Rotherham United coaching staff duo Stephen Gilpin and Ross Burbeary are eight days into their mammoth month-long 10k-a-day challenge, which has seen them raise over £1,500 for Prostate Cancer UK so far.
The pair have been backed by Millers boss Paul Warne, his staff and players and a number of names and faces from around the sporting world, in addition to those who have pledged their backing on social media. Many supporters of the club have also donated to the cause on the JustGiving page here.
The challenge is set to run until the end of November but we caught up with a tired Stephen Gilpin on Thursday afternoon. Here’s his update on the journey so far:
“So far, so good. We've found it challenging in places and we've had to do a couple of runs away from each other which has been difficult but considering where we're at, we're really happy.
“The support from everybody is really motivating us to keep going. The football club has been absolutely brilliant, the manager, the coaching staff and the players have all been right behind us. The manager and the coaches particularly have done plenty of the running with us behind closed doors and have helped to motivate us. Coming into work everyday they've really pushed us on.
“Away from Rotherham United, the wider community andthe town have been overwhelming in their support of us. The way they've backed us with sponsorship and helped to spread the word on social media is brilliant.
“Myself and Ross have both had people contact us who we haven't spoken to in years.
“We're almost a third of the way through now and we just want to keep pushing on. It's becoming very physically tough for us, our legs are sore and we're getting a lot of aches and pains but we're being driven on by the support we've had.
“We apologise if it's becoming a bit in your faces but it's such a worthy cause and something I'm really keen to raise money for because of how my grandpa battled with it.
“We set a target of doing each run in under 45 minutes and we're determined to stick to that because unfortunately, someone passes away roughly every 45 minutes from Prostate Cancer.
“We don't just want to support the charity from a financial point of view, but also the awareness that our challenge will bring. If it prompts people to go and get themselves checked out then that's great too.
“Tony Bellew got on board with supporting us and he invited us down to his training camp with Dave Coldwell. We met Tony and had a really good chat with him. We watched him train and we swapped some ideas on training and it's created a link with the gym there. He wanted to hear all about our story and he wanted to share it on his own social media. Considering he has a massive world title fight coming up, for him to take time out of his busy schedule was amazing for us.
“We've had Charlie Edwards, who similarly has a world title fight coming up, show his support. He ran the leg at ParkRun with us and we'd like to thank him massively for that.
“There has been a lot of support on social media from people such as Paul Chuckle, various football players and we're looking to get a few more people on board to come and run with us in the near future.”