Cornwall sportsmen running one million metres for charity: donate

Jamie Thomson, Dan Stidwell, Marytn Webster, Matt Evans and Stewart Yetton will be running a combined distance of 621.3 miles, or 1,000 kilometres, throughout April to raise money for the Sport Cornwall Foundation.

The idea was the brainchild of Porthleven manager, and Supasport South West CIC founder, Jamie Thomson, who came up with the concept during lockdown.

Jamie said: "I went for a run during lockdown as you do to get your hour's exercise.

"I’m sure other people will be able to identify, but I don’t tend to run without some form of headphones in with some music or a podcast playing. But the one run that led to this is a run where I didn’t have anything in my ears and it allowed me to think a bit more.

"It was during that run that I thought 'I’ve always admired people who are able to do these charity challenges'.

"I thought: 'As we’ve all got a bit of spare time, if we combine our efforts, we can probably do a challenge'. So then I started doing the arithmetic while I was running and thinking what could we realistically achieve and decided on a million as it is obviously a really good impressive round number that we could work towards."

The Sport Cornwall Foundation is a charity that raises funds to promote community participation in healthy and wellbeing recreation by providing facilities for the playing of sports capable of improving health and well being.

They also aim to help, provide and assist in providing facilities for sport, recreation and other leisure occupation of people who have the need for such facilities such as their age, disability, social and economic circumstances or for the public in the interests of social welfare and with the object of improving their lifestyle.

Joining the former Helston Athletic reserves manager is Dan Stidwell and Martyn Webster, both from Supasport CIC and who have played football at a local level. Accompanying them on the challenge is Truro City Football Club's assistant manager, Stewart Yetton and Cornish Pirates team manager, Matt Evans.

The jackets the five men will be wearing to complete their challenge.

Jamie added: "We will run on average seven kilometres a day every day for 30 days meaning that each of us individually will run just over 200,000 metres each in the month and obviously combined will make over a million.

"We’d like to smash that total and hope we can do even more but I’m finding the training to quite as easy as I would have hoped and doing seven kilometres a day is more than I expected.

"If it weren’t for Truro City and the Cornish Pirates getting on board we would have been running 12 kilometres a day."

This challenge is also being used to secure funds that can then be used to deliver their Sport 4 More service to the people of Cornwall.

Sport 4 More is a style of sports delivery that Supasport South West C.I.C. are known for which uses their style of delivery to show how sport and exercise can be used to teach and help people work on key self-development themes and life skills.

This has been seen in the work they have done previously in the form of PE lessons in primary schools.

Jamie explained: "Sport 4 More acts as a social prescribing service, where GP’s can prescribe a course with us in place of or alongside a traditional prescription relieving the pressure on people to rely on drugs or pharmaceutical products and there are obviously alternate things we can do.

"Its been identified that our style of delivery using sport to engage people to work on personal self development themes and topics related to mental health and wellbeing are really important and can have more impact when you engage people via the medium of sport."

To donate, visit: https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/1million-metres