours throughout the abdomen makes it normally terminal upon diagnosis. This was the case for Chloe and her treatment over the next 11 months was mainly to try and prolong her life as much as possible.
I had been running for a few years before Chloe became ill and stopped when Chloe became ill because I felt guilty for doing the exercise when my daughter was terminally ill. Eventually however my elder daughter persuaded me to go back out running and I found that by running I was able to cope better with our desperate situation.
After my Daughter passed away in December 2007 my wife started running seeing how it made me more able to cope. My wife has now found that the running helps her to cope as well and she finds it very hard without her daily fix of running.
We set up a charity in March 2008 to help other families who have children affected by cancer and other life limiting conditions. We have recently helped a family who lost their son at the age of 14 to the same cancer as Chloe. It was their son’s dying wish to fund a researcher into the cancer. Just before the new year we helped them hit their target of £100,00.00 and this should fund the researcher for the next 3 years.
We are now fundraising to try to purchase a holiday caravan or flat for the use of families with terminally ill children as Latch, the Welsh Children’s charity tell us there is a desperate shortage of such accommodation.
The holiday home will be registered under the Chloe Bigmore Trust and it is our way of keeping our beautiful daughters memory alive in the future.
You can read all about Chloe’s Story and some of our sponsorship events here.
