Dublin Mini Marathon

On Monday 1st June 2009, 24 year old Helen Pyke from Dublin took part in the Flora Women's Mini Marathon and completed the race in 1hr 15mins.

Helen has loved and played sports all her life and decided to take part in the Mini Marathon to raise money and awareness for cancer research. Helen has three sisters, all of whom are older than her, and the eldest, Linda, was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2006. Linda went through surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy and seemed to be doing well. However when it was coming up to her second anniversary of being cancer free the doctors found out that she had a re-occurrence of the cancer and she was going to have to undertake more treatment. She seemed to be doing well but in March of this year they spotted some shadows on her lungs and the results showed that the cancer had spread. She had to undertake more treatment and had a scan at the end of the April. Helen and her family have their fingers, toes and everything crossed that she will have beaten it this time and that she will be ok for a while at least.

While Helen was getting ready for the mini marathon her sister was getting the results from the scan.  "So while she's going through all of that, I'm going to do what I can to raise funds for cancer research."

Helen explains why she chose to raise money for AICR, "I looked at cancer charities but the AICR seems to be doing the most amount of work and even though I won't be raising a huge amount of money, I'll feel like I'm doing something. I found out about AICR when there was an auction for a ticket to watch Hamlet in London. The plan was to take my sister as both her and myself love David Tennant and Patrick Stewart."

Unfortunately that plan fell through for Helen and she was unable to see AICR Ambassador David in Hamlet, but she was still incredibly generous and made a sizeable donation. We would like to thank Helen for taking part in the Mini Marathon and send our best wishes to her sister Linda.

You can still make a donation to Helen here.