I am 55 and my Daughter Ellie Rogers is 27. Neither of us had much motivation to get fitter and were both overweight. I live in Wombourne and Ellie has recently moved to Penn Wolverhampton, (a few doors down from my parents old house).
During lockdown I dropped on a “tweet” from Compton Care. A hospice in Wolverhampton that is very well loved and they looked after both of my parents (Ellie’s Grandparents) towards the end of their lives.
The call to action was to sign up and run a 5k Tough Mudder in the Midlands and raise the much-needed funds during lockdown. To be honest, neither of us could run to catch a bus let alone a 5k!! We looked at each other and given we had some time as well as Ellie’s school being closed, we thought we just couldn’t say no.
We signed up to C25k and found some very old trainers and off we plodded around the garden for 5 weeks (3 sessions a week) until we felt brave enough to leave the front door!
We really struggled to start with and could only manage a few minutes of running but eventually, we completed the 5k after all of those 5.00am starts – nine weeks later. We were elated and just couldn’t believe it!! Sadly due to the ongoing pandemic the Tough Mudder was cancelled, so we built our own mini assault course and ran 11k on the very same day, raising nearly £1800 for Compton Care.
I also became a Trustee of Compton Care during the pandemic so the link to the charity is very personal to me, helping people just like my mom and dad in the future 🙏
We continued to train in the winter months and the “running bug” had well and truly bitten us both. Early in 2021 Compton Care had 2 gold bond spaces available for the London Marathon and we thought…..why not? 🙃
I cheekily reached out to an ultra marathon runner called Nick Butter (the only person to run a marathon across all the 196 countries in the world) and he agreed to coach us over 3 months to get to the marathon distance. It was super tough, but we learned a lot about running/nutrition/running kit and training planners… 365 days later we completed our first training marathon!
Then, in October 2021 we completed the London Marathon and raised over 7k for Compton Care.
At this point we thought that was it….but we just couldn’t resit another visit to London !!! So we have signed up for London 23 (for the last time.)
We have run a number of events over the last 18 months including Solihull half, Prestwold half, Wolves 10k, Stafford half, Wolverhampton half, Hanley half, Long Mynd Half and most recently, the virtual London Marathon.
We have set ourselves a year long challenge called 12 Million steps which finishes at the London Marathon 2023.
The Wolves 10k will be part of the 12 million steps challenge and with the help of 12 runners, 9 of us are all marathon runners from the class of LM 2021 supporting Compton Care.
My son will also be running a 10k race for the first time with us on the day also, so it should be a special day.
Finally, we are hopeful the local Express and Star newspaper will get involved nearer the time and we also have a radio interview planned in a couple of weeks with BBC WM.
