Most sport and fitness clubs and groups wouldn't be able to function without volunteers like these. Their get-up-and-go helps others stay healthy, make friends, enter competitions and more. Read on to find out what inspires them to make it happen for others.

All | Simon | Carrie | Louise | Jane

Wednesday Aug 08, 2007

Why bother?

I'm entering the Hydro Active Women's challenge to raise money for the Alzheimer's Society.

When I was younger, my half-terms and school holidays would invariably be spent at my maternal grandparents' home.  As grandmothers do, my grandma took great delight in spoiling me and my little sister, but also took the time to teach us practical skills.  I can still bake a mean chocolate cake, serve up a tasty beef casserole, and embroider a tapestry – and more relevantly to my job, I type at 100wpm and am pretty sure I'd never have got anywhere close to that had I not had Grandma's old typewriters to bash out my stories and poems.

Fast-forward 18 years, and my sister and I noticed a problem. We'd gone for lunch with Grandma, and when we'd both ordered milkshakes, she'd ordered a coffee. We were happily drinking from our paper cups through a straw, but she was looking blankly in front of us, as if she didn't know what to do with her hot beverage.  Eventually she tried to put a straw through the lid covering the cup.

Soon after, she admitted that she thought she had a problem with her memory.

Eventually, and after many tears and months of effort on the part of my grandad and my mum, Grandma moved out of her flat and into full-time residential care as her condition deteriorated even further into the mire of Alzheimer's disease.

Grandma died in May 2005. I still miss her – not the often confused, sometimes angry, sometimes frightened shell she became, but the fun, loving, cheerful grandma with whom I spent so many happy hours in my childhood.

So that's why I'm running to raise money for the Alzheimer's Society – so that other families don't have to go through what we all did.

Posted by Carrie ( 11:03 AM )
Link to this post Comments[0]

The challenge

I love sport. I became a journalist primarily to write about sport. It remains a constant source of pleasure to me that I can sit in an office and watch cricket, football, tennis, athletics, motor-racing and even darts all day without anyone batting an eyelid – because it's my job and they're paying me for it.

However, I've never been a sporty kind of girl in terms of participation.  I have happy memories of hiding in the music room at the age of 15 to avoid doing cross-country, and though I enjoyed kicking a ball around at break-time, I wasn't really the sort to take it seriously enough to join a proper team.

I'm also hideously clumsy. My knees and shins are battered and bruised with the evidence of my inability to walk around unscathed for a day.

All in all, I'm not exactly a lycra-and-trainers kind of woman, more a cake-and-Veronica-Mars kind of woman, and I'm the last person you'd expect to enter the Hydro Active Women's Challenge in Hyde Park on Sunday September 16th.

Posted by Carrie ( 10:59 AM )
Link to this post Comments[0]