Red Cross Blogs

The London marathon is just around the corner…

By Kerrie McEvoy
April 8, 2010 at 11:56 am

Getting prepared to run the London Marathon requires a lot of work, time and dedication. All those cold, winter evenings out running while your friends are down the pub, sometimes it can feel like a real hard slog. In order to give myself a much needed break from training and to raise some money for the British Red Cross I decided to put on a fundraising event. I figured it would be another way for people to donate to the Red Cross and have a brilliant evening listening to some of the best live music around.

It seemed like a pretty daunting task to begin with, asking bands to give up their time for free and pulling in favours from pretty much everyone I know, but once I told them that all the money raised on the evening would be going to such a cause they were all a hundred percent on board.

Working with my good friend Stella we set about booking the bands, hiring the venue and publicising it with posters designed by 3DGlasses and an online social media campaign. We were so grateful because everyone donated their time, space and talent for free. I was so moved by their generosity.

Once the big night arrived everything fell nicely into place at the Fighting Cocks in Kingston – Charlotte and Lucy, dressed in 1940’s tea dresses, were manning the cake stall selling delicious cupcakes to the hungry gig goers. Gin Panic, Three Colours, Heck Tate, Nitkowski, Silent Front and Ex Libras were blowing the crowd away and everyone was donating what they could afford. It was a brilliant evening made even better knowing why we were doing this. I want to thank everyone who was involved in making the event such a huge success.

I’m still completely stoked by how it all went and the memories and music are helping me get through my final stages of training. I ran 20 miles last weekend and 18 miles this weekend, it’s probably easier to list the parts of my body that don’t hurt at the moment but these pains are nothing in the grand scheme of things. Knowing that the money I raise is going to help so many people keeps driving me on and I know it will drive me on to finish the 26.2 miles on the 25 April 2010. If you are in London on that day come down and cheer on the Red Cross running team as we make our way around the course. All the support will be much needed!

You can sponsor Kerrie on her JustGiving page.

Got your own place at the London Marathon? Sign up to run for the British Red Cross now.

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Tags: london marathon

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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 8th, 2010 at 11:56 am and is filed under Fundraising and events, UK. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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