Race for Life is a series of fundraising events for women only, organised by British charity Cancer Research UK. They involve running, jogging or walking a 5 or 10 kilometre course and raising sponsorship for doing so. The money raised funds cancer research in all 200 types of cancer.
The Imperial Cancer Research Fund identifies Jim Cowan as having the original idea for the Race for Life. The Fund then engaged Mr. Cowan to organize and act as race director for the first Race for Life event, which took place in 1994 in Battersea Park, London, where 750 participants raised £48,000.
Since Race for Life began in 1994, 6 million participants across the UK have raised over £493 million for the charity. Notable participants include Jane Tomlinson, whose first fundraising event was a Race for Life in 2001 after being diagnosed with terminal breast cancer. She went on to raise over £1.75 million for charity before her death in 2007. In 2009 actresses Laila Morse and Lynda Bellingham became a Race for Life ambassadors in memory of Wendy Richard and Jade Goody, both of whom had recently died from cancer.
Friends and family are welcome to come and support any of the ladies taking part in the event, by lining the course or by shouting support to help the ladies cross the finish line. Whether you run, walk, dance or jog around the course the cause is fabulous and the sense of achievement simply overwhelming.
Ladies. It’s time to show cancer who’s in charge at Cancer Research UK’s Race for Life.
There are over 200 cancers and we won’t give up until we find cures for them all. It’s fighting talk, and we mean every word we say.
Cancer, we’re coming to get you!
Good luck to everybody involved from Thebestof Barnstaple!
I'm Sarah and I live just outside Barnstaple near Umberleigh.
I love sport especially rugby, cricket and golf and want to hear your thoughts on the site and add events and blogs on subjects that interest...
The following Cookies are used on this Site. Users who allow all the Cookies will enjoy the best experience and all functionality on the Site will be available to you.
You can choose to disable any of the Cookies by un-ticking the box below but if you do so your experience with the Site is likely to be diminished.
In order to interact with this site.
To help us to measure how users interact with content and pages on the Site so we can make
things better.
To show content from Google Maps.
To show content from YouTube.
To show content from Vimeo.
To share content across multiple platforms.
To view and book events.
To show user avatars and twitter feeds.
To show content from TourMkr.
To interact with Facebook.
To show content from WalkInto.