Andrew Byres

On Sunday 27 September I’ll be on the start line outside Portman Road for the Ipswich Half Marathon. Seven days after that I’ll be waist-deep in a Suffolk river, hauling myself over a cargo net at the Whole Hog. Thirteen point one miles on tarmac, then five more through mud. My knees have questions about the eight days in between.

I’m raising £1,000 across the two races and splitting it equally: £500 to Suffolk Mind, and £500 to the Time Garden Appeal at Ipswich Hospital. This page is the Suffolk Mind half.

WHY SUFFOLK MIND

I’m an Ipswich man, and before that I was a soldier.

In the army you see the full range of it. Anxiety somebody carries quietly for years and never names. Families holding things together while someone’s away, and sometimes holding things together harder once they’re home. PTSD. And, more than once, someone reaching the point where they couldn’t see a way through at all.

None of that is a soldier’s problem. It’s a people problem. Soldiers just get a concentrated dose of it, and a culture that historically made it very hard to say so out loud.

Which is why Suffolk Mind is the one I want to support. They aren’t aimed at any particular group, they’re aimed at everyone in this county. Counselling and anxiety support for ordinary people having a hard year. Suffolk Night Owls, for the hours when there’s nobody else to ring, and it is always those hours. Support for people bereaved by suicide, which is something far more families carry than anyone realises. And work with children from the age of four, roughly thirty years earlier than most of the men I served with ever talked to anybody.

That last one is what gets me. Not the crisis end, though that matters enormously. It’s the ordinary, unglamorous, available-to-anyone stuff that means somebody gets help in the year before things get bad, rather than the year after.

THE TRAINING, HONESTLY

I’m north of 100kg, and long-distance running has strong opinions about that. Mostly expressed through my knees and ankles.

So training has been slow and deliberately unheroic: time on feet rather than pace. I’m up to sixty minutes of continuous running with four weeks to go. Thirteen point one miles is a fair distance past sixty minutes and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

It’s going to be tough. I’m going to finish it anyway.

WHAT I’M ASKING

Whatever you can spare. £10 gets me past a mile marker still smiling. £25 and I’ll dedicate a mile to you and say so publicly.

Please tick the Gift Aid box if you’re a UK taxpayer. It adds 25% at no cost to you, so £20 becomes £25.

Thank you. I’ll be thinking about every one of you somewhere around mile eleven.