Welcome,
My name is Andrew and I am a father of 3 amazing boys and lucky to be blessed to find my soulmate. The reason behind this blog is to take you all on a journey with me through training and then running the London Virtual Marathon.
This is my first marathon for me and one that I have not chosen to do lightly. My partner and I first met in a gym, of all places back 8 years ago. We were each avid gym goers and were both very interested in body “sculpting”. This meant that cardia was one of the least favorite things that either of us wanted to do. Ever since I can remember I never had a keenness for running. This change by necessity in 2019. In 2019 we found out that we were expecting our third child which was fantastic news. With this news comes a serious amount of planning and consideration, and one of those considerations is that I decided to give up the gym to help save on household funds. This left a whole in my life where exercise used to be. This is where my journey towards running began.
Rewind to 2019, I had a work colleague who swore by running on a daily basis. He would constantly want me to give running a try. He introduced me to the app Strava ( follow the link to
follow me on that platform) which is an app that tracks your activities and route that you have run/walked. Armed with this “new” app I decided to record my first ever run. I managed to run 3.6km loop which caused me to have breathing problems for the following week (Because my lungs were not ready for this sort of activity). What I will say to you here is this was not enjoyable. However fast forward to pushing through this feeling after about 3 weeks I started to enjoy running and the rest is history.
Now lets bring you to the present day. I have decided to run the marathon and I have chosen to run this for FND Hope UK. FND Hope UK is part of the first and only global patient-led charity for people with Functional Neurological Disorder. Originating as a grassroots campaign, it uncovers the hidden world of FND and empowers those affected to live their best possible life. Functional Neurological Disorder (FND) is a problem with the functioning of the nervous system and how the brain and body send and
receive signals.
The charity is very close to home as my beautiful Fiancée was diagnosed with FND 2 years ago and we have found that there is little to no understanding of this disorder within the health care industry let alone in everyday life. My goal with running the marathon is to raise money for FND Hope UK to help spread the word about this disorder.
So what I am planning on doing is documenting my training, my feelings, the issues, the positives and everything in between. I am going to do this through creating a Blog and also Vloging
(which both I have never done before so bear with me until I get more natural behind the keyboard and camera). On that note, I will leave and say bye for now. Please if you have the chance, maybe donate a little something to the cause to help raise money for this charity, which will allow them to fund more research/spread the word about FND.
Thanks again Andrew
If you would like to donate, please do so here: https://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/fundraiser-display/showROFundraiserPage?userUrl=AndrewBarke1&pageUrl=1
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