My husband Chris, is crazy when it comes to running. But next weekend he will put his fitness to the test when he runs the 110km 7 Valleys Ultra Marathon in the Lake District. As well as running the distance of over 2.6 marathons in one go, he will also be running nearly 4000m in elevation (to put that in perspective if you were to climb Ben Nevis, Snowdon and Scarfell Pike that would total 3,333m). This is likely to take somewhere between 15-18 hours of hard running!

He’s been running up pendle hill 4 times in a row to train for this, and when we talked about raising morning for a charity with this challenge we immediately thought of Rio Spurr, who’s been fighting his own battle for the past 18 months.

I’ve known Rio’s mum, Chloe, since we were both at secondary school, and Chris worked with Rio’s dad, Tom, at Rovers for several seasons. We were devastated to hear in April last year, that they found out that one of our beautiful boys, Rio, had cancer. He was only 3 at the time.

He was diagnosed with a rare type of kidney cancer; A Wilms tumour. Only around 80 children are diagnosed with it in the UK each year. Since then, he has endured 12 months of intense chemotherapy, including 6 different cytotoxic drugs, ten consecutive days of Radiotherapy to his lungs, four hour surgery to remove his right kidney & primary tumour, endless stays at hospital, and all this treatment he has had is likely to make him infertile.

On top of this Rio’s cancer is also ‘High Risk’ and Anaplastic (only 5-8% of all Wilms tumours fall into this category) This makes it much harder to cure & much more likely to come back after his initial course of treatment. However, despite the odds, in April this year Chloe and Tom had some very positive news…Rio’s scans showed NO EVIDENCE OF DISEASE! The ‘High risk’ and Anaplastic features of Rio’s diagnosis make his chance of relapse high. Should he relapse, his consultant has advised that he will not have many (if any) options left for treatment & Rio’s chance of survival will plummet to around 10%. This is the whole reason behind the familys ‘All for Rio’ fundraising campaign!

Chris is hoping to raise additional funds towards this campaign, so if you can support Chris and give any funds for this the All for Rio campaign then please do. I’ve set the limit to just £2 for every km chris will run, so please help us achieve this if you can