'Running liberates me of grief of losing my dad'

A university student is gearing up to run the length of the UK to raise funds for a brain cancer charity after his father's death.

Rafe Colman-Chadwick, 20, plans to run 874 miles (1,407km) from John o' Groats to Land's End for Brain Tumour Research in memory of his father, Damian Colman, who died from glioblastoma in 2018.

He said the run was a "way of liberating myself of grief" having spent many years struggling to talk about his father's diagnosis and subsequent death.

Colman-Chadwick, a politics student at the University of York, will begin the challenge on 4 June.

"When I was a little kid, all the way through dad's diagnosis, even for a few years after he died, I didn't talk about it once," he said.

"I kind of pretended like he didn't really exist. I kind of trapped that inside me for a while.

"I think it's hard to talk about grief, but I think it's harder not to talk about it and I think that until you realise that, that's when you start going through the process of healing."

He said his father had left him a journal containing life advice, which he was given on his 18th birthday.

"By the end of the first page, I'm like bawling my eyes out because it was five years of emotion. It was kind of bottled up," he said.

"It told me about his lessons, his mistakes, his wishes, all these various things which we all felt were missing."

Colman-Chadwick has previously taken part in the London Marathon and trekked across Nepal for charity.

He said three quarters of the funds raised as part of his upcoming challenge would go Brain Tumour Research with the remaining quarter going to Pancreatic Cancer UK, which Rafe previously supported following the death of his teacher in Harrogate.

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